Parenting With Somatic Mindfulness With Hakomi Therapist Karen Daley, LMFT

Part of practicing respectful parenting is the ongoing journey of building your capacity to access your reserves of inner calm in the face of your child’s big emotions, their behaviors that irritate you, and your own involuntary emotional reactions. 

One of the most common requests I get from new clients is to tell them how to get their parent-rage to go from a 9.5 on the severity scale down to a 2 during moments of family conflict. The first thing I usually suggest is to get in the habit of attuning to your own body.

Does your body feel one way when you’re happy and one way when you’re angry or when you’re in the presence of someone else’s anger? What about sadness—your own, your partner’s, or your child’s? What sensation happens in your body all by itself?

Surprisingly, learning to tune in to your body’s reactions in the moment can help you begin to understand your emotions, which in turn helps you modulate them when it’s necessary to do so.

To help us understand how this mind-body connection can be helpful to parents, I talked to Hakomi therapist Karen Daley, who uses mindfulness and awareness of the body in her work with clients.

Karen’s private practice in Northern California is called Many Rivers Healing. She is a licensed marriage and family clinician and is also in the process of becoming a Certified Hakomi Practitioner while also enrolled in the Hakomi Teacher in Training Program.

Karen co-developed the Resilience Clinic at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital’s Primary Care Clinic, specializing in bringing caregivers and their children into a weekly circle that fostered deeper relationships and communication between them. The focus included neuroscience, mindfulness, crafting, outdoor experiences, and nutritious snacks in addition to learning about how each of these experiences can be resources for the nervous system. Karen is a parent of an almost-25-year-old, and her loves—besides her wonderful daughter—are her plant and book babies which she tends to daily!

Here are some key takeaways from our conversation:

• Hakomi is a type of psychotherapy that privileges the somatic experience.
• It’s about taking a read of what's happening in our bodies to then figure out what kind of resource we need at any given time.
• Parents tend to have a belief that the busyness of everyday life means that it’s a privilege to make time to check in with yourself—but in fact, it’s an important thing to do.
• Checking in with yourself allows you to be able to regulate your responses so that you can soothe your nervous system and help your child develop that same capacity.
• In Hakomi therapy, while the client tells their story, the therapist looks for a moment to offer the person a “missing experience”—an experience they needed in childhood from or with...

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