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When Your Only Child Becomes Your Oldest Child

November 27, 2017 By Ben Nash Leave a Comment

I’m sitting here staring at my darling baby girl who was born a few months ago and feeling the paradigm shift that I am going through emotionally. Since entering the world I have felt a near constant mix of euphoric joy, overwhelming love, and heavy grief. I didn’t understand the grief part until I had left the hospital and entered back into my “normal” life at home with my husband and our 2 1/2 year old son. It then began to sink in—we now had to create a new normal that includes the life we had just welcomed into our family. But still I ached and wondered why I felt so heavy. As the hours and days passed I was met with questions from my son about nursing, why baby Darcy cries, and I began to watch my loving and observant boy take in the new normal we were entering into in which he was no longer the center of attention. When he asked me to play with him I had to tell him I would after I finished nursing Darcy. When he wanted to climb all over me in bed I had to tell him to be careful because I was still healing from having baby Darcy. The heaviness surrounds my heart as it blends ever so delicately with the joy I am also experiencing on a daily basis as I embrace having two beautiful and healthy children.

The loss in the story is that of my son’s reality of no longer having our sole attention. My thoughts are now split between him and Darcy and will be forevermore. And what a wonderful gift for him as he continues to grow and thrive in the world. He has a partner now, someone who will always be there and understand where they both came from. Someone who will be there in the world long after his father and I will be to support him and love him and vice versa. I am so cognizant of the importance of their relationship as siblings and also of how that relationship can go awry due to many factors including parenting. Even at this early stage, I deeply honor and respect the gift we are giving him in his sister.

In studying family behavior and patterns both in my professional life and personal life I have developed a deep understanding of what can go wrong in the sibling relationship and it most often has little to do with the kids themselves and everything to do with parenting and the marriage at the core of any family. Siblings fight. This is not only a reality but an important part of learning to engage with and accept differences. But as our children grow older it is important that their relationship is fostered as being what will carry them forward through life and tether them to their family of origin.

Now that brings me to the importance of parenting and the people behind these little beings. If a marriage is suffering, broken, or toxic, so too will be the sibling relationship. Children are far more likely to take out repressed anger on one another than on a parent whom they may fear will abandon them. If children feel they are more important than the parents’ bond to each other and feel that they can wedge themselves in between and claim mommy or daddy as their own this will lead to a fractured sibling bond due to the lack of emphasis on its importance.

Family therapy doesn’t just treat one individual or one problem, it treats the system as a whole. Families come in all shapes and sizes. What matters the most is how the family engages and interacts with one another. There is an inherent misunderstanding that couples therapy is meant to avoid divorce. While in many cases that is true, there are plenty of other cases where couples therapy is meant to help people move forward in learning how to co-parent and how to define a new, but equally healthy, balance in their relationship and how they engage with each other and their children in that balance.

Filed Under: Blog, Family Therapy, Parenting, Psychotherapy, Relationship Issues, Wellness

Let the Weeds Grow

November 27, 2017 By Katie Nash, LCSW Leave a Comment

Does your to-do list look something like this most days?

  • Meal plan for the week
  • Grocery shop
  • Finish laundry
  • Prepare kids for the week of school/daycare/babysitter/etc.
  • Mow the lawn
  • Fall clean up/leaf blowing
  • Finish weeding flower beds
  • Make vet appointment for the dog
  • Send emails that are waiting in drafts at work
  • Dentist appointments for family
  • Organize summer clothes and store for winter

This list could go on, and on, and on. Yours might look a little different and you may have a different stress threshold than someone else. But the point remains—most people are overbooked, overwhelmed, and over tired. Especially when they are raising children. We exist in a culture that puts emphasis on perfection and makes it nearly impossible to achieve. We live in a culture that fosters comparing ourselves to others whether it be how much money we make, how smart our children are, or how tidy our yards are. We fill our homes with quotes that are meant to remind us to slow down, breathe, enjoy the little things, but still get buried with feelings of not being good enough or worthy enough.

