For Caregivers:
Relief from Caregiver Distress.
If you are like many of the adults we work with, you’re probably experiencing some level of parental (or caregiver) distress. Feeling uncertain about the wellbeing and safety of the people we love most can be agonizing. In a recent study on uncertainty, and our tolerance for it, the majority of study participants chose to take an immediate certain shock rather than sit with the possibility of an indefinite coming shock. And when waiting for an uncertain shock, participants experienced a spike in nervous-system activity. Most of us would rather be shocked, than worry about being shocked!
The uncertainty of your situation can be profoundly uncomfortable. Whatever you’re experiencing, working with a skilled, compassionate, informed consultant, will help. If you have an abundance of aimless or misplaced energy, we can help you focus on the manageable steps of creating a reassuring therapeutic plan. If you’re wrung-out and exhausted, we help by doing a lot of the heavy lifting and legwork. If you’re experiencing a flare-up from an earlier trauma in your own life or are feeling your loved one’s pain to an uncomfortable extent, we are experienced mental health clinicians, and we will be connecting your loved one—and by extension you—to gifted therapists in the field. Both we, and the therapists at your loved ones out-of-home therapeutic placement, can, and will, help you recognize what is happening with you, and process it.
For Young People:
A Renewed Connection with Life.
A person who’d freshly emerged from a two-year depression described it by saying, “I was in a loveless marriage with life.” We don’t know the state of your loved one’s relationship with life, but since you’re here, we can assume that relationship is strained. When a person is out-of-tune with life, every moment has the possibility for dissonance. When nothing feels smooth, we experience friction with ourselves and others. But where we feel resistance and discomfort, we find our greatest opportunities for growth.
By having lived more years and accumulated more experiences, you may, or may not (no judgement) have expanded the boundaries of your inner emotional real estate. Your distress container is larger. Your younger loved one probably hasn’t had as many expanding experiences—or has had some intense contracting ones—and their big feelings and emotions are ill-fitting. They are emotionally overloaded. Like a river in an abnormally wet season, they may regularly be flooding, or jumping the banks. This overload might produce combative behaviors, lashing out, risk taking, law breaking, etc. Or maybe, to avoid spilling and making a mess—because a flooding river draws attention to itself—they are surrounding (practically burying) themselves with sandbags. These types of young people isolate or avoid, and some of the common “sandbags” they use are drugs, alcohol, and technology.
Aligning your loved one with the proper out-of-home therapeutic environment will open and expand them. It will provide them a safe, and adequately challenging, environment to confront their issues, and their contracted, or rigid, sense of self. And eventually the experience will diminish their issues, cause them to become more open, and allow them a more complete connection with themselves and the world around them.
All of this poetic talk aside, we will align your loved one with an out-of-home therapeutic environment that has proven positive treatment outcomes. So yes, the things stated above may happen, and evidence—not just flowery language—supports it.