Coaching practices for Meaning Centered Therapy as a Parent

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Meaning Centered Therapy as a Parent, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I keep waiting to feel like life means something again before I do anything, and the waiting just deepens the emptiness
  • So much has been stripped away that I feel like a passive recipient of my own life, and I miss the feeling of making something
  • My child can’t seem to name what they’re feeling
  • My body can’t do what it used to, so I keep grieving everything I can no longer go and accomplish
  • Even when I sit down to play with my kid I catch myself steering it

Practices that may help

  1. Meaning-Centered Therapy, Made Practical
    Meaning-centered therapy, developed by William Breitbart for patients with serious illness, holds that humans can choose an attitude toward unavoidable suffering and that connecting to sources of meaning — heritage, relationships, creative engagement — reliably reduces despair even when circumstances cannot change. Clinical trials in palliative care populations show it reduces hopelessness and improves spiritual well-being.
  2. Treat meaning as a responsibility, not a feeling
    Meaning is not something that happens to you — it is something you are responsible for creating.
    Meaning-Centered Therapy, Made Practical
  3. Create something that expresses your unique presence
    Engagement in creative work — making, teaching, building — is a direct route to felt meaning.
    Meaning-Centered Therapy, Made Practical
  4. Build mindsight by reflecting inner experience
    Describe your own inner experience in everyday conversation to build the child’s "mind-seeing" capacity.
    The Whole-Brain Child (Siegel & Bryson)
  5. Receive meaning through beauty, love, and nature
    Meaning flows not only from what you do but from what you allow yourself to fully receive.
    Meaning-Centered Therapy, Made Practical
  6. Follow the child’s lead completely during special time
    Let the child decide what you do, how long you stay, and when you move on.
    Special Time (Lawrence Cohen — Playful Parenting)
  7. Choose your attitude toward unavoidable suffering
    When you cannot change your circumstances, the stance you take toward them is itself a form of meaning.
    Meaning-Centered Therapy, Made Practical
  8. Self-applied limited reparenting
    Treat the vulnerable child mode in yourself with the care and limits that childhood should have provided.
    Schema Therapy: Healing Early Maladaptive Beliefs
  9. Allowing the "divine therapy" — psychological healing through practice
    Expect that regular centering prayer surfaces buried emotional material, and allow it.
    Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating
  10. Use special time to fill the connection cup before problems escalate
    A proactive ten-minute connection recharge can prevent an afternoon of battles.
    Special Time (Lawrence Cohen — Playful Parenting)

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