How Child Therapy Can Also Help Parents – Can It Have a Positive Impact on Your Career?
When parents bring their kids into our child therapy office, they trust us to ensure that therapy will create positive change in the child’s social-emotional health. Parents are sometimes surprised to learn that attachment-based therapy works to improve their relationship with their child. The best outcomes are seen when the parent is actively involved in the therapeutic relationship.
We are indeed focused on the child’s wellbeing. The therapeutic goals and outcomes we work towards are always intended to support the child. To get there, though, parents often must improve their own social-emotional skills, building attunement to their child’s needs by watching and listening to what their child is communicating. A side benefit is that many of these skills translate well to areas like professional development. Here are five ways a parent may benefit from parent-child therapy that can also enhance any professional skillset.
It can help you build reflective capacity
Parent-child therapy can increase an adult’s ability to practice mindfulness and wonder about their own responses to others. This could help identify maladaptive thought patterns and behaviors. These techniques can help identify and implement areas of improvement at the office.
Increases your distress tolerance
Parent-child therapy can help build the strength and resources to endure uncomfortable or unpleasant experiences. The ability to focus under stress sounds like a good skill to have in most jobs. How about yours?
Improves communication skills
Parent-child therapy can help build skills to communicate assertively, rather than in an aggressive or passive-aggressive manner. Assertive communication skills are an essential building block of leadership and often lead to greater job satisfaction.
Improves work/life balance
Usually, we think that the “work” part of the work/life equation is the problematic factor in achieving balance. But, if your home life is taking a toll through a difficult relationship with your child, then improving that relationship can help restore some energy that you can put back into meaningful work.
Builds awareness of unconscious beliefs
Through play therapy with you child, parents often discover can how their own childhood experiences impact their present beliefs. This can improve ways of relating to others. An improved relationship with your boss or co-workers is rarely a poor step in your career. You may even discover how hidden beliefs torpedoed that last job interview.
Our goal at UpliftME Attachment-Based Therapy isn’t professional development or career success. Our mission is to help your child through painful experiences, to learn about emotions and managing them, and to have better relationships with caregivers, family, and peers. But, like so many of our important undertakings, you’ll get out what you put in. Parents who are active in helping their child in therapy can reap benefits that expand to other areas of life, all while improving the outcomes for those little humans that make the stress of our jobs worthwhile.