If you are not an adopter you cannot fully understand what the adoption journey is like. As with most things in life, you need to go through it, to really get it. There are so many assumptions about adoption that are at best, misplaced, and at worst, harmful.
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A We Are Family member shares the relief she felt when she realised she wasn’t the only parent going through child-to-parent violence.
Here is the last blog of our ‘Therapy’ series. Trusting your instincts can be very hard to do when you start out in adoption. But, as we go further into our parenthood, we realise that we’re usually right. This mother felt that constant demands to play just weren’t quite ‘normal’ – and eventually sought help in family therapy.
In the fifth of our ‘Therapy’ series our blogger recalls heart-breaking hostility from her daughter. When they turned to The Great Behaviour Breakdown, a shift in thinking enabled life-changing shifts in their relationship.
This is the first of our series of blogs about therapy. Over the next weeks we will hear from people who’ve loved it, hated it, abandoned it and thrived on it. We’re starting with The Great Behaviour Breakdown. This is a brilliant account of conflict mounting, mounting… and how GBB therapeutic parenting can turn down the heat.
In this age of fake news, perhaps I need to re-evaluate my
feelings about lies. I hate them. I have a thing about lying, cheating and
everything else to do with falsehood.
And I know we are not supposed to use the L word, but I do. Something that’s dishonestly
made up is a lie. I know that’s not therapeutic, but, like I said, I have a
thing about it. How can I be therapeutic for something I need therapy about?
Enough of me. This is actually about my otherwise delightful
son, who is very much into lies.
I took The Great Behaviour Breakdown course to manage his
behaviour. Tell him you know how angry
he is, they said in the classroom.
Jump up and down with him when he’s angry, they said.
Try to get him spinning, they said. It regulates the vestibular system in his
brain.
I jumped. I
spun. I shouted.
“I would be so angry too,” I shouted. And my son screamed at me, so high and shrill
and then he hit me harder and opened his jaws as if to bite. It
made it worse.
I’ve recently completed the first two days of the four day parenting course for adopters called The Great Behaviour Breakdown and I’m blown away already…
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