"You Must Reconnect With Yourself Before You Can Reconnect with Your Children"
Compassion Academy
Did you know that it is IMPOSSIBLE to repair a relationship without increasing your self-awareness? Self-awareness is critical to recognizing and dismantling defensiveness so that you can show up in the relationship differently.
With more self-awareness and less defensiveness, the room is created for self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness is the pathway back to your child because it can create a total transformation within yourself!
If you have been alienated from your child, your inner self is the first relationship in need of your attention and repair. Healing the wounds of your trauma FIRST enables you to reconnect with yourself, and create the necessary space for a new relationship to evolve with your alienated child.
This is why we created “The Compassion Academy.”
We help you make this powerful shift within yourself so that you can show up with your alienated child from a place of compassion and self-forgiveness, instead of from a place of fear, loss, and rejection.
When you work on repairing your relationship with yourself, you learn that an unconscious victim mindset has unknowingly maintained alienation in your relationship, and self-forgiveness is the key to re-connection!
This key mindset shift will help you internalize the strategies and skills needed to be able to listen with as much passion as you want to be heard and express heartfelt language to reconnect with your alienated child.
We will help you accept that this alienation happened FOR you, not TO you and that it is here to show you areas where you have opportunities to grow and heal old wounds. We will provide you with the tools to create emotional closeness within the physical distance between you and your child.
We help you identify the core issues your children have been experiencing and attempt to communicate to you through teaching you how to feel heard within YOURSELF!
What you'll learn in the Compassion Academy
In the Compassion Academy, you’ll learn a structured pathway for showing up for yourself with compassion, forgiveness, and unconditional love and acceptance.
First, you will explore your family of origin and relational patterns to identify, differentiate, and integrate experiences of relational trauma. You will expand on your self-awareness, and begin to recognize and practice emotional responsiveness rather than reactivity.
Next, you will learn to use the acronym RAIN (Tara Brach) (Recognize-Allow-Investigate-Nurture) to transform your internal conflict (guilt, shame, blame, unworthiness, anger, rage, abandonment, injustice, lack of forgiveness, victimized).
Together, we’ll explore how the RAIN practice can help you:
-
Pause and come home to the embodied presence (somatic experience to help you be present in your body).
-
Regard your inner life with friendliness and care (stop the cycle of self-abuse, break the pattern of stacking abusive behaviors on top of already painful experiences.
-
Loosen the grip of chronic self-judgment (make friends with the voice in your head!).
-
Cultivate compassion for yourself and others (while we each have the capacity for love and compassion, it is by intentional practice that we develop a truly wise and caring heart).
-
Alleviate the suffering from emotions like fear, shame, and anger.
-
Heal addictive and reactive patterns.
-
Revitalize and transform your relationships.
“Self compassion is the beginning of all emotional and spiritual healing from the trauma you suffered in your life. Healing yourself creates a pathway for healthy relationships.”
As you learn how to use this simple technique to dismantle emotional charges, you will begin to experience the healing and freedom that becomes possible when we contact the vulnerability within ourselves and others, to show up with a loving heart.
The RAIN sessions with our staff will address the core domains of suffering:
1. Self-aversion, self-hate, self-blame, shame- the feelings of “bad self”
2. Fear
3. Anger
4. Blaming others
5. Cultivating boundless compassion
At the end of this Compassion Academy, you will show up with a loving heart toward yourself and others. This shift will be felt by many family members with whom you wish to heal your relationship.
Be assured that we will work on:
Acknowledgment:
-
We begin our work together identifying and acknowledging the history of how you ended up here!
-
We will review your perspective, and help guide your awareness to other perspectives.
-
We will teach you how to show up for yourself in your pain, and walk you through a somatic exercise to help start releasing trauma from the body.
Validation:
-
Here our focus is on learning how to provide validation internally rather than looking externally.
-
We take a closer look at your wounds and Dr. Amy will guide you through another somatic exercise to practice providing yourself validation on a deeper level.
Self-Worth & Dismantling Shame:
-
Self-Worth is required to be vulnerable without collapsing into shame. It is required to apologize and to see mistakes as being part of being human.
-
The greater your self-worth, the greater your ability will be to apologize without defensiveness.
-
We will teach you practices, skills, and strategies to help you deepen your self-worth.
Dismantling Defensiveness & Embracing Self-Forgiveness:
-
You won’t feel defensiveness happening, therefore we will teach you how to recognize your defensiveness. Just recognizing it can give you a little bit of distance from it, and help you see where you have been listening for inaccuracies. The first step to releasing defensiveness is setting the intention to pay attention to it!
-
Since we are wired NEURO-BIOLOGICALLY to be Defensive and protect the best version of ourselves that we want to identify with, we need to develop a STRATEGY and set a CONSCIOUS INTENTION to Dismantle Defensiveness. We will help you begin this process!
-
Defensiveness starts in the body. It makes us tense and on guard, therefore we will teach you how to recognize defensiveness happening in your body and will guide you through another somatic exercise to help you work through these powerful emotions.
-
We focus on moving out of a blaming stance (the other parent or the child), and into an assertive claiming stance of self-forgiveness (integrity and maturity, being your best self, defining your position while seeing the other party’s perspective)!
-
You will practice another somatic exercise while detaching from the outcome. We will work to let go of any expectations of a response, while you keep reaching out!
Learn about the steps in moving towards reunification with your children and re-establishing the connection.