My Nonprofit Reviews

 Hello everyone!
I am a certified Hand in Hand parenting instructor. I have been involved with Hand in Hand since 2016 and have experienced how the genuine act of simply listening to a child can shift the whole dynamic of a relationship.

I am currently being trained by EFTuniverse to become an EFT practitioner and I have a university degree in business administration. My background is in the banking & insurance industry and in the field of education where good communication, problem-solving skills and the ability to handle complaints are required. As a parent though, I was feeling totally inadequate handling my son`s passionate feelings about tiny, little, mundane things throughout the whole day!

My son was two-years-old when I started using the listening tools, and I was a severely sleep-deprived mum, feeling lost parenting through his frequent night waking, unending cries, aggressive and uncooperative behavior. I had an unplanned Cesarean section following 48 hours of active labor, including many hours of pushing. My son was full of feelings of frustration, fear, powerlessness, and loss of control caused by hours of unproductive labor. He was most of the time inconsolable when he cried.

His entrance to our world wasn't smooth, his whole nervous system was alerted for days during the labor and I wasn't available emotionally throughout the entire labor. In fact, I myself was reliving the fears of my own birth experience and feeling totally overwhelmed though I had prepared myself for the whole transition! Thus our journey of healing with listening tools has taken place gradually and in the beginning, it seemed like we didn't make much progress. Having inherited family trauma made it also harder to move forward with the listening tools and thus help my son process the hurt caused by his birth experience.

As a birth traumatized baby he very often showed symptoms of stress, thus would cry a lot, having several long daily crying spells, during which he was utterly inconsolable. The listening tools have helped me to hold space in those situations and listen non-judgementally through countless times even in the middle of the night or in public places when it seemed it could not be possible. I am very much proud of myself that I could help my son break free of all emotional obstacles, inherited family patterns and thus becoming part of the solution or healing process in his life.

After many countless, ongoing, unending, messy, and loud stay listening sessions, painfully long `Setting limit` sessions turning into staylistening sessions, tons of playlistening sessions ( in form of power-reversal games, roughhousing, separation games, regression play, and so forth ) we would see him again falling into the same old behavioral patterns caught up in fear, despair, frustration, and fight-flight response as if his life was in danger..

Till recently he kept initiating games in which he was pretending to be a newborn baby and loved to be held, adored, cherished and told the doctors what to do to regain his power back. This kind of regression play has helped him to process the experience of the interruption during the important bonding time after birth. To my amazement, they have helped me too to renegotiate and transform the break in the bond that occurred after the birth. This play-based approach helped us both to regain a sense of control, reshape/rewrite our birth story, integrating it with our present.  

By being present, listening attentively, and setting loving boundaries, I have helped my son sleep through the night after years of sleep deprivation.. By honoring, acknowledging, and listening to his feelings of fear and frustration, I have created a safe space for his stuck emotions to release, thus helping him also to move beyond aggression.

It took me a while to figure out that it mattered enormously to keep the balance between those heavy staylistening sessions and playlistening & special time. He seems to know intuitively how to create a therapeutic play or game for himself to conquer his fears and hurts. And it wasn`t until last year that I learned following his lead, being sensitive to his reactions to protect the delicate balance between feelings of fear and safety while playing.

I am ever grateful to Paty and everyone who has contributed along the way to HIH. I love the generous view of our approach that children are good and that they communicate through their challenging behavior to connect. This simple yet very powerful core belief of HIH alters the facts in our life thus paving the way for the healing process within families. The quality of our interactions, a simple act of listening to our child´s needs, a simple limit set lovingly, waves of laughter we follow while playing are nurturing and thus creating health in the real world every day.


This very positive intention of focusing on connection and holding the generous view of our children's behavior { though very intangible) is a powerful form of „epigenetic medicine“ for challenging and difficult behaviors, creating real tangible changes in our relationships with our significant ones.


Dawson Church , author of The Genie In Your Genes, desrcibes the loving parenting as “epigenetic therapy“ HIH parenting by Connection Approach is a epigenetic therapy, dealing with the real roots of our children's behaviors not with the behavior itself or the symptoms on the
surface.

Warmly,


Ebru