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Today’s news: A quarter of all 14 year old girls self-harm. In the media, this is treated as a mental health problem. A young woman is interviewed. She cut herself for five years. There is a conversation about the lack of availability of counselling services at school, which may have helped her process the difficult kind of emotions she felt so alone with. Her mother shares the sense of helplessness she felt, her self- doubt and self-blame, the question she asked herself: “Have I been a bad parent?”.

I would like to tell you about a recent hobby of mine and how the experiences in the group have resonated for me very deeply with my therapeutic practice and in particular NVR. Over the past 6 months I have been attending weekly Biodanza classes here in Cardiff. Most people in the UK have not heard of this wonderful dance-based system. Antoinette Lorraine, our inspirational teacher, writes on the website Biodanza 4UK: The Magnificent Art of Living’:

NVR is an approach that changes parents’ and caregivers’ perception of their child, and helps them challenge their own underlying beliefs. With these changes comes a deep sense of connection between parent and child. The parents recognised how NVR had hugely helped them to keep him safe, and having a practitioner with whom to share his progress and challenges meant they were not alone. This loneliness can leave parents feeling vulnerable.

My mother stated, “You know, I did a bit of an intervention, earlier this week. With some of your stuff in it.” I immediately understood that, by saying ‘stuff’, my mother meant Non Violent Resistance.

I have recently had the privilege of starting to work with a parent whose child has been looked after by the local authority for the past two years. My work is helping the parent develop a new relationship between father and his son. This parent, let’s call him John, was in his twenties when his second son was born, At that time John was fully committed to his drug and alcohol addiction

It was a privilege to attend this conference and to be a part of 3 amazing days listening to the most influential people in NVR. The conference was opened by Haim Omer, who also gave a keynote speech and workshops alongside Nahi Alon, another clinical psychologist.
To sit alongside such a wealth of experts in this field, such skilled and reputable practitioners who have developed strands of the approach in their own way,

Chris Holmquist works with adoptive families, in which young people who have suffered early childhood adversity develop behaviours that are harmful to others and to themselves. He told me this story about William Penn who was a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania. Quakers have played an important role in the history of the United States

Sometimes, parents no longer experience themselves as being important for their children and don’t feel competent anymore to take care of them. This can cause a downward spiral, where the idea of a brighter family future seems remote. In this post, I will address how parents and their children can co-develop a fatalistic outlook on the future. Using a case example, I will try to illustrate how professionals can support parents to separate their own outlook from that of their children once again.

A few months ago, I was asked by an NVR  trainee to discuss my thoughts about supervision in NVR to contribute to some research on supervision he was undertaking. I thought it would be interesting to share my responses with you here. Here are his supervision questions, along with my responses.

This morning i woke up remembering her black eye from 45 years ago. The memory still haunts me. We were hippies then; she had invited my friend Bernard and me to stay overnight in her boyfriend’s barn. He was a hippie too; he made jewellery for a living, and we thought he was a cool guy. Being a hippie back then was all about peace and love and nonviolence.