senSI Therapeutic Parenting
Therapeutic Parenting encompasses an attitude in which an awareness of both yourself and your child guides your approach when reacting to behaviours. Children who have experienced Trauma, and particularly those who also have attachment difficulties, commonly operate with a fear-based view of the world and find it hard to trust caregivers.
senSI Therapeutic Parenting involves
- Exploring your experiences of regulation
- Explores how you responded to distress as a child, and how you respond to distress now as an adult. This is important so we can individualize your therapy and ensure your needs are also met
- A careful balance between high structure and high nurture to enhance actual and felt safety
- Creating a toolbox of strategies (Therapeutic Parenting differs for each family and so do strategies)
- Maintaining a connection with your child
- Practising self-care (parenting traumatised children can be traumatising – it is essential to make self-care a priority and to have a support network around you)
- Co-regulation (the ability to self-regulate while interacting with another, this may involve assisting your child’s regulation through influencing but not controlling their action in a calm and regulated manner)
- Assisting regulation using the sensory systems (proprioceptive,vestibular and tactile)
As part of our Therapeutic Parenting work, we meet with parents/carers separately and explore their own responses to distress, and the strategies that they used themselves as a child, and now as an adult. We explore this at some length, to ensure that they themselves are not re-triggered by the child or situations, and build a toolbox of individualized strategies to help them maintain their own regulation.
Our aim
Our aim is to strengthen the relationship caregivers have with their child, in a very personalised and tailored way. It is essential that the parent
understands and experiences their own regulated state, and so we welcome parents to participate in group sessions such as Parent Mindfulness sessions, Yoga, Relaxation and Massage, in addition to their 1:1 Therapeutic Parenting sessions with staff trained in the Dynamic Maturational Model, and work by Eadaoin Bhreathnach.
Sessions may be filmed and microanalysed, with consent.
Things to remember when practising Therapeutic Parenting:
- Do not take your child’s behaviour personally
- Create a support network for you and your child
- Practice self-care
- Give yourself and your child patience
- Remain calm, regulated and positive
- Nobody gets it right 100% of the time
