#circle of security

[royalpain16]

Catherine Duchess of Cambridge

Lambeth Early Action Partnership - LEAP

Together Time-Circle of Security

[minttealelf]

Had a really great time tonight at the parenting group that I'm leading! It's one of my favorite weeks of the Circle of Security curriculum. Jump in, the water's fine! We've got:

Empathic non-shaming attitudes toward the difficulties of parenting

Research-based information about secure attachment

A compassionate look into how your childhood impacts parenting strengths and struggles

The Jaws theme (if you know you know)

[lifecoachingnorthbrisbane]

Circle of security online course Brisbane

At times all parents feel lost or without a clue about what their child might need from them. Imagine how good it would feel if you were able to make sense of what your child is really asking from you. The Circle of Security® Parenting™ program is based on decades of research about how secure parent-child relationships can be supported and strengthened.

[pragmaticpolyanna]

When you finally have room to realize that you have lived the last 20+ years in isolation. Desperately needing intimacy. And you don’t remember how to let people in. You’ve been convincing yourself that you’ve been close to others. But you haven’t. Not at all.  And it’s not too late to correct it. <3 

[pragmaticpolyanna]

Getting this down before today’s anxiety swallows it whole:  * My middle kiddo has so much to offer me and those around them when they are completely loved, secure, and accepted. The sass and joy this weekend was glorious. * I erased some of my helplessness in life with the help of those I love. * A combined headache and stomachache in my youngest is still triggering. * There are board games out there that I enjoy. And watching my kids play is breathtaking. 

<3  

[littlewingconnections]

Child Haven, Inc to Offer Free “Circle of Security” Parenting Program

Child Haven, Inc to Offer Free “Circle of Security” Parenting Program

Feeling like you are overwhelmed and on an emotional roller coaster are common feelings for parents.  After all, it may well be the hardest job on the planet. Children are hard-wired to need security, and parents are hard-wired to provide it; but where do you begin? And if there has been a trauma or challenges to the child’s sense of security, how do you help to heal that?

Beginning Thursday May…

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[phynxrizng]

SPELL OF THE DAY, CIRCLE OF SECURITY

The Witches Magick for December 8th – Circle of Security CIRCLE OF SECURITY Here’s another way to keep your home and everyone in it safe from harm of any kind – acts of nature as well as human menaces. INGREDIENTS/ TOOLS: Small clear quartz crystals A black cloth A garden trowel or shovel BEST TIME TO PERFORM THE SPELL: Begin on Saturday during the waning moon Collect the listed ingredients. If you live in a house and have a yard, you’ll need enough crystals to completely circle your house. If you live in an apartment, you’ll need one crystal for each window and each door to the outside. Wash the crystals with mild soap and water, then pat them dry. If you have a large area to cover and a lot of crystals, you might need to continue this spell over a period of days. Draw or find a picture of a pentagram and lay it on your altar, or another surface. Place the crystals on it and visualize them absorbing the protection represented by the pentagram. Lay the black cloth over the crystals, covering them completely. Allow the crystals to sit overnight. In the morning, remove the cloth. Pick up the crystals, put them in a bowl or other container, and take them outside. Beginning in the east, bury the crystals in your yard one at a time, making a protective circle that surrounds your home. Position them as close together or as far apart as feels right to you. If you live in an apartment, start at the east and place a crystal on each windowsill (inside) of your living space. Then set a crystal in a safe spot near or above each exterior door. As you work repeat this affirmation aloud: “Crystals wise, crystals strong Protect my home all day long. Crystals clear, crystals bright Keep it safe throughout the night.” You may also want to hang a pentagram on each door that leads into your home Source, –Skye Alexander, The Modern Guide to Witchcraft: Your Complete Guide to Witches, Covens, and Spells Posted by, phynxrizng,

[martinelfert]

Lo, I Am With You

Isaiah40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39

*

Lo, I am with you ‘til the ends of the earth, Lo, I am with you when you leave self behind, Lo, I am with you when you suffer for love, Lo, I am with you through the changes of life, Lo, I am with you in the darkness of death.

Lo, I am with you ‘til the ends of the earth.

           ­- “Lo I am With You” by John Bell

Our Dean, Bill Ellis, and I spent the better part of this past week at a retreat for clergy from across the Diocese of Spokane. It was a delight, as always, to have time with colleagues – the clergy in this Diocese are genuinely fond of one another, and that is bigger accomplishment than it might sound like. And it was an uncommon privilege to have almost four days with our retreat leader, Kent Hoffman.

Many of you will remember Kent from the extraordinary series of classes that he offered here at the Cathedral in the fall. For those of you who weren’t there – or for those of you who are ready for a refresher – Kent is one of the architects of Circle of Security, a science-based strategy for teaching parents to create strong and loving connections with their children. Kent and his colleagues variously call this connection “resonance” or “soothing” or “a holding environment” or, wait for this one, “communion.”

Over the course of our time together, Kent gave us a crash course in Circle of Security and the research that lies behind it. Particularly powerful were a series of videos showing interactions between real parents and toddlers. The basic scenario in all of them was identical: the parent would exit a room, leaving the child in the care of a stranger. And after a set period of time – three minutes (or shorter if the child became started to cry or otherwise became distressed), so long enough for the toddler to begin to wonder where the parent was and to call out for him or her – the parent would return. And we would observe what their reunion looked like.

