NEW EDITORIAL
BY TAMARA STRIJACK

Have you ever felt like life is spinning around you and you are not sure where you fit or how you fit or even IF you fit, but you can’t slow down enough to even contemplate the question?
 
Well I have … on more than one occasion. At first, I didn’t even notice the spinning. It was so much a part of my life I didn’t even recognize the vortex I was being pulled in to. But some life events made me pause just long enough to notice, gave me cause to slow down just enough to see, or at least to experience, the fast pace I was caught up in. It stirred something deep within me, prompting me to press pause and catch up with myself.
 
And so here, more than a decade after those initial rumblings, I find myself sitting at the beginning of an experiment. An experiment that has me doing more than pressing pause …
 
I have hit the reset button.
 
I wrote this at the cusp of my sabbatical as I gathered anything that “dinged” or told time and secured them away in a box for three months. At the time I remember feeling giddy with excitement, but also nervously curious as to how it would unfold. What would the time be like? What would I find out about myself?

UPDATED DISCIPLINE COURSE STARTS MAY 26TH
BRAND NEW EDITION!

OFFERED BY GENEVIÉVE BRABANT
WEDNESDAYS
MAY 26 TO JUNE 23, 2021
9:00 AM TO 10:00 AM PACIFIC

STARTS WITH AN ORIENTATION SESSION ON MAY 26TH AND RUNS FOR 5 WEEKS
A note from Gordon on the new edition of the Discipline course...

Back in the days when I taught courses on parent-child relations in university, I would start off each course by asking my students what traits they admired most in others. The following attributes were typical: courageous, adventurous, honest, resilient, compassionate, articulate. I asked them to keep their lists for future reference. Then a week or two later, I had them write a list of what traits parents most value in their children. Besides intelligence, the traits most frequently mentioned included civilized and considerate, appropriate and well-mannered, responsible and well-behaved. My first agenda in this exercise was to get my students to realize the discrepancy between what we value in adults and what we value in children. My second agenda was to have my students realize that we tend to view children through the lenses of our own needs and responsibilities as adults. Certainly one of the most important responsibilities of the adults in charge of children is to impose some order on their behaviour so that they can be shoehorned, so-to-speak, into the complex society in which we now live. Contemporary society seems to be getting more complicated every day and so correspondingly are the demands on our children's behaviour, and hence on us as adults to orchestrate their behaviour. No wonder many parents feel as if they are between a rock and a hard place. 
 
It is for this reason I believe that the quest for good behaviour has become the holy grail of parenting. It was certainly at the top of the list of requested topics when I used to speak at parent groups. The lack of good behaviour was also the most common presenting problem during my 45 years of parent consulting. It is fast-becoming a major concern of classroom teachers as well. 
 
In this course, I want to discuss how to manage a child's behaviour so we don't put in jeopardy the very traits we would want to see in them as adults. I want most to give away the MAP that I myself consulted when trying to help parents and teachers manage the behaviour of the children in their care. I want parents and teachers to be confidently be in the lead with their charges, not trying to follow someone else's directions. I want to give away my secrets, so to speak. 
 
I hope students of this course will become as full of awe as I have been, and still am, when I reflect upon the picture that emerges when all the puzzle pieces come together. It has taken me 45 years to find just the right place for every puzzle piece. At least I think I have. I am eager to share the completed puzzle with you now.  
For more from Gordon on the subject of discipline, we invite you to read his two-part editorial from a few years back:

LIVESTREAM SEMINAR
PRESENTED BY GORDON NEUFELD, PH.D.

JULY 7 & 8, 2021 | 9 AM TO 12 PM PACIFIC EACH DAY
$90 PER PERSON
includes access to recording for 30 days
Emotional health is increasingly becoming our collective objective, despite a lack of common knowledge regarding what this actually looks like or how to get there. At the same time, emotional health and emotional maturity appear to be increasingly elusive in today's society, so much so that immaturity could well be considered epidemic in the adult population. It is notable that emotional health and emotional maturity are conspicuously missing in all major behaviour problems, syndromes and disorders. As it turns out, emotional health and emotional maturation are not only core issues but also intricately linked, so much so that the constructs are inseparable. Given this, it should be no surprise that that there is a significant developmental aspect to these dynamics. 
 
Doing what he does best, Dr. Neufeld has put the puzzle pieces together to reveal five developmental steps to emotional health and maturity. His model is easy to follow and has become a template for a growing number of therapists. The five-step model reveals the most common pitfall in working with the immature, regardless of age - attempting to treat the symptoms at the level where they occur rather than retreating to the underlying developmental prerequisite where the problem is most likely to exist. Dr. Neufeld's model provides clear insights as to the nature of emotional maturity or its lack, as well as the way through to removing the impediments to emotional stuckness.

OUTLINE:
This six-hour course is divided into four sessions of approximately 1.5 hours each.

Session 1 Emotion as the Heart of the Matter
Session 2 Back to the Beginning: getting the first step right
Session 3 Towards Fully Feeling: addressing the impediments
Session 4 Supporting the Final Steps AND The Five Steps as a Template for Treatment
Did you miss our online conference? If so, we've got you covered! We've made it possible to purchase access to ALL recordings until the middle of July! Click below to visit our conference website and to purchase post-event recording access.
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