Apr 3, 2018 | Birth, breastfeeding, parenting, feminism, suffragettes
FEAR_Issue_52 There is an insidious undercurrent that can seep, unbeknownst to us, into our children’s hearts, affecting their behaviour and their confidence. It can alter their thinking, posture and shake their enjoyment of life and bigness in the world. When the baby is constantly crying and squirming, refusing to nap more than 40 minutes a day. When our toddler won’t let us out of sight, or when children are picky with their food. When siblings become aggressive, a child is clingy or passive, or needs a lengthy bedtime routine to be able to fall asleep, we assume these are typical kid things. But what do these seemingly unrelated behaviours have in common? Fear. Fear can accumulate in good children, who have good parents. It weighs on them and causes their world and the opportunities available to them to become restricted. It prevents them from feeling relaxed enough to eat or sleep effortlessly. Fear makes a short separation from mummy feel life threatening. It signals such desperate alarm in challenging situations that they are prone to strike out or bite or lose bladder control. It drives them to answer back or appear defiant as a defence. Fear creates anxiety, restlessness and rigid or compulsive behaviours. Fear causes some children to quietly retreat from things they love. The good news is we can help our children recover from fear! It is guaranteed for children to experience frightening situations, no matter how well we love and care for them. It’s certainly no-one’s fault. We don’t always know when fear set in. It may have been during a... read more
Feb 27, 2018 | Birth, breastfeeding, parenting, feminism, suffragettes
If you are based in Frome you are already part of one of the most cutting edge towns in the UK. Last week George Monbiot reported on revolutionary community measures against isolation that are cutting the rates of hospital admissions in this progressive town. Frome is known for its community. You may be enjoying the benefits of this already. Or – and especially if you have young children – you may be feeling more isolated than ever. Why is community so important? And what role does it REALLY play in raising healthy kids? As humans, we are such social creatures that our brains don’t actually exist as individuals. Unbeknownst to our conscious awareness, our brains are constantly searching out ways syncing, moulding, adapting, and mirroring our brains with those around us. We do this spontaneously, unconsciously and completely naturally – it’s part of our in-build survival mechanisms. It’s an attempt to form and participate in a ‘hive mind’ – something greater than each of us. We are group animals; built to survive, thrive – and raise children – in a tribe. So a good portion of our energy and nervous system activity is allocated to constantly assessing how well we belong, how socially acceptable we are. And yet: if you are a parent you might be experiencing one of the most isolated phases of your life. So many of us are living geographically far (or estranged) from our parents. If a couple is going to break up, the most likely time is within the first year of our child’s life. And even if we do stay together, with the pressures of nuclear... read more
Oct 9, 2017 | parenting
“Help! My daughter is 2.5 years old and does not listen at all, she now has a little brother which she is jealous of. Sometimes her behaviour is out of control. What can I do?” Ah bless you, this sounds very normal to me and so challenging for you when you are trying to meet the needs of a new baby. It’s very common for children to become a bit ‘wild’ when a new sibling comes along. Some children will be aggressive towards the baby; ‘accidentally’ squeezing too hard or being passive aggressive. Some children will be loving towards the baby but become difficult in another area. Your sweet girl isn’t trying to make life hard and when she doesn’t listen it’s because her brain chemistry means she literally CAN’T hear you. You’ve probably noticed how children are sometimes naturally co-operative, kind and flexible. This happens when they feel connected to us, they feel our attention and warmth in a way that feels like we ‘get’ them. Often our attention gets unavoidably interrupted, causing small breaks in connection and our child’s upset feelings about that accumulate. And sometimes things happen in the family to create a bigger break in connection. Maybe one parent goes away on a trip, or you move house or get ill. Having a new sibling is a bigger break in connection. The unconscious, emotional part of the brain registers it as a threat. It questions if there will be enough love and attention to go around. With bigger breaks in connection, sometimes your child can’t feel your warmth and attention even when you are... read more
Sep 25, 2017 | Birth, breastfeeding, parenting, feminism, suffragettes
