Helping families and their children to be more psychologically flexible and “resilient”

I recently had a request from a loving parent to help her child become more “resilient”.

We then explored “psychological flexibility” as possibly one way to achieve this.

So psychological flexibility involves six core processes.

1. The ability to be present rather than too much past and future orientated.

2. The ability to have a healthy distance from our thoughts, beliefs, values, and feelings when required.

3. The ability to emotionally accept the “unfixable”, or emotionally accept what is IS right now.

4. The ability to ground in the “observing mind” rather than just in our “thinking and feeling minds”.

5. The ability to understand self, and fully accept self and our values.

6. The ability to live life true to self and our values, but still able to reconcile that with the outside world for workability. 

Got them to rate each process out of 10.   

Developing “psychological flexibility” is not an easy nor a short process.

The whole family will need to be involved and not just the child.