Learning through Experience

Understanding children through the experience of being with them

What’s it like to feel all over the place?

What’s it like to feel you are not understood?

I feel that these are exactly the emotions and feelings that parents sometimes feel when they are with their newborns or older children. The experience of not coping and being less than capable often leads to acting. Maybe we might loose our temper and explode or we might withdraw to where things are not as raw. In these moments maybe we have lost the ability to think about the emotional experience we are in. It has become too much to bear.

Parents, adults and children sometimes need help to bear the emotional difficulties that they experience in their intensive relationships with one another. By helping to hold the experience and begin to think about it will encourage development of both parent and child to deal with these difficult emotions. The aim of both Alex and Liam is to help parents and children firstly by holding the emotions and then considering what is going on, what can be spoken about and what is being acted out on or what is being avoided altogether. This might lead to a greater understanding of the dynamics of our relationships resulting in a greater capacity to cope.

In everyday life we use socially approved ways of behaving, forms of social conventions that help to know what is right or wrong. These conventions prove useful in workplaces, or other formal circumstances, but they are insufficient when being with babies. No one can know in advance how to be a mother or a father to this particular baby who has just been born. Having heard from so many parents that parenthood is nothing they could have expected it to be, Alex and Liam designed BorntoRelate.

Neither Alex nor Liam know what the answers are and what could work for you and your family. However they are willing to explore with parents to find their truth and their way of developing greater internal dialogue and ways of coping with the emotional world of children.

They are interested in finding out how you remember your first days of parenthood. How you guided yourself through initial disorientation in your new role?

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