What if every time your child cries or tantrums, they are actually doing something highly worthwhile? We don’t always appreciate it when our children begin to cry, but what they are actually doing is making use of the body’s innate recovery system. When we get hurt, physically or emotionally, instead of storing it all up in our bodies as tension, we can make use of crying, laughter, raging or trembling. This is how the body processes and releases feelings. Most of us don’t do this often, having being told “Don’t cry” since we were small, but our children still have their recovery system intact. The best news is that all of our children’s difficult or ‘off track’ behaviour is driven by emotion and when they get to use your good, warm attention to dump out these feelings, you get your angel back. By actively encouraging our children to cry when they need to, they not only get to shed hurt feelings, they end up feeling more connected to us as well. The way we listen can either shut feelings down, or help children to feel what they are feeling more fully. Here are things you can say to listen well. General reassuring phrases: 1. I’m right here 2. I see how upset you are 3. I’m sorry this is hard, Love 4. I’ll be with you while you are upset 5. I’m not going anywhere 6. You are safe 7. There’s nothing more important than being with you right now 8. I’m sorry… you lost your lamby/your friend said that/you dropped your ice cream 9. I hear you Sweetheart... read more
Sep 10, 2017 | Birth, breastfeeding, parenting, feminism, suffragettes
When women are impacted by birth trauma it can stay with them for many years, influencing their mental health and sense of self. The work of Mary Main et al (2005) in their Adult Attachment Interview demonstrated that a child’s attachment status can be predicted with 85% accuracy by their mother’s state of mind. It is therefore vital that mothers be supported towards emotional health when their wellbeing has such a profound significance for the next generation. This article will look at the what we have learned from running workshops for postpartum mothers, using an approach we call ‘After Birth’ and how midwives might bring elements of it into their practice. We will always be grateful for the day we sat together at Binnie’s dinning table, drinking tea and co-creating After Birth, honouring and resolving the birth of your baby. Both of us had worked (Binnie for many years) with women who wanted to process their birth trauma on a 1:1 basis, but we were inspired by the concept of women coming together to support each other to release the feelings they had been carrying and being able to see their experiences in a new light. We created a structure that allows women to share their story in an environment of deep listening and total acceptance, by encouraging them to notice specific aspects of their story related to personal power, connection and fear. The workshop also includes psychospiritual processing work and visualisation and other techniques from hypnotherapy. Our experience has been that through this process, women have been able to release emotion, appreciate a new perspective and come away... read more
Sep 10, 2017 | Birth, breastfeeding, parenting, feminism, suffragettes
Roma Norriss reflects on the basis for an ecstatic birth I’m all about receiving love when it comes to birth. Receiving love is a bold, rebellious act; as it counters deep-rooted feelings of not receiving enough during birth and infancy. Receiving all the love and support that is there for us, is what allows us to step out of any place that is victimised by the process and choose to be present and powerful instead. This is not an easy task; it goes against the very grain of our conditioning. Last week a mother did a beautiful thing. She let me love her so fully that she literally melted into my body as she laboured. She absorbed the support and safety I could offer and said the only thing she was aware of throughout the process was her dear husband and I. Amazingly, she remained oblivious to the chaos and fear emanating from the paramedics and midwives that piled into the bedroom. Despite being commanded many times to lie on her back, her insurgent body somehow neglected to take heed and she persisted, warrior-like, leaning into me or kneeling at times and relishing the tight hold I had on her pelvis. She filtered out all the support she didn’t need and instead spaciously focused on receiving what was safe and nourishing. It was an inspiration to see. Preparing to receive is a fundamental and unacknowledged part of birth preparation. If we learn to release blocks to letting others in, we can let go and surrender to the process and allow ourselves to be held. Binnie A. Dansby, pioneer of... read more
Mar 30, 2017 | parenting, trauma
My daughter was playing with a gaggle of kids the other day and they decided it would be fun to all pile into our small sauna. In the scuffle, one of the other kids was closing the door and accidentally caught her finger quite badly. On hearing her shriek, I ran and lifted her out. She was screaming, very distressed and for a while I didn’t know what had happened so I took her to sit down and just held her. I could see she was holding up her finger and that it was squashed and bleeding. She was besides herself with heavy sobs and wailing and I just said simply “Your finger got trapped” as she heaved and tried to tell me the story. I stayed close as she shuddered and shrieked and told fragments of the story and just offered simple observations such as “That really hurts, your finger got caught” and letting her know “I’m with you, I’m so sorry that happened.” After about 10 minutes her crying started to die down and I suggested “Shall we have another look?” She looked again at her finger and once more started bawling. I wanted to help her stay with the feelings of upset so she could release them fully from her system and recover from this mishap. I continued encouraging her to keep looking at the finger and crying more. When children cry after small bumps, the intensity of emotion can often feel disproportionate to the level of injury. We tend to want to appease them with plasters or medicines or stop them crying through reassurance that... read more
