How can somatic therapy help with parenting?
When we start our parenting journey, no one tells us the extent to which our past experiences will impact our parenting, especially those from early childhood and how we were parented.
We carry our life story and past experiences in our biology, as memory imprints. These imprints are subconscious and influence our parenting practices, our emotions, and our beliefs. When some of those imprints are from stressful experiences and carry an emotional charge, we can more easily be triggered by our kids (or our partner) and be thrown into a dysregulated state.
However, we don’t have to keep those memory imprints forever. We now know that the brain and nervous system can change.
When you’ve been doing your best to create secure attachment, confidence, and emotional wellbeing for your child, but you’re having difficulty with any of these:
- Allowing your child to express their big emotions while staying grounded yourself,
- Getting them to listen to you,
- Having clarity about where to set limits and when to let go,
- Staying calm and grounded in stressful situations, 👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻
often what’s missing (because you didn’t learn it in your childhood) is your capacity to tolerate big feelings yourself without losing control. The result is that you react, in an automated response, before you can stop yourself. The moment of losing control is often not conscious, in that it happens automatically before you’re able to make a conscious decision about it.
Typically, there’s some unprocessed emotions or experiences that have left a memory imprint in your nervous system and it’s still running the show. Somatic therapy uses an approach that explores these patterns and can update the memory imprint.
Somatic therapy can help build capacity over time, meaning,
- Increased ability to stay calm in the face of stressors,
- Increased ability to calm yourself after you’ve become dysregulated.
Somatic therapy is an exploration that opens up more choice. Your reactions, when triggered, are caused by an “old” habitual response in your nervous system. The nervous system gets activated and follows an old, outdated pathway before you can consciously catch yourself.
Somatic exploration opens up new options, and more choice. It offers the opportunity to update the wiring in the nervous system.
Behaviors that were unconscious and beyond your control come more into your conscious awareness, and you’re more able to make a choice.
It’s never perfect (of course!), but even small changes towards being more regulated can help you find your way to pausing more often before reacting–catching yourself a bit sooner–no matter what habit you’re trying to change.
If you’re curious, you can:
- Hit reply and ask me any questions,
- Find more info here on my website, or
- Book a free chat here to ask me questions (and email me if you don’t see a time in the schedule that works, and I’ll find a time that works, colleen@colleenadrian.com ).
(For parents of kids of all ages, including adult kids 🙂)
Reduced rate for Somatic Therapy – July 2 through August 23, 2024
I’m offering a reduced rate for somatic therapy for a few weeks over the summer months 👉🏻👉🏻
Rates:
60min session – $50CAD (reduced from $85)
80min session – $75CAD (reduced from $110)
If you’re interested and we haven’t chatted or worked together before, email me or use the link above to schedule a free chat.
Either way, I wish you blessings on this solstice, and a fantastic summer with your family if you’re in the northern hemisphere with a break from school (or warmth and coziness if you’re in the southern hemisphere).
