Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Parents
The experience of parenthood can bring a deep sense of joy and enrichment to life, but it can also be exhausting and emotionally challenging. As your child moves through the life cycle from in utero to babyhood, being a toddler to becoming a child, reaching adolescence to young adulthood, each stage brings new challenges, anxieties, and opportunities for both the child and their parents or carers.
There may be other complexities within the family that contribute to the child's struggles, such as sibling rivalry, different parenting styles, or parental separation. The addition of reconstituted families with step-parents, step- and half-siblings adds further complexity to the family dynamic. These experiences can arouse emotional turmoil within the child, their parents, and relationships and sometimes lead to family functioning getting stuck.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy can offer psychological support with a range of issues
With parents and families this includes (but not limited to):
- Contemplating becoming parents and the transition to parenthood.
- Difficulties in conceiving and becoming parents
- Problems in the couple relationship as parents.
- Feeling pressures of parenting
- Conflicting parenting styles.
- Concern about child's mental health and well-being
- Difficulties in understanding your child's communications/behaviour.
- Problems between child and parental relationships
- Sibling rivalry
- Living through and post parental separation/divorce
- Living as reconstituted families
- Grandparents as primary carers
- Parenting fostered and adopted children
- Bereaved families and loss
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy with parents and families provides a safe and reliable space where difficult thoughts can become thinkable and painful feelings can be talked about. It offers the opportunity to explore your worries about your child and discuss any struggles you experience with parenting. It is a place where we work together in seeking to understand and give meaning to your child's behaviours and think about what it might be communicating about your child's emotional world.
It offers the opportunity to reflect on past experiences, your child's and your own, and consider how this might impact on the present. Having a space to reflect and make sense of life histories in this way can free you from patterns of the past and potentially awaken new aspects in your emotional world and ways of relating to your child.
I am flexible in my approach to this work and will consider what will be most helpful to your child and family. If you are worried about your child and would like to discuss whether I might be able to help, please do get in touch for a preliminary, no-obligation telephone conversation.