Mindful Self-Compassion training is an evidenced based program that teaches concepts, practices and skills that will help to reduce and eventually prevent burnout that is a common outcome for parents caring for or responsible for adult children with a serious, chronic, mental illness.
Parents of adult children with serious, chronic mental illness are often told to maintain diligent self-care activities like walking, listening to music, exercising, talking to friends or going for a massage. But the limitation of most self-care activities are that they are done when you’re not in the midst of stressful interactions with your adult child.
Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) training teaches practices that help parents to not lose it as often and to stay steady in the eye of the hurricane by practicing MSC tools while in the eye.
What parents will learn from MSC training are practices that will help to turn down the heat in a spiraling out of control interaction with an adult child; ways to offer themselves care, kindness and compassion when they themselves are suffering; indirect ways to offer the same to their always loved, but not always liked adult child; and ways to practice personal fierce self-compassion when required.
Quote from a parent:
“I thought dealing with a hungry, screaming baby; a biting two-and-a-half-year-old; a battling brother and sister; a barrage of four-letter words from my sixteen-year-old; or a completely out-of-control young person was tough. I hadn’t seen anything yet! Nothing in “Parenting Guides” could have ever prepared me for having one of our children grow up and in their early adult years be diagnosed with a brain disorder; often commonly called a serious, chronic mental illness.”
Quote from the same Parent after MSC training and after a few months of practicing what she had learned:
“Our son said to us, you and Dad are different! I don’t know what you’re doing but keep it up… I like it. I don’t feel so tense around you as much.”