Appliation
What is Parent Coaching?
Parent coaching is a forward-looking, solution-focused partnership of mentoring and support that empowers you, the mom, with the right tools, skills, information, and support you need to successfully parent some of the toughest kids on the planet and help your entire family heal in the process.
Parent coaching is not a treatment program. Nor is it a “how to parent your difficult child” program. It is, however, all about helping YOU, the mom, find the right answers that WORK for you and your unique situation.
The overall goal of parent coaching to help you become not just part of the solution, but to become THE solution to the problems and you and your family are experiencing.
Who do I work with?
I have a few one-on-one private coaching slots available for mothers of children who struggle with intense emotional and behavioral problems related to early childhood trauma exposure.
Many of their kids endured multiple adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, and now suffer from conditions such as Reactive Attachment Disorder, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Complex PTSD, Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder, and other similar mental health conditions.
These spots aren’t just for any mom of hard kids, though. They are reserved for moms who are passionate, committed, and who are both ready and willing to step away from the exhaustion, chaos and drama, invest in themselves and their family, and learn to thrive in spite of whatever is going on around them, even when it isn’t comfortable or easy.
Parent coaching can help you:
- Significantly reduce toxic stress, burnout, and overwhelm
- Reverse parent burnout and restores hope
- Create and implement a safety plan that works for all family members
- Gain clarity and insight needed for critical decision making
- Work through your own feelings of grief, loss, and resentment
- Understand and practice positive and healthy coping skills
- Establish and maintain healthy boundaries across the board
- Learn and apply proven skills to reduce chaos and help the family heal.
- Repair and restore important key relationships in your life
- Rediscover who YOU are
- Identify and reduce your own contributions to the chaos
- Naturally reclaim your place as a leader in your family
What can you expect from coaching?
In short, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. If you are willing to take the leap of faith, do the work, and make the investments and sacrifices required, you WILL experience significant positive changes in yourself and your family that no other modality can deliver.
However, those changes only come when you’re actively engaged and focused on making them happen. Healing isn’t a passive process. It takes a significant amount of time, effort, teamwork, and commitment to untangle the mess, learn and apply new skills, and change belief systems and behavior patterns that aren’t working. It also isn’t cheap!
You can expect me to…
Challenge you, push you, validate you, listen to you, teach you, support you, laugh with you, cry with you, and believe in you.
I will also help you believe in yourself, see things from a new perspective, shift the way you think, and modify the actions you take.
I expect you to…
Show up, be present, be honest, take the process seriously, keep up, and take specific and direct action steps, even when they feel impossible or scary. In other words, I expect you to give it all you’ve got and to be ALL in.
It takes time to learn new skills, develop new ways of thinking, and change habits. To achieve the results you’re looking for, a minimum 6-month commitment is required to begin the coaching process. Most people stay with it much longer.
“My outlook on parenting through the future and on life overall has shifted drastically. I have found myself and I am able to know some confidence in our future. Like every parent, there are still plenty of hard days that end with the question of whether I made the right choices, there is still the exhaustion sometimes too. What I’ve dropped from my parenting is the questioning of myself about whether I am capable, whether It is possible for me to guide my children to a satisfying adulthood. I don’t miss those questions.”
-Carissa M.
“My experience with Diana helped me to gain the tools and resources I needed to feel like I could get back up on my feet. She helps me see that it’s worth it to keep trying. Beyond that, I’ve tried therapy before. While it works for a few things, therapy couldn’t provide me with a self-paced plan of action that targeted my core belief systems. As a writer, I use the Hero’s Journey writing model all the time. It states that a hero must meet with a mentor in order to learn and become the best hero they can be. I see coaching in this perspective. Diana is my mentor in becoming the best version of myself.”
–Kirsten E.
“I am now able to understand why two adults who both experienced extreme trauma during childhood can go in circles, hour after hour, disagreeing and yelling at each other. As Diana helped me understand, the wiring in the brain is NOT normal when trauma is experienced by children; especially if the child is younger than 4 or 5 years old when the adverse situation happens.”
–Sara A.
Appliation
Why does parent coaching work?
There are many resources and programs out there now that focus on meeting the needs of foster and adopted kids who had a rough start in life and experienced significant adverse childhood experiences. However, there are precious few that even consider our needs as parents.
This is crazy to me! It’s also completely backward and the exact opposite of what actually works. Until we get Mom back on her feet and OUT of the stranglehold of trauma, drama, and burnout herself, there isn’t much that will work with the kids.
Parent coaching works because we focus on the right person first! Rather than chasing largely ineffective treatments that only address one small piece of things with the kids, I work primarily on supporting, strengthening, and training you, the parent, as you move through the process of helping yourself and your family find hope, healing, and peace. By far the best way to help a child heal is to help their mom do it first!
Healing Starts with Mom!
There is a big myth out there that says if we focus on the needs of our struggling child first, all the problems will go away. This simply isn’t true. Though it may seem logical to treat the kids and their stuff first, very little of what actually works with traumatized or drug/alcohol-exposed children has anything to do with logic.
Trauma exposure impairs the brain and changes the way kids think, feel, engage with other people, and process information. Most of them don’t understand there is anything wrong with them. In their mind, they are the ones who are fine and everyone else around them is crazy. They also have no idea why they are the ones being singled out or need to change!
What our children need most is a strong, emotionally healthy, well-trained mom who understands how they operate, knows how to enforce boundaries (including physical and emotional safety for everyone), has good relationship skills, takes care of herself first, and is able to recognize and meet her child’s needs, including the ones that are only communicated through behavior. Parent coaching can help you make that happen!True healing doesn’t happen by sitting in a therapist’s office for an hour a week. It happens at home and it happens through a healthy mix of boundaries, rules, relationships and connection. It’s pretty tough to build those types of healing relationships or effectively parent a high-needs child who resists or defies you at every turn if you are exhausted, burned out, angry, or apathetic yourself.
Is parent coaching what you’re looking for?
I’ve Walked This Road
As a parent of severely traumatized children myself, I’ve been in some very dark, scary, and mega-stressful places with my kids and family life. I get this life and I understand the complexities and realities that come with it. I also know what it takes for children, parents, and families in situations like ours to leave the trenches of chaos and heal.
The steps I guide you through in the coaching process are the exact steps I used to climb out of my own dark abyss. They are the same steps I’ve used for more than a decade to help other parents find their way out and restore peace and light in their lives.
I love helping moms of extremely challenging kids climb out of chaos, restore peace and hope, and gain the tools and skills needed to do their job! The process isn’t always easy and it does require commitment, hard work, and investment. But it also WORKS!
