Cefi College

Current Themes

An "adventure" in the maternity world

Yesterday was Mother's Day. I chose to venture to write about maternity and psychological flexibility, term coined by acceptance and commitment therapy. Psychological flexibility is sought through the association of acceptance and attention processes with commitment and behavior change processes. There are 6 central processes I thought of exploring in this writing from the theme of motherhood. They are:

Present Moment / Flexible Attention: Do you have more present experience than being observing a baby? I wonder when it's my own baby ... if you stop to look at my nephews and other kids I always get glazed and loving every detail. The experience of flexible attention or moment proposals by acceptance and commitment therapy brings this contemplative look for the here and now, for what our world of senses can catch / observe: the little face, the fat little fingers, the way to wake up, the look, the smell, the warm and soft skin, the warmth of that small body ... aaaahhhh how much love we experienced at the present moment, is not it?

I as a context: Motherhood experience seems to be one of the most beautiful and challenging in a woman's life. How does it affect the way she realizes? How does it describe it, the adjectives she uses to talk about herself? What behaviors have never been tried to compose your repertoire? From feelings and emotions not yet experienced even experiences how to feed another being (in all sense of food ... of milk, love, looking, lap, of everything) ...

Acceptance: How many intense emotions should come with the maternity experience. Cold in the belly, fear, love, fullness ... the hot emotions of feeling we want more is to feel and feel ... noticing ... and the difficult emotions of feeling our tendency is to try to escape, do not feel, to flee ... (named as experiential dodging ). The process of acceptance invites us to make room to feel whatever is there, without trying to modify anything ... calls us to notice how we experience every emotion, and to "read" what communicates us.
Disulation: The exercise From looking at internal experiences, be they thoughts, emotions, perspective sensations, with distance. This means, in other words, that each mother may notice her thoughts and judgments as thoughts and judgments simply, not as "said" or truths about them. Thoughts like "I'm not doing right, I'm not a good mother" can be experienced, just like "I'm afraid" and the very sensation of fear. Our exercise of power to contemplate these experiences as experiences is the path of the blindness.

Values: Know what is valuable to us. Thinking of maternity, my son is important to me. Let feel beloved, understood, emotionally connected to me and other things and valuable people for him. Let feel at peace and find happiness in small things. Let us love and love life. May I feel on the way for those who are walking. That I can live one day at a time.

Action with commitment: it concerns those things we do that approximate ourselves from what is valuable to us. What things do I do to get closer to being more connected with my son? What I (ME) do I see that you take me to this feeling of walking on the way? Taking a step at a time?

I, here and now, experiment this text how to venture, how to speak of something of the plan of desire, imagination, experiences already experienced as aunt and lived as a mother under construction. Why not? As the mother I want to be when you have a "puppy" in this world of the senses.

by Martha Ludwig, Psychologist and PhD in Psychology.