In some of the reunions, we got to see what it is like when soothing is disorganised. Here were interactions in which a parent was withdrawn or distant and the child would become withdrawn or distant in response. And here were interactions in which, without realising it, the parent was doing more to meet his own needs than those of the child. During and after these interactions, the researchers found that the child remained really anxious, that their heart rates and the stress chemicals in their bodies remained sky high.

Kent’s goal in showing these videos is not to say, “Look at these awful parents.” To the contrary, he emphasises that these parents are employing the very strategies that they themselves learned as children. Through these interactions – interactions that these children had experienced in similar ways thousands of times before – each of these children were slowly but deeply internalising the message that, “if I am going to function in this world, it is up to me, and it is up to me alone.”

Maybe that’s a message that you recognise from your own life.

We also got to see what it looks like when resonance really works, when communion just sings between a parent and a child. Here was as beautiful, as inspiring, a video as I have ever watched. The parent, in this case a mother, reentered the room to see her crying child. And immediately, the child crawled over to her and raised up his arms. (Kent says that this “pick me up” or “hold me” gesture is seen universally in secure children. They are confident that they can and will be soothed, they are confident that good things follow bad things.) The mother held him and spoke with him. And in fewer than 10 seconds, the child’s crying stopped, he became calm, and he became curious about something else in the room, about the lights set into the ceiling.

This ability to sooth quickly, to find resonance quickly, to “fill your cup” quickly, is what deep security looks like. Over forty years of research, Kent and his colleagues have found that the children who experience this kind of security will grow up to be adults who are capable of vulnerability and autonomy in equal measure. Vulnerability: the ability to open your heart to other people, to experiences, and to God. And autonomy: the ability to act independently with confidence. Vulnerability and autonomy, two things that God hopes all of us will find. Vulnerability and autonomy, which maybe we could paraphrase as joy and freedom.

Now, Kent is forthright in admitting that these videos are all rated PG for “parental guilt.” For those of us who are parents, whether our kids are small or all grown up, it is kind of hard to see view materials and not say, “My God! I’ve broken my kids. I am breaking my kids.” But precipitating guilt isn’t Kent’s goal in sharing his research – and nor is it my goal in telling you about work with you this morning. Rather, Kent shows us these videos as a way of setting the stage for the rest of his research, as a way of getting us ready to hear three really important things.

First, Kent wants us to recognise that, no matter who we are, no matter how old we are, whether we are a toddler or in our nineties, we need resonance. We need soothing. We are all of us the child in the video holding out our arms and looking for communion. Kent says that he has never met anyone who would not have benefited from more soothing. And, when you get down to it, I don’t think that I have ever met such a person either. I have met lots of people, however, who wonder if real soothing is possible.

There is an emptiness in all of us. A hole built out of all of the hurt we have given and received, all of the loneliness we have known, all of the times we have been unheard and misunderstood, all of the unfair things that has ever happened to us, all of the things and ideas and places and people that we have lost. Most of us don’t want to spend a whole lot of time with that emptiness. Most of us have constructed a lot of strategies to stay well away from it. Strategies built out of alcohol, out of a pathological relationship with food, out of shopping, out of the screens on our computers and TVs and mobile phones. Anything to stave off silence and stillness, lest the emptiness sneak in. Anything to stave off the fear that there is nothing beyond the emptiness, that we are the child to whom the loving parent will never come.

Now, that sounds pretty bleak. So here’s the second thing that Kent wants us to know: all of us can get better at communion. We can get better at lowering the walls that keep resonance out and we can learn to transmit resonance. And, more than that, it’s never too late for us to get better at communion. Kent speaks parents whose children are teenagers or in their twenties or thirties or forties or beyond who have crafted new relationships with their children, who have found a new way to resonate with their children. And Kent speaks parents whose child has died – and I know that there is more than one person at this Cathedral who has endured the awful responsibility of burying a child – who, even in their children’s absence, have found a new way to resonate with them. These parents tell of experiences that they cannot entirely explain, experiences of resurrection, in which they came to understand their relationship with their child had shifted and grown.

The last thing that Kent wants to share with us he phrases as a question. Look at the video of the mother in communion with her child. Look at her holding that child, at her helping her him to fill up his cup. And ask yourself: how many of us believe that God does that for us?

Whether we realise it or not, a lot of us believe in two Gods: the God of love who interacts with rest of the world and the God of judgment who interacts with us. This is the God who looks into our history and our hearts and finds us wanting. This is the God who says: you aren’t good enough. This is the God who is incapable of loving someone like you or me.

There aren’t two Gods. There is only the God of love, for you and for me and for everyone. When you start looking for that mothering God in scripture, you suddenly notice that she is everywhere. Consider the reading from Mark today. Here is the God who holds our hand in our time of lostness. Here is the God who heals us. Here is the God drives the demons away, the demons who tell us that the emptiness has no end. Here is the God who descends with us into that emptiness, into our darkness, and who calls us into the light that lies beyond it.

The purpose of a spiritual practice, such as coming to church, is in large part to learn – or, perhaps, to remember – how to hear that God. To remember how to accept resonance from the God who, when we reach out our arms and say, hold me, always says, yes. To remember the God who is with us ‘til the ends of the earth.