Welcome to Journey through Parenting! Our course over the next 5 weeks will provide you with the latest research and therapeutic tools to provide systemic change within you and your family dynamics, or classroom. This class is experiential and meant to provide you with a path to deeper self-discovery and understanding of how you arrived with your parenting beliefs and why you behave the way you do in response to your children’s behaviors. Our world needs connected relationships more than ever. Healing is a journey not a destination, our work is ongoing, and with the right tools to navigate, we find it’s an incredible journey of self discovery. Together we can pave the way towards a new future. 

Class 1 Topics:

• Inner Child Journey: Learning the Five Steps
• Circle of Safety
• Naming Emotional Needs
• Somatic Awareness Skills
• Defining Autonomic Nervous System Regulation Skills

Stress is a normal part of life, yet many of us struggle to actually move through and work through negative stress in sustainable ways. Learning to navigate adversity and regulate stress in our bodies and minds is the most important skill we can learn, and it’s an ongoing process.

Class 2 Topics

• States of the autonomic nervous system: social, sympathetic, and the parasympathetic
• Definition of unresolved trauma and impact of trauma on the nervous system
• Implicit memory and “triggers”
• Regulation exercises to manage stress and shift states of being in the nervous system 

Week 3 builds upon everything we have learned about the autonomic nervous system and how our emotional needs feed into the actual states our nervous system takes on to function, while taking into consideration our Inner Dialogue, otherwise known as our Ego. We look at how our ego may be disconnecting us from our child’s needs based on our own unmet needs.

Class 3 Topics:

• Developmental Stages of Babies, Children & Adolescents
• How the brain stores memory and build narratives
• The Inner Critic
• Polyvagal Theory
• Compassionate Communication Skills
• Boundary Setting

All humans have egos, or the Inner Dialogue, that tells stories based on our past experiences. This module addresses how to bring awareness to the Inner Dialogue and separate from this voice.  Through this process of building vagal tone and resiliency in the nervous system, we have the ability to witness the stories before we react to them. We can learn to pause between stimulus and our response mechanism. We can learn to map feelings to our emotional responses and discover our core emotional needs.

Class 4 Topics:

• Emotions versus Feelings
• 5 Rites of Passage for a Developing Infant, Child, Adolescent, and Young Adult as defined by Robin Grille
• Four Sensitive Parenting Topics: Sleep, Transition Times, Eating, Potty Training

The last module integrates everything from previous modules and allows for parents/caretakers to share stories, ask questions, and reflect upon what they have learned in class. We spend considerable time practicing body psychotherapy techniques.

Class 5 Topics:

• Embodiment Exercises to bring about healing
• Window of Tolerance
• Mantras for Inner Child Healing
• Tools to Reparent Ourselves