Welcome to restorative wellbeing book club. In this series of posts I want to share with you my thoughts on some of the many books I have read of the past 7 years of my healing journey, to help guide you to what sources will help fill you will the motivation and knowledge you need to restore your wellbeing and live your life filled with joy and health.
Today I want to share with you a book I have only recently finnshished reading: ‘The Whole-brain Child: 12 Proven Strategies to Nutrue Your Childs Developing Mind’ by Dr. Tina Payne Bryson and Dr. Daniel Siegel
Although essentially a parenting book, I really wanted to include this book, in this series because I strongly feel a healthy relationship with your children is, for all parents at least, a fundamental in living a life with joy and health. And as a parent of two girls, this has very much been at the forefront of my daily life healing practice.
For those who are not parents, never intend to be parents and don’t have young children in their lives on a daily bases…. there are still some powerful chapters that talk, about healing and learning from our own childhood traumas that I feel would be impactful on other day to day relationships; the book as a whole though, is unlikely to be worth your reading time. There are many more books out there that covers this subject without the parenting aspect.
As a parent however and to all the other parents out there, I honestly with I had found this booker sooner in my parenting journey. I would recommend it to every parent I know. Already less than a month after finishing the book I feel the relationship between myself and my eldest daughter has healed dramatically, after our connection was damaged from my bout with pre-natal depression. We now have really deep connection talks about anything and everything, as well as the house being filled with much more laughter, singing, dancing, cuddles and words of affection than it had been for the past 2 years.
Although we were very close for most of her life, pre-natal depression took away all of my confidence as a mother. I felt stressed and anxious about every little decision I made as a mother. I was getting sensory over-load to every little thing, making me ratty and tense. I completely forgot how to relax and play.
This book really helped me to learn how to enjoy being a mother again, but not just by telling me what I should be doing, or telling me what my kids needed; I knew that, but there was a block stopping me from actually doing what was needed. And if anything being told what I should be doing and not being able to get into the emotional sate to do it made me feel worse….
……but my favourite thing about this book was how it talked about the science behind how a childs brain worked, how they make connections in childhood, and how to help them develop emotional intelligence AND how you can do the same for yourself.
a lot of these techniques weren’t completely new to me, there is a lot of aspects of mindfulness, however having so much of the science, explained so beautifully simply ironically really helped me make the connections between my logical and emotional brains to put it all into practice.