Friday afternoon, dog walked, lunch eaten, CNN bulltins on the results in Georgia turned off and now focussing on work for MPCP. It is actually a pleasure, though, to go through the evaluations from the last MBCT for adoptive parents entitled 'Caring For Me, Caring For You'.
Just a few of the many positive comments we received:
" I really enjoyed the gentle style of teaching and felt safe knowing that other parents were adopters - there was a sense of understanding present before we even began to get to know each other."
"I love the way the course was delivered. With kindness, openness an understanding of people’s experiences. Facilitative and non-preachy."
"...it’s reinforcing that self-care and noticing those special moments doesn’t have to take ages - just 15-30 minutes a day makes a difference and little things can be hugh."
At MPCP, we are really grateful to Adoption West for the opprtunity to work with adoptive parents. Modern adoption is a extremely challenging amd widely misunderstood. Older children are being placed, many of whom have complex edcuational and emotional needs; contact plans with birth family members have to be honoured; universal and specialised 'support' services are under resourced. And added to all this, there is now Covid 19. We believe (and now have evidence to support our contention) that mindfulness courses like this should be made available to all adoptive parents who wish to attend them. They are caring for our most vulnerable children and we owe them this.
In the conclusion of my report, I have written the following:
'Whilst the primary focus of adoption support social workers and therapeutic interventions is, of course, on the child, MBCT is an intervention that recognises and ‘honours’ the whole person: the parent who is dealing with personal issues and challenges unrelated to and in addition to the tasks of parenting. Many of these challenges are likely to be outside the awareness of the adoption professionals supporting them, if indeed they are receiving support at all. This attention to the wider experiential world of the parent is, we believe, essential for the quality of the psychological conditions in which adopted children live'.