To Be a Parent - a pilot group
tuesday evenings, april 21, 28, may 5, may 19, 26, june 2
6.30-8pm on zoom or 6.30-8.15pm
This space offers a rich, relational environment in which to explore and share our lived experience of being - or not being - a parent. Whether we have children or not, our experiences in this territory are profound. Yet often we don’t have contexts outside of our immediate family or circle to reflect on it in a wise, spacious or communally-informed way.
So our aim here is to invite presence, accompaniment and inter-generational awareness to these themes and what they touch on - to create a space in which you can inhabit the places and dilemmas and loves that being a parent sends you to.
cision, differentiation, clarity, and to bring witnessing and presence.
This is not a group about parenting as a skill, nor is it a group exclusively a group for parents. It is a space in which to express, explore and share the parenting moment you are in - parenting as an aspect of self-experience.
It is an area of life that affects us very deeply, in ways we don’t often get to articulate.
Being a parent can be lonely, isolating, stressful, profoundly moving, expansive, ardyous etc. Often all of these.Not being a parent - whether by choice or circumstance - is also a profoundly significant reality. and can be isolating, painful, emptying etc.
Being [or not being] a parent is one of the most crucial/essential roles/relationships in our lives.
Whether or not we step into this space is hugely significant for how our lives and identities are shaped.
It stirs deep/touched on places of depth, meaning, emptiness and ordeal of life.
At various stages in the parenting (or non-parenting) journey, these are experienced differently.
Aim of the Group
One of the gifts of being a psychotherapist is to be exposed to the uniqueness and complexity of each person’s life scenario: … s a psychotherapist I am struck by the profound complexity and particularity of each person’s relationship with being - or not being - a parent.
at the heart of parenting is an impulse to sacrifice. an other-oriented activity.
Week after week, I witness the myriad calls, rewards and pressures of parenting: the unique contours of different moments in the parenting journey: and how, as with many important things in our lives, we don’t always have adequate space in which to take in what we are going through, or convey it to others who have the capacity to hear us.
Which is why i created this space. At the heart of my motivation in creating this group is an impulse to cultivate emergent, generative space in which we can share and be witnessed in this central theme.
Often these are places we carry alone, and can be characterized of inner conflict, fear, longing, paradox and uncertainty. We negotiate too much alone and have too little access to spaces/environments of quality and presence that enable us to feel and be felt, to own the goodness and the costs of the price we pay.
Another motivation is to close the binary/split between parents and non-parents.
wondering whether to have children. how it is to be.
Leonard Cohen says somewhere that the only really important question is: What are you going through?
That question is at the heart of this group. group work gets its charge/spark when we find a way to bring forth that which is within us.
Who is it For?
Being a parent can be lonely, isolating, stressful, profoundly moving, expansive, ardyous etc. It is often all of these.
Not being a parent - whether by choice or circumstance - is also a profoundly significant reality. and can be isolating, painful, emptying etc.
We created this space to provide a rich, relational, environment in which to explore and share our lived experience of this theme. We recognize that for many people, whether they have children or not, our experiences of parenting - or of not having children - are profound. is deep, preoccupying and at the heart of our identity.
It is an area of life that affects us very deeply, in ways we don’t often get to articulate.
Yet we often don’t have contexts outside of our immediate family to reflect on it in a wise, spacious or communally informed way.
How will we work together?
My wish is to create a safe, enriching and elaborative environment to support each participant - and the group as a whole - to unfold further in embodiment, insight and empathy for self and others. Over these weeks, we create a profound witnessing circle; a stimulate possibilities we don’t encounter alone; expand our appreciation and resonance with a very wide range of experiences.
This offering consciously creates space to reflect, express, explore how we are navigating this theme, and be stirred by the experiences of others. Together we form a deep reflective, relational listening field, where the specificity of your experience is respected. And where each of us can be extended, enriched in our empathy, insight and tolerance.
The experience of resonance, recognition, learning is hugely valuable within the group. It allows us to flesh out and embody our own truths, our own edges, to be witnessed by one another and to arrive in fuller more grounded expression of who we are.
Such expansions in empathic capacity transfer into our lives outside.