My brain is predominantly filled with thoughts of therapeutic parenting, assessing the fallout from my consistently inconsistent ability to parent in that manner, swelling with hope for the future that I yearn for, and then crushing disappointment, fear,and certainty of failure. It’s really insane the amount of emotion that goes on here. If I could just shake all those thoughts of my head for about 12 hours I could probably get some really good sleep!
It’s not even that things are so bad right now. They’re not. It’s just that this is so…much. Therapeutic parenting is exhausting and isolating. I really believe that therapeutic parenting with a toddler/preschooler is a different bird, well maybe it would be more accurate to say it’s the same bird, but with different feathers. What makes it so hard is that there is very little out there on how to properly care for those little feathers. It’s beyond frustration. How do I when to clip their wings or when to shove them out of the nest? Okay, enough bird analogies. I don’t even like birds. Oh wait, I don’t like trauma either, maybe this is the perfect analogy. No? You’re right. That analogy was for the birds. Moving on.
The point is: We need each other! If you are parenting a child from “hard places” who has survived trauma (and remember, adoption by itself is trauma) and you are parenting therapeutically then you have wisdom to share! Write a post with your best strategies and link them up below. Post the linky on your own blog if you want to, tell your friends, let’s get this out there and together we can soar like eagles learn new techniques and help each other parent better, and help our kids heal.
This is the post that I wrote originally and contains the linky: Therapeutic Parenting with a Preschooler You should read the comments too because there’s some great advice in there as well. I’ll leave it open for several weeks so that we can get as many links as possible. I’d really like for at least one other person to link up so I don’t feel like a total idiot, mmkay?
I am not sure how to link my blog to yours because I have it through tumblr rather than blogger, but here is a link to a post I wrote about what works with my foster sons (ages 3 & 4). Take care!
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I'm not sure how to do a link up either. But, I recently did a series of posts on understanding attachment...
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http://www.fromsurvivaltoserenity.com/2012/03/unhealthy-broken-attachment.html
http://www.fromsurvivaltoserenity.com/2012/03/impact-of-broken-attachment.html