Category: Emotional Regulation
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Trauma Anniversaries in a Changing World
Originally published in the Climate Psychology Alliance-North America blog Spring has sprung early again this year in Northern California. And with temperatures at a record setting 90 degrees last week, it appears to be ending early too. It took my New York body a long time to adjust to California’s Mediterranean climate when I first…
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Teaching the Love of Plants: Nature Therapy with Children
Originally published in the Climate Psychology Alliance-North America blog By Jenni Silverstein, LCSW, Santa Rosa, California My new “office” is a garden hidden behind a berm at a therapeutic farm. The farm rescues animals and brings children from foster and group homes to tend them. Each creature comes with its own story of being saved from…
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Love and Grief in the Redwoods
A very wise midwife once told me, “you cannot vibrate in love and fear at the same time.”* I pondered this for a long time, believing it made sense, but not embodying it. Until one evening years later, when I had a profound experience in my first garden. I had been practicing a form of…
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Peekaboo
Ed Tronick’s Mutual Regulation Model describes the “dynamic organization of the behavioral communicative system” between a child and adult, “which regulates behavior moment by moment and shapes development over time” (Tronick p56). From this perspective, Dani’s development is shaped by an increasing capacity to comprehend my actions and intentions in any given moment, and to…
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The Meaning of Crawling
During my midwifery training, we considered a baby’s 9-month birthday to be the end of a “second gestation”, a time of major transition in the mother-child relationship. Pregnancy and birth were valuable metaphors to normalize the intensity of change many mothers experience around this time. As a baby begins to move outwards into the world,…
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The New Dance: Developmental Changes in Emotional Regulation
I always knew 3-months was a major developmental marker, yet I have been blown away by Dani recently. It is as though the moment she began holding her head up, she became a whole new person. She is more alert and aware of her environment, more interactive, and I am seeing the first hints of her…
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“Emotional Sponges”: Rupture and Repair
“Babies are emotional sponges.” I can’t remember when I first heard that said, but it rings so true. The words we currently say to Dani are just jumble of sounds and rhythm, yet we are communicating with her constantly. We express our emotional state non-verbally by tone, facial expression, posture, movement, touch and the capacity…
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“The Witching Hour” – Crying, Colic and Stress
Danica had her two month check-up yesterday; she is blessedly healthy and well. My wife asked the Doctor about Dani’s routine crying spell at 7pm every evening. It has been like clockwork for the past month or so. We call it her Witching Hour. Some nights there’s just mild fussiness and she is easily soothed…