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It's easier for health professionals to prescribe drugs than to rebuild
relationships.
It's easier for people to use alcohol or nicotine, or
prescription anti-depressants and stimulants
than to apply intelligence,
focus and analytical skills to their relationships.
Do you accept the consequences and side-effects of
psychoactive drugs?
What is Normal?
Since the dawn of recorded history, most people lived in rural
communities with many relatives. If you had been there, almost
everyone you knew was family. Learning parenting was simply part of
growing up ... with many siblings, cousins and extended family watching and
perhaps too willing to offer advice.
Child-raising was a normal part of busy lives. Who needed to
learn parenting? Healthy parenting is still rather new in Western
countries, and seems hardly known in older cultures. In older times, most
teenagers became parents - and certainly by the time they were twenty-few.
Much culture is simply people and copying other
people. Our modern culture seems shaped more and more by the ideals of
marketers, politicians and television
producers. Today it seems that many families live in more seclusion in an urban
apartment than in a remote village.
What is Abuse?
It is a sad fact that those who did the least to cause
marriage and family problems are those who will suffer the most from them.
Children are subject to their parents' rules, maturity, responsibility, parenting
skills, social background and religious beliefs.
I know of no accepted definitions of child abuse,
child maltreatment or cruelty to children. This results in confusion about which
behaviors are considered abusive. Decisions to label a person as an abuser
are usually made by victims, or by legal or health professionals, using
varying criteria. The situation is further confused by differences between
physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect.
He who spares the rod hates his son:
but he that loves him corrects him Proverbs 13:24
A definition of an abused child is: "any child
who receives non-accidental injury as a result of acts or omissions on the
part of adults that violate community standards concerning the
treatment of children." Although emotional abuse is harder
to define, it seems to be normal in many families. (I define emotional abuse as
behavior that causes people to dissociate or "split-off" parts of themselves.)
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Children in Crisis? |
- Is it appropriate for you to offer assistance? See
Coaching Children
- If so, build trust and offer emotional first aid -
breathe, walk and relax.
- Empathize with child’s emotions. Listen carefully
and talk it through.
- Build trust and ask about what happened. Listen
carefully.
- Help child deal with ideas of guilt and punishment.
- Explore options for solutions and restitution.
- Prepare to handle consequences.
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Severe child discipline can be traced back to the ancient
Greeks, Romans and Jews, when slaves were property of their owners and
children were property of their parents. Only in the 20th century was
cruelty to children first regarded as a problem (and then only after
Cruelty to Animals legislation.)
Consequences of Child Abuse
The effects of child abuse range from hurt feelings to
lasting behavioral, emotional and mental impairment, especially following
sexual assault. Some abused children become adults who are chronically
depressed or dissociated,
people who may abuse or neglect children themselves.
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Structural consequences of childhood
maltreatment include disruptive development of corpus callosum, left
neocortex, hippocampus, and amygdale; functional consequences include
increased electrical irritability in limbic areas, frontal lobe dysfunctions
... and subsequently the stress response. Grassi-Oliveira R, Ashy M, Stein LM.
Psychology Department, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul,
Brazil |
While this may suggest that people suffering the
consequences of child abuse cannot change, we continually help
people to change many unpleasant consequences of abuse.
Emotional Incest
. Sexual Abuse
. Incest
Abusive Parents
We find no no single abusive personality. Only a small
percentage of abusive parents seem to have severe mental health disorders or
extreme religious beliefs. However, most abusive parents lack relationship
skills - they often lack friendship skills, teamwork skills, partnership
skills and parenting skills. Their skill deficiencies often include problems
coping with stress and emotional self-control.
Prevent & Remedy Child Abuse
A common goal of change strategies is to
improve parenting skills. However, if people can evaluate their own
family and friends, dissolve emotional blocks and develop friendship skills
and partnership skills, they are likely to develop healthy parenting skills.
Parent Coaching
. Parent Alienation
In our systemic coaching, both the prevention and
resolution of child abuse begins with helping adults evaluate their families
(relationship diagnosis). A person's
evaluations of his or her family members can be recorded as a family matrix.
Following relationship diagnosis, we
help people plan which should be the first relationship to clarify ...
which next ... and so on. Each clarification helps a person choose how to
behave, which changes emotions, compulsions, conflicts, relationship bonds
and other effects of trauma and abuse.
The result is a relationship coaching
plan which can be tested for congruence (a person's verbal
and non-verbal communication shows full support of the plan without
verbal or non-verbal objections).
Build Interpersonal Skills
Most people want better interpersonal skills to enjoy better
relationships - although few seem to be motivated to change. Communication
skills help build lasting friendships and improve working relationships.
Good communication skills are a firm basis for partnership and parenting.
- A first step to effective communication is
to know your values and your goals.
- A second step is to express yourself appropriately
within different types of relationships (with parents, siblings, friends,
colleagues, etc).
- A third step to effective communication
is to appropriately respond to relationship challenges and stress.
A useful goal direction is to stay resourceful in chaos.
We coach motivated adults ... people who are childish or not
motivated to increase their happiness and sense-of-life often reveal unpleasant
beliefs that happiness would be somehow wrong or inappropriate ... which again
reflects their family background and childhood experiences.
Skills Training
Our coaching and coach training provides life models that can help prevent,
alleviate or manage the unpleasant consequences of child abuse and emotional
incest. We offer proven ways to help dissolve the underlying
emotional causes of ...
Systemic Solutions
People who were abused as children may fear happiness and success,
and sabotage their own desire for healthy relationships. Our brief
systemic coaching can help most adults dissolve emotional blocks,
build happy relationships and move on with their lives - in short time frames.
We coach people to identify their individual needs, and make action
plans for change. We support and encourage people to achieve their goals
and objectives. We help people handle difficult situations.
Click HERE for Better Relationships
Plagiarism is theft. Copyright ©
Martyn Carruthers 2002-2012 All rights reserved
aubse, soltuions, terapy, couching, soluwork, soulowrk, soulwok
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