Feb 3, 2017 | parenting, relationships
Sometimes children seem to be so unreasonable, don’t they? They lose it over the most insignificant of things, such as which coloured cup you give them, or which flavour ice lolly they got. And it’s hard not to find that immensely frustrating when you are doing your best to be kind and help their lives go well. You did everything right and they are having a huge meltdown about nothing. Except, one thing you can guarantee is that it is never about nothing. We sometimes refer to this at Hand in Hand as the ‘broken cookie situation’; you give your child a cookie and the corner has broken. They scream and scream that they wanted a ‘whole one’ and refuse to eat the broken one, even if it’s the last in the pack. We see it that there is actually some wisdom in this. When humans are in optimal emotional health, we make use of the body’s inbuilt, self-mending mechanism; we release hurt, stress and tension through emotional release like laughter, crying and raging or trembling. By adulthood, most of us have inhibited this response after being shushed, or scolded from babyhood when we went into emotional release. We hold back tears, we stifle laughter, we try to stay calm when we are angry. But children tend to have their emotional release mechanism in full working order and make really good use of a small pretext like a broken cookie, to offload some stored up feelings. I recently had a ‘broken cookie’ moment myself and it has given me a greater understanding of how it feels for a child... read more
Dec 6, 2016 | parenting, relationships, trauma
This scene is the aftermath of deep emotional work. Where all the lights… and eyes, were on me. An experience unparalleled except for in ceremonies where all my people showed up just for me – like our wedding or my beautiful blessingways. I have shared a fair bit on Facebook about how I have recently been going through an intensely emotional time. I have had to face several really hard things this year, culminating in an excruciating situation which triggered two core hurts from childhood. This pain I had spent my whole life avoiding finally found a way out in the shape of a breakdown where I spent four months unable to do much beyond feeling, shaking, crying, raging. I was deeply distressed most of the time, waking each night for several hours distraught, frozen in angst and horror. I was exhausted and out of my mind. My capacity to think has been very much inhibited, as well as my ability to parent or hold space. I have leaned on my community a lot. My listening partners have held me through this with such presence, patience, love and dedication. And somehow through the shame of being so needy, broken and unable to give back and feeling that this was all my own fault and I deserved it, I knew I needed to ask for even more. So I rallied my listening partners and asked if they would be willing to perform what Patty Wipfler has developed as a ‘Parent Rescue Squad’. This is where a parent in crisis summons support through one way extensive listening time. An intervention that... read more
Oct 13, 2016 | parenting
I just took my kids on a slightly wild adventure to see Amma (the ‘hugging saint’) in London. They managed to hold it together throughout the 5 hour car journey, despite being sprung straight from school without any Special Time to top up connection levels. We scraped them through a quick dinner in a cafe, where they were pretty on the edge. They ADORED the Amma program; running about Alexandra Palace, making friends, playing, eating cake, sitting on the stage near Amma. And this went on for many hours. Until one passed out under a table of blessed water at 3.30am and the other was still going strong. I wondered how much more they could hold the crowds, the excitement, the lack of sleep. At 5.30am our tokens were called for ‘darshan’ (our chance to hug Amma). We moved through the queue before deciding to wake Arte up so that she had some time to acclimatise. Having only slept a couple of hours after staying up so late, she was understandably hysterical when I tried to scoop her sleeping body into my lap. And here it came, the tidal outpouring of emotion I had suspected might be on the cards. She threw herself off my lap, onto the ground and I sat by her as she screamed “I’m NOT going!” “You don’t want to go up” I validated and let her know she didn’t need to do anything she didn’t want to. Only she was still upset. “Get away from me! Leave me alone! Go AWAY!” screamed my fiesty 5 year old over and over again. I stayed close,... read more
