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8. The best way to parent in a positive way is to take care of you. Make sure you get enough rest, good nutrition, and some time for yourself when possible. This might require you actually scheduling time for yourself to make it happen.
9. Have good parental boundaries. Don’t treat your child as a friend, confidante, or confess things to your child that are inappropriate. This becomes confusing for a child and interferes with parental discipline.
10. Don’t expect to be a perfect parent– there is no such thing! Everyone makes mistakes, even the most loving parents. If you do find yourself having continuous difficulty or feel yourself becoming out of control, please seek professional help. Patterns of abuse can be prevented by early intervention.
Stay tuned for next weeks Imagine Hope Counseling Group blog… Tips for creating better intimacy with your partner!
Written by Joleen Watson
Joleen Watson, MS, NCC, is a therapist at Imagine Hope Counseling Group. She enjoys doing marriage counseling, relationship counseling, couples counseling, and individual counseling. Imagine Hope also specializes in family, child and adolescent counseling and serves Indianapolis area including the surrounding areas of Carmel, Noblesville, Zionsville, Westfield, and Fishers.
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This week we have been discussing positive ways to parent your children. We have talked about boundaries, positive reinforcement, natural consequences, following through, and withdrawing from conflict. Here are two more:
5. Separate the behavior from the child. Make sure your child knows you love them no matter what they do. It is good to say, “That is not good behavior” vs. “You are a bad boy”. Kids personalize such comments and feel they are bad rather than their behavior.
6. Make sure discipline builds self-esteem rather than humiliates or embarrasses them. Carry out discipline that teaches them so they can learn from their mistakes.
7. Allow negative feelings in your child: for example sadness, frustration, disappointment. This helps them learn to cope with uncomfortable feelings. Teach them appropriate expressions of emotions and model this for them as well.
Tomorrow Joleen will give our final 3 tips.
Natalie Chandler, MA, LMHC is a therapist at Imagine Hope Counseling Group. Natalie enjoys doing marriage counseling, individual counseling, and couples counseling. We also specialize in family counseling, child, and adolescent counseling. Imagine Hope serves the Indianapolis area including the surrounding areas of Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville, Westfield, and Zionsville.
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Tags: Discipline for children
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Today we’re continuing our discussion on how to parent children in a positive way. Yesterday we discussed boundaries, positive reinforcement and natural consequences. Today we’ll discuss 2 more
3.Withdraw from Conflict- this is not going to be easy! It’s hard to hold your tongue when your child is talking back, but as a parent we have to model the behavior we want to see from our children. During a tantrum, make sure your child is safe & leave the room. Tell your child you will be in the next room if she/he wants to “try again”.
4.Be consistent and follow thru. Children respect parents who mean what they say and say what they mean. This is also how children build trust with a parent. If you say you’re going to do something and follow thru, then your child can trust that your word is golden.
Stay tuned for Thursday’s positive parenting tips!
Written by: Tamara Wilhelm MA, LMHC
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This week our blog series is on Positive Parenting tips. Parenting is a difficult and challenging responsibility. Here at Imagine Hope we help parents navigate their way through this roller coaster with the hopes that you will raise emotionally healthy children! Enjoy the tips this week!
1. Kids need and want boundaries and limits. It helps them feel safe and secure as well as helping them know what to expect. It is important to set and keep boundaries so kids know you will follow through with the expectations. This creates a trusting relationship.
2. A great way to change negative behavior into positive behavior is through positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is rewarding positive behavior instead of constantly focusing on negative behaviors. A great way to do this is a token system, a sticker trail, or a simple chart where rewards are granted after so many positive behaviors.
3. Allow natural consequences. By interfering when we don’t need to, we rob our children of the ability to learn from the consequences of their actions.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s tips!
Written by: Teri Claassen MSW, LCSW
Teri Claassen MSW, LCSW is a licensed therapist at Imagine Hope Counseling Group. Teri enjoys doing marriage counseling, individual counseling, couples and relationship counseling. Teri also does family counseling, child counseling, and adolescent counseling. Imagine Hope serves the Indianapolis area, including the surrounding areas of Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville, Zionsville, and Westfield.
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There are many signs of emotional affairs, if you know what to look for. While these signs can also be related to other life issues, as well as physical or sexual infidelity, there are some common themes to look for when dealing with an emotional affair:
- Hearing your partner talk about another person of the opposite sex more frequently and with more fondness than before. It could be a co-worker or old friend from high school from Facebook that your partner has been talking to on the phone. When you confront your partner about your discomfort with the situation, he/she may become very defensive and be adamant they are “just friends”.
- Your spouse or partner no longer confides in you intimately any longer. You may find out that he/she is sharing things of a personal or intimate nature with another person of the opposite sex, which are things that need to be reserved exclusively for your relationship.
- Stange phone behavior, including secretive phone calls or text messages. Your partner may hide the phone or hang up the phone when you walk in the room, or they may keep the face of the phone turned down when it is sitting in the open. Also, your partner may be unreachable by phone for long periods of time when out of the house, and may fail to promptly return text messages or phone calls when they didn’t used to do that in the past. He/she may refuse to answer the phone when they are with their “friend”.
- Your partner may be working later than usual, more often than usual, with no specific changes to his/her job title. Also, your partner may be going out more frequently without you, wants to spend more time away from you, and could be secretive or evasive when sharing where he/she is.
- Your partner may be overly flirtatious when around a certain “friend”, speaking to them the way you remember he/she did with you when you first started dating. Your partner may also act jealous when he hears of the other person going on dates, or when they spend time with members of the opposite sex.
- You notice your partner keeping more secrets from you, and feel them avoiding intimacy with you. You find out that another person of the opposite sex seems to know more about him/her than you do lately.
