Announcing a new training for therapists: Offer healing to your clients with a parent with BPD
Growing Ourselves Whole
a therapy group for people with a parent with Borderline Personality Disorder
Are you a therapist wondering how best to support your clients who were raised by a parent with BPD? Are your clients with this chronic developmental wounding stuck in negative beliefs that they internalized in childhood? This may show up as addictive behavior, high emotional volatility, numbing, depression, unstable relationships, among other possibilities.
Growing Ourselves Whole is a 10-week therapy group for adults with a parent with Borderline Personality Disorder. The group utilizes multiple modalities and offers clients vital healing, allowing them to break through stuck patterns, and to begin to shed limiting beliefs about themselves and the world. The group is an important step in the process of interrupting intergenerational trauma.
Thriving is possible!
There is something existentially threatening about thriving for someone with this wounding. In order to thrive, the adult must break subconscious contracts that they made early on with their parent in order to survive. A primary figure for the child, the parent gave them life, and taught them about the world. At the same time, the parent communicated that the child must attune to, and be in service to the parent’s needs, not to make the parent jealous, not to have needs or wants of their own. Hence, thriving goes directly counter to the adult child’s deepest survival conditioning.
However, thriving is possible, as is coming home to self, body and community. Clients can dissolve their sense of isolation in a circle of others who share aspects of their history. Diverse group members find resonance with others who have survived similar challenges and cheer each other on for starting to break old contracts.
Techniques utilized in group include: psychoeducation, art therapy, emotional regulation skills, somatic resources, guided visualizations, experiential experiments, brainstorming activities, group debriefs. Sharing happens in many configurations so participants build safety and connections with the therapist and with peers in the group.
The group is grounded in mindfulness, somatic and attachment-based modalities such as: Hakomi, (somatic and mindfulness based psychotherapy), Relational Somatic Healing, Drama Therapy, Transpersonal Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and energy healing practices.
“This group helped me find a peace my ancestors couldn’t envision.”
-LN participant of Growing Ourselves Whole
Each of the 10 weeks has a theme pertaining to the wounding and challenges unique to this population. Themes include: home, boundaries, knowing what we want, emotional volatility, the parent’s history, the role of cultural factors, how BPD wounding/patterns affect clients’ current life, (especially around attachment and intimacy), resourcing, archetypes of people with BPD patterns.
Clients are invited to study their experience in group and to keep a journal. Homework exercises are offered to support integration of new insights. A google doc is used throughout the ten weeks, which participants can access between sessions.
Group is the ideal healing modality for people with this developmental wounding. Participants report experiencing an end to the sense of isolation and invalidation experienced in childhood. They experience a sense of liberation as they start to untangle the layers of shame and blame placed on them by their parent with BPD. The friendships formed in the groups carry out into daily life and many groups choose to continue to meet in a peer-led format after the 10-week group ends.
Your groups can be held virtually or in person.
The upcoming training for therapists to lead Growing Ourselves Whole therapy groups will be virtual and is open to licensed psychotherapists.
Your training will include:
Content
- The 10-week curriculum
- Handouts to distribute to participants
- Scripts for guided visualizations
- Suggestions for weekly follow-up emails
- Psycheducational tools about nervous system regulation, about neurology, and about BPD
Skills~ support your growth as a therapist
- Training in the modalities particular to leading each of the 10 weeks
- Guidance for leading each week’s experiential section
- Support for you as leader of a group with wounding around a parental figure
Techniques utilized in Growing Ourselves Whole:
“Current neuroscience research has confirmed the basis for many foundational aspects of Hakomi, including the effectiveness of mindfulness, loving presence, empathic attunement, limbic resonance, and memory reconsolidation, As we work with core developmental trauma, Hakomi provides what Ron Kurtz called the “missing experience”, a deep and transformational process for the client. This profoundly moving experience heals developmental trauma by rewiring neural pathways and reconsolidating implicit memories in ways that can support the individual to open to new and more satisfying experiences.”
Why mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a practice of observation without judgment and is essential to the work of shifting to a more loving relationship with oneself.
Why drama therapy?
As an active, experiential approach, Drama Therapy allows you to explore dynamics in a lived way in present time.
Why relational therapy?
Since trauma happens in relationship, a deeply embodied, relational and present therapist can support a deeper level of healing. Clients receive contact in the here and now in new and reparative ways.
Why body-based or “somatic” psychotherapy?
Clients are invited to study their physical experience in the moment through mindfulness, somatic practices and experiential experiments. Deep and lasting change is possible when there is an embodied experience with dual awareness. Clients’ capacity for self-regulation is increased.
past participants wanted to share these thoughts:
This group helped me find a peace my ancestors couldn’t envision.
meet the founder of Growing Ourselves Whole
Pamela Rosin, MFT (she/her) helps clients move toward a sense of belonging, grounding, freedom and comfort in their own skin. A Certified Hakomi Therapist, Pamela draws on a professional acting background, a decade as a bodyworker, and years of teaching Shakespeare in prison.
As a teacher, Pamela draws from a multitude of experience in teaching arenas including: restorative yoga classes and workshops, self care coaching, teaching English abroad, designing and leading theater workshops.
A graduate of the Integral Counseling Psychology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Pamela’s therapeutic orientation has been influenced by the Eastern/Western blend provided at CIIS, traditional Freudian, psychodynamic, and transpersonal approaches, and by the many wise mentors and guides with whom she has traveled.
In her body-oriented, experiential psychotherapy practice, she specializes in supporting people with a parent with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Pamela is a seasoned guide, dedicated to healing this wounding in herself and others. She has led Growing Ourselves Whole numerous times over the past few years.
Click for Pamela’s therapy practice website
Interested in upcoming trainings for therapists to lead Growing Ourselves Whole groups?