Lighthouse Parenting Program
Lighthouse Training Program
Mentalization Based Treatment (MBT) improves social and emotional capacities by strengthening a person’s capacity to make sense of mental states while relating to others. The Lighthouse© Parenting Program is an MBT intervention framework developed for parents who struggle to know how to understand and respond to their children’s emotional and behavioural difficulties. Lighthouse interventions help parents to manage their own emotions, and to develop skills in noticing and thinking about their children’s complex internal experiences. Participants of this five-day training course should be qualified health professionals who are familiar with basic MBT principles. Participants will learn the skills to apply Lighthouse© interventions in individual and group therapy sessions with parents. The MBT principles underpinning these interventions will be explained and demonstrated. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss and practice these new skills in the context of facilitated role play and real play activities. This training will be delivered online. Training times have been chosen to accommodate England and Australia.
Deep Water Warning
You will have seen this sign before, I am sure? It is often seen by deep waters in a harbour. You need to know; this training goes deeper than most you will have experienced. If you think about it, the safest harbour will have deep waters to allow vessels of all sizes to safely dock. A shallow strand limits the crafts that can safely land.
One reality, I believe, of the work that you do is that it often disturbs you. If like me, you are working with clients with a history of developmental trauma, and/or with varied caregiving experiences that has sometimes, if not often, been disorganizing of their careseeking behaviours. When welcome them into harbour, as it were - we open the door, our mind, perhaps our heart and mind to them, it is no wonder their disorganized careseeking creates confusion and confused feelings in us. Sometimes we can find ourselves feeling useless, helpless, and even despairing about their capacity to take anything from us.
This training tries to honour the depth of the work that you do by offering a fairly deep harbour to you in various experiential exercises throughout the training. Whether you volunteer to take part in any one of the exercises (it is optional, there is no pressure to do so) or choose to be an observer to those who do, you will find yourself in your and their deeper waters. By this I mean that you will experience strong feelings, have powerful memories stirred, may recall deep connections with secure memories that may evoke intense feelings of joy and sorrow in you. You may also recall memories that are more painful, moments of being misunderstood, perhaps some of the experiences that may have been pivotal to you choosing to work with vulnerable people. Perhaps those experiences are key to your compassion for your clients.It is my belief that any training worth its salt will take you into deeper waters, but most trainings do not provide space to reflect on this. To be effective in offering the Lighthouse programme, the parents, and clients you work with will need you to be available to them when the exercises you facilitate disturb their boats, tip them into deep waters. Your capacity to support the clients going through the programme will be greatly helped, we believe, (and many people who have trained with us have told us exactly this), by participating in this experiential training with an expectation that it will generate much to reflect on, to process and re-process.Not everyone will choose to train in this programme. It is not for everyone, it asks more questions than it answers, and it is certainly not ‘the answer’ to every parenting situation and there are many, many other programmes that are excellent too. But if you do choose to join us, you will be most welcome, and we will do our best to create a safe enough harbour for you to learn some of the core skills needed to offer the parents you work with a deeper and safer harbour.
Gerry Byrne