How Lifespan Integration Therapy Can Help You Be a Responsive Parent

Lifespan Integration Therapy is a body-based therapy that uses a combination of techniques to help a person heal from past trauma. Rather than cognitive therapy, which primarily focuses on behavior and changing patterns of thought, this therapy aims to help a person heal through gentle modalities.

These gentle modalities include a timeline of your life. This helps you review memories in a short, gentle way rather than talk therapy where you examine them in depth.

How can lifespan integration therapy help you be a more responsive parent?

If you’ve experienced any form of trauma, and you likely have if you’ve undergone any kind of neglect, tragedy, bullying, abandonment, abuse, or relational trauma, you may be parenting out of reactions more often than healthy responses.

As you heal from childhood trauma through Lifespan Integration Therapy, you may find that responses from a healthy, whole person replace your old parenting reactions.

Some researchers define traumatic events as anything that was “extremely upsetting” and at least “temporarily overwhelms the individual’s internal resources, and produces lasting, psychological symptoms.” (Briere and Scott) It’s reported that between 14% and 67% of children experience one kind of trauma. However many children experience more than one type of trauma.

This complex trauma can inform how a child grows up to relate to others, including his or her own children.

If you find that your childhood experiences had any sort of trauma, even if it was short-term, you may find healing and hope in Lifespan Integration Therapy, especially as a parent. There are many times you might react out of anger, fear, or unhealed trauma in your own life, and that’s something that can be healed.

Even if you have gone through counseling before and feel that you’ve dealt with childhood trauma, you might find that parenting challenges your sense of self and your attachment to your children. This can be a key indicator that Lifespan Integration Therapy can help.

How does lifespan integration therapy help?

When a child experiences a traumatic event, he may become disconnected from his sense of self to protect, hide, or cope with the emotional, physical, or mental stress that trauma can bring with it. Lifespan Integration Therapy’s primary tool is to repeatedly and sequentially go through the timeline of memories that a person has from his life, accompanied by a gentle, trained counselor.

The mind-body connection experiences gentle healing as the memories of the individual’s life are recognized as having occurred in the past and a new awareness is heightened: the individual is safe in the present. Some of this connection is restored because a person’s body is cleared of that harmful memory when he or she walks through the timeline of memories repeatedly and in sequential order.

Unlike talk therapy where a counselor guides the individual through deep, prolonged discussions of traumatic memories, Lifespan Integration Therapy is gentle and happens more naturally as the timeline is reviewed. It is almost like viewing a movie of one’s life until its memory surfaces a healed body-mind awareness rather than the childhood hurt.

Another tool of Lifespan Integration Therapy is a counselor’s coaching. A counselor can help you talk from a current point of view to the inner child who experienced the traumatic events. Under his or her guidance, a person learns how to say helpful things to the child he was when the trauma occurred.

Why might a parent pursue lifespan integration therapy?

Parents are people, just like everyone else. Not one parent got to take an instruction manual home with them from the hospital. Because parents have never parented before, they are learning and often make unintentional mistakes.

Sometimes, parents speak to a child the way they were spoken to when they were children. At other times, a parent may try to over-correct and parent differently than how he was parented to avoid making the mistakes that his parents made.

And still other times, a parent may struggle to feel close to a child or may find the same patterns cropping up repeatedly in how he relates to a particular child. These are all great reasons to seek out a counselor who is trained in Lifespan Integration Therapy.

When a child is secure in his caregiver’s love and relationship toward him, he is more likely to experience the world with curiosity, resilience, and the ability to appropriately develop trusting relationships with others. However, those children who are not secure in their attachment to a parent will usually struggle to trust and get along with others.

As you experience healing from your childhood trauma through a restored body-mind awareness, it can transform your ability to respond specifically to each of your children in the ways that each child needs. This can enhance your relationships with your children so that they can feel your love and acceptance in ways that they may have struggled to experience before.

In addition to helping you become a more responsive parent, which helps your child with their relationships, Lifespan Integration Therapy can target negative beliefs that you have about yourself, help you process grief, and integrate your neural pathways to begin rewiring your nervous system. That rewired nervous system can help you respond better to stress and regulate your emotions.

Many parents agree that stress and heightened emotions can impact how present they are as parents and how they respond or react to their children’s choices.

Can you give specific examples of how this therapy can impact my parenting?

Imagine that you have believed you’re always going to fail when you try something new. It may not be a conscious belief, but you rarely try new things  –  things you aren’t sure you’ll be good at  –  because at some point along the way, you were bullied in school when you tried something unfamiliar and failed.

This, of course, is an imaginary scenario. But if you were the child who was determined not to be bullied after that experience, you may have shut yourself off from the joy of trying new things for the rest of your childhood and into adulthood. As a parent, this can color how you teach your child, what you allow your child to try, and how you set boundaries for your child.

By experiencing Lifespan Integration Therapy, you have the chance to restore the neural pathways that connect your body to those memories of bullying. In the grand timeline of your life, you can gain freedom from the belief that you will always fail upon trying something new.

This freedom and healing start to change how you see your child’s attempts to try new things. It gives you the ability to not experience fear or worry when they fail after trying something new. You may be able to encourage them to try again whereas before you might unknowingly teach your child to give up and move on to something safer and more practiced.

While this may not be your story, it’s reflective of how a parent can find healing through Lifespan Integration Therapy and how that can give you the ability to respond rather than react to your child. That has a trickle-down effect on how your child relates to you and others throughout his or her life.

What steps can you take to pursue lifespan integration therapy for healing?

Reach out today! My name is Pamela Gallagher, MA LMHC. I am trained in Lifespan Integration Therapy and other therapies that can help you on the road to becoming a more responsive parent.

I see clients in person in Spokane and via Tele-mental Health sessions M-F, Tuesday evenings, and Saturday mornings.