These are only a few of the signs to look for with emotional affairs. For more information, feel free to contact us at Imagine Hope Counseling! Check back next week for our new blog topic… 10 Tips for Positive Parenting.
Written by: Joleen Watson, MS, NCC
Joleen Watson, MS, NCC, is a therapist at Imagine Hope Counseling Group. She enjoys doing marriage counseling, relationship counseling, couples counseling, and individual counseling. Imagine Hope also specializes in family, child and adolescent counseling and serves Indianapolis area including the surrounding areas of Carmel, Noblesville, Zionsville, Westfield, and Fishers.
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Once you have identified that you are in an emotional affair or you have been caught in an emotional affair, there is a specific reconstruction process to follow to heal your relationship.
These are the first 5 things to do once the initial disclosure has come out:
1. Seek IMMEDIATE help from a profession. The longer you wait the harder the healing process is. Don’t expect that you and your partner can navigate your own way through this. You are too emotionally involved to stay focused.
2. The person you had the emotional affair with needs to be gone. Completely cutoff contact.
3.Both of you must make a commitment to the long road of healing for it to work.
4.Full disclosure of things such as who it was with, what happened, when, how long, where, and that it ended are important. No new details can come up after this point. Otherwise you will start back from square one.
5. Look at the causes that lead up to the affair.
Once these first steps are taken then you can start the road to recovery. These steps all happen simultaneously, and must continue over a significant period of time to be effective.
1. Rebuild safety in the relationship
2. Rebuild trust
3.Begin the forgiveness process
4. Manage triggers as they arise
This is a difficult yet powerful process to go though. Remember relationships can heal after and affair- there is HOPE!
Written by: Teri Claassen MSW, LCSW
Teri Claassen MSW, LCSW is a licensed therapist at Imagine Hope Counseling Group. Teri enjoys doing marriage counseling, individual counseling, couples and relationship counseling. Teri also does family counseling, child counseling, and adolescent counseling. Imagine Hope serves the Indianapolis area, including the surrounding areas of Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville, Zionsville, and Westfield.
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Harry and Sally both worked at Eli Lilly. They were on the IT team together and worked on several projects as a great team. They started going out to lunch to talk shop. One day Harry was very upset about a fight he and his wife had the night before and decided to get some advice from Sally. Sally then shared her struggles in her marriage with her husband. Seem pretty innocent? Let’s continue…
The next day they go out to lunch together and eventually start talking about their relationships again. They both listen intently and support the other. This becomes a routine and before long they are both looking forward to talking to each other. They exchange email addresses and eventually cell phone numbers.
They both begin sharing their hurts, concerns, and conflicts with each other. They feel the gap between them and their spouses growing larger and larger as they grow closer and closer. Sally even feels herself getting more excited to tell Harry when good things happen to her than she ever felt with her husband. He is her best friend. They begin emailing and texting throughout the day. Sally has finally admitted to herself that she is even sexually attracted to Harry. She would just DIE if her husband found out she is feeling this way. Harry thinks to himself, “What harm is this? It’s not like we are having sex or anything.”
Yes, Harry and Sally are not having physical intimacy but they are being emotionally intimate. THIS is an emotional affair.
Natalie Chandler, MA, LMHC is a therapist at Imagine Hope Counseling Group. Natalie enjoys doing marriage counseling, individual counseling, and couples counseling. We also specialize in family counseling, child, and adolescent counseling. Imagine Hope serves the Indianapolis area including the surrounding areas of Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville, Westfield, and Zionsville.
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In this week’s blog series, Imagine Hope is going to discuss Emotional Affairs. It’s a issue we see happening more & more often, and throughout the week, we’ll discuss various aspects of an emotional affair, along with how to heal from one.
How do you know if you’re caught up in an emotional affair? Today we’re going to talk about what an emotional affair looks like. If you find yourself doing any of the following, then you might be involved in an emotional affair. Here are some characteristics:
- sharing information with a member of the opposite sex that you don’t with your own spouse
- looking forward to talking/texting/emailing this person
- convincing yourself or others (friends, family) that this person is “just a friend”
- noticing yourself becoming physically or sexually attracted to this person after some time
- noticing sexual tension between you and this new person, but not necessarily acknowledging it
- keeping this person a “secret” from your spouse, or keeping your conversations with this person “secret” from your spouse
- believing that this new person “understands” you better than your spouse
- you would be embarrassed if your spouse were to meet this person, or you actively keep them from crossing paths
If any of the above sound familiar, then you might be involved in an emotional affair. According to MSNBC 50% of all emotional affairs lead to physical affairs. Stay tuned to learn more about emotional affairs, and as we go thru the healing process.
Written by: Tamara Wilhelm MA, LMHC
*Tamara enjoys doing marriage counseling, individual counseling, & couples counseling at Imagine Hope. We also specialize in family counseling, child & adolescent counseling. Imagine Hope serves the Indianapolis area, including the surrounding areas of Carmel, Noblesville, Zionsville, Westfield & Fishers.
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Imagine Hope BlogosphereBlogs by Imagine Hope Counselors
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Teri Claassen's Blog
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Grief Counseling, Codependency, Marriage/Couples Counseling, Individual Counseling, Sexual Addiction, Group Counseling.
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Natalie Chandler's Blog
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Grief Counseling, Codependency, Marriage/Couples Counseling, Individual Counseling, Sexual Addiction, Group Counseling.
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Joleen Watson's Blog
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Grief Counseling, Codependency, Marriage/Couples Counseling, Individual Counseling, Sexual Addiction, Group Counseling.
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Tamara Wilhelm's Blog
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Grief Counseling, Codependency, Marriage/Couples Counseling, Individual Counseling, Sexual Addiction, Group Counseling.
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