Transforming the Single Parent Experience: The Power of Metaphor
Therapists working with single parents often hear stories of abandonment, disempowerment, loneliness, hopelessness, victimization and unrelenting stress. Difficult experiences, as well as the distrubing perceptions and emotions that may result, often rigidify into psychic schemas comprised of patterns of depression and anxiety, compromised coping and dysregulated reacting.
Such painful schemas can increase the intensity and chronicity of stress, impact the requirements of parenting, and affect the quality of living a single parent life. Through the use of didactics and experiential exercises, this workshop explore the ways in which negative schemas impact single mothers and fathers and affect their functioning.
Participants will explore the ways in which the symbolic language of metaphor can transform negativity and stress, while providing hope for single parents to find solutions to the problems they face.
Emphasis will be placed on the power of new emotions, thoughts and life meanings to increase ego strength and facilitate greater psychological health for single parents and their children.
Through simple, effective experiential techniques for re-imaging new metaphors and eliciting re-formed meanings, participants will experience the healing potential of sympathetic identification with the strength and possibilities of re-imagined stories.