The first thing I do when I get a patient who is suffocating by their to-do lists and feelings of low self worth is help them to stop. Just stop. You see that list above? What is missing from it? How about these things…

Self-care
Family-time
Fresh-air
Playtime

I know, I know, THERE’S NO TIME! But the thing is, we all have to make time because the other stuff just doesn’t matter if we aren’t checking off those boxes that feed our souls and nourish our relationships. I have to remind myself of this as much as anyone else does which is why this post is titled what it is. This summer after having a child, being away from work but still working at home to maintain my business, and having all of those other nasty to-dos build up week after week I finally had to make a decision. I decided to let the weeds grow. Because in order to take care of myself, be present for my husband, children, and friends and family, something had to give. So my house isn’t as tidy as I would like it to be and my yard isn’t going to win any green thumb awards. But my kids are happy, healthy, and we are moving through this season as a family with as much grace as we can.

Filed Under: Anxiety, Blog, Family Therapy, Parenting, Psychotherapy, Stress, Wellness Tagged With: anxiety, parenting, stress, therapy

Newtown Family Therapy Now Accepting Insurance For Psychotherapy

May 15, 2017 By Ben Nash Leave a Comment

Newtown Family Therapy Now Accepting Insurance For Psychotherapy

Newtown Family Therapy is now accepting the following insurance providers for our in-office psychotherapy:

  • Husky Medicaid
  • Anthem Blue Cross & BlueShield

Filed Under: Blog, Psychotherapy Tagged With: insurance, psychotherapy

Newtown Family Therapy & Wellness Featured in the Newtown Bee

May 15, 2017 By Katie Nash, LCSW Leave a Comment

Newtown Family Therapy & Wellness Featured in the Newtown Bee

Newtown Family Therapy & Wellness was recently featured in the Newtown Bee. The article covers the news about our additional services (acupuncture and massage therapy) as well as our expanded space. You can read the full article here:
Newtown Family Therapy & Wellness Broadening Services In Expanded Space.

Filed Under: Acupuncture, Blog, Family Therapy, Massage Therapy, Online Therapy, Psychotherapy, Wellness Tagged With: acupuncture, massage therapy, online therapy, psychotherapy, therapy

How Do We Deal With Grief?

May 7, 2017 By Rebecca Velasquez, LCSW Leave a Comment

How Do We Deal With Grief?

I think about my 99 year old grandmother who passed away a year and a half ago. She and I had a deep love for each other and would always joke that we were kindred spirits. I could see the spirit that was beyond her eyes- ageless and genderless. (If anything, inside she was an 11 boy considering the practical jokes she played!) I imagined the grief would overcome me and be endless and that was not the case. When she passed away, I kept reading Rumi’s poem The Guesthouse visualizing grief as a visitor knocking at the door. This guest would knock randomly and unexpectedly too, as grief often comes in waves. I could choose to avoid my guest but he would just knock louder until I would let him in. So I welcomed him and surrendered fully to the experience of grief. Through that experience, I awakened to the truth that pure love exists beyond time and space and that my grandmother now actually lived within me. Little things that I noticed that she would do, I caught myself doing, like making up songs to sing and bringing humor more fully into life…the best parts of her were within me. When I really grasped that not only in my head but in my heart, the grief disappeared. She’s as close to me as my own beating heart. So if this is a time of grief for you on any level, how can you allow yourself to let go into the grief and trust the process of healing? Perhaps its giving yourself 30 minutes or an hour per day to really be present to the grief. What qualities of your loved one can you now see in yourself? How can you channel that grief energy into a way to honor their life?

Filed Under: Blog, Family Therapy, Grief, Psychotherapy, Stress Tagged With: depression, grief, stress, therapy

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Recent Blog Posts

  • But, Why?
  • When Your Only Child Becomes Your Oldest Child
  • Let the Weeds Grow
  • Newtown Family Therapy Now Accepting Insurance For Psychotherapy
  • Newtown Family Therapy & Wellness Featured in the Newtown Bee

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