Tips From the Couch by Merle Yost, LMFT

Based on 25 years of helping to repair childhood wounds, this an overview of important perspectives and tasks for raising healthy, independent adults.

Description: Based on 25 years of helping repair childhood wounds, this an overview of important perspectives to and tasks for raising healthy independent adults.

Excerpt:

Over 25 years, while on both sides of the couch, I have learned a lot about what works and does not work when it comes to parenting. There are some universal truths about what it takes to successfully navigate the land-mines and potholes of childhood so that a child can grow into adulthood and successfully launch. The following tips are some of what I have gleamed form all of the men and women who have entrusted me with their pain and joy.

The two jobs of childhood

From the moment babies arrive in the world, they have two jobs; job one is to download the love of their parents. That will allow them to love and be loved, which is what we call attachment. If a child does not feel the unconditional love of the parent, then he will be unable to feel genuine love from anyone later on. The parent-child bond is thus an essential foundation for being able to love and be loved as an adult. 

The second job is to make sense of the world. From that first smack on the rear and opening of the eyes, the infant is overwhelmed with information. They are tasked with organizing and bringing order to all of the information that suddenly floods in.  

How we make sense out of what happens to us, from those very first moments of life through childhood, creates the foundation for how we will experience the world. One of the major problems is that babies and children often reach grand conclusions about what all of this means, both about them and the world, before they have sufficient data to make sense out of it and put the information into context. Those grand conclusions shape their reality and the lens they look through to understand what is happening throughout the rest of their lives.