Inner Child Co-Regulation – How Empathic Dialogue Can Clear Implicit-Memory Blocks to Bonding
- Duration: 60 Mins
- Credits: 1 CERP, 1 R-CERP, 1 AMS CPD
- Handout: Yes
- Origin: GOLD Learning
Abstract:
An increasing number of research studies and psychotherapists’ accounts address the phenomenon in which parents’ attachment histories play a major role in their emotional capacity for pleasurable bonding with their own baby. Birth trauma, childhood trauma, insecure or disorganized early attachment can all carry forward as unconscious, implicit memory (emotional memory) that, in stressful circumstances, can arise and interfere with parent-infant bonding.
However, when a parent is able to communicate aspects of their historical pain, shock or distress, within a context of empathic and validating dialogue, this can often clear the way for pleasurable and spontaneous bonding.
Health practitioners are in a unique position to invite and hold an empathic dialogical space, in which parents can feel emotionally safe enough to tell a little of their own story. This can make a significant difference to parents’ emotional capacity for sustained attachment with their infant.
Learning Objectives:
2. Describe the neuropsychology of body-flashbacks, and their positive and negative impacts on parent-infant bonding.
3. Describe signs that painful emotional (implicit) memory has been triggered for a parent.
4. Describe the evolutionary purpose of implicit memory.
5. Describe how empathic dialogue can help release emotional blocks to pleasurable bonding (the power of empathic listening, and how it mimics maternal holding).
6. Assess how to ask good questions! – how to safely invite a deeper, more personal and self-disclosing level of dialogue.
7. Explain what constitutes good listening .
8. Describe a simple, 5-step dialogical process to assist clients to release painful emotional memory, and become attentive to the present moment with their child.
