The Program
Caregiver Burnout
The joys and responsibilities of caring for a child with complex needs often come with a high degree of emotional, physical and mental fatigue. What’s important is how we react to this fatigue.
In this session you will:
- Understand what burnout is and where it comes from
- Distinguish the physical and psychological effects of constant stress
- Understand your personal experience of burnout
- Reflect on your experience following your child’s diagnosis and through the challenges you face as a caregiver
Managing Stress
While everyone experiences stress, we all handle it differently. Stress management is not “one size fits all.” Different strategies work for different people – and the same strategy may not always work for you. The good news is, there are many helpful approaches to choose from.
In this session, you will:
- Understand the foundations of stress management
- Learn different coping strategies to manage your day-to-day stress
- Distinguish between everyday stress and more long-term challenges
- Discover a range of community resources
Helpful Thinking
Learning to differentiate between what we are thinking, feeling, and doing can help us understand ourselves and manage our reaction to what is going on around us. However, we also need to understand how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours can work off of each other – this often involves slowing down and examining each of these components in response to a given situation.
In this session, you will:
- Distinguish between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours
- Understand how thoughts, feelings, and behaviours affect each other
- Identify the different thinking traps that our brains can fall into
Rewriting Our Stories
We can change the way we feel about ourselves by changing how we talk to ourselves. Throughout the program you will work on identifying the thoughts and patterns of thinking that can be unhelpful. The next step is to practice challenging these thoughts so that we can slowly change our self-talk. One way of doing this is to take on an attitude of self-compassion when you are having a hard time.
In this session, you will:
- Understand how you can use different questions to “put your thoughts on trial”
- Practice taking a more self-compassionate perspective towards your challenges
- Practice refocusing on your strengths and resources
Problem-Solving
We can easily get locked into our automatic ways of thinking when faced with challenges – which means we don’t always see all the solutions that are available to us. When it comes to problem solving, a helpful first step may be to identify what your natural style(s) of thinking might be in the first place. By understanding your default thinking style and learning about other perspectives that are available to you, you can start to build your flexibility – learning to tackle a problem from multiple angles and come up with alternate possible solutions.
In this session, you will:
- Identify the thinking style(s) that feel(s) most natural to you
- Practice problem-solving with the group using a case study
- Have learned more about flexible problem-solving using a variety of thinking styles
Assertive Communication
You will practice skills that can help put our solutions into actions. We will discuss and practice assertive communication, which is a great tool to advocate for yourself and your needs without behaving passively or aggressively. We will also discuss tips that will assist you with conflict resolution, which can be a helpful skill with interpersonal problem-solving.
In this session, you will:
- Learn more about what it means to communicate assertively
- Practice assertive communication
- Identify the “social assumptions” by which many of us live
- Challenge these learned assumptions from a more confident perspective
- Learn tips for conflict resolution