Sunday, 25 April 2010

Dad Fights for Son's Contact

MG from Somalia has been trying to get contact to his son for the past two years. He says his former partner 'allowed' him to see his son occasionally but he has had to 'beg' and contact was often stopped moments before it was arranged to take place.

Sound familiar?

We encouraged him to take the matter to Court for a Contact Order....

Mum has made allegations of domestic violence, denied by Dad. The Court has asked for reports following a recent Hearing.

He asks....

Q "How long will it take to get the next hearing after ive just had the first one yesterday?"

A The next Hearing will be determined by several factors the main ones being... The time it takes to get the reports needed. Although the protocol sets out the times that are often stretched because of the difficulties in getting the reports completed. Another factor is the Court listings. Quite often the Court has a lot of cases and have to fit your case in. Once again, the Court has to take account of the protocols, (they are different in private law than public law). You should have had a new Hearing date fixed when you were last in Court.

Q "police said there is no allegations made on my name as they have checked in their database system and there was nothing on me, mind you i only went to ----- police in ------------ where we used to live so will this database record show just anything that happened in ----- or is it the whole country database?"

A The Police National Computer check should have all details of any arrests etc. The local Police should have checked on this. You have said that you have never been in trouble with the Police so when the reports are completed this should be dealt with.

Q "I am gonna be on supervised contact visit at a contact centre in ------, how long will this supervised visit last because eventually i would love to have my son having fortnight staying contact with me like previously requested?"

A You tell me that the order made states that contact will happen at the contact centre every 2 weeks for 2 hours. This should be until your next hearing. I would expect that whoever is supervising you will be responsible for reporting their findings. The Court will take all this into account when your case is properly heard. It is not good to keep long term contact at a centre so the reporter should look at this for you.

Q "how does it work in contact centre? are they gonna be watching every move how i interact with my son?"

A If your order says supervised then this is exactly what it means. You are being supervised and as such you will be watched and your behaviour monitored along with your son's reaction to contact.

Monday, 12 April 2010

USE YOUR UNIQUE KNOWLEDGE

What you have is priceless. Don't underestimate your worth. Your knowledge is unique to you and whether you like it or not, good or bad it all belongs solely to you. You make your decisions in this knowledge, it affects your every day thoughts and events.

Understand that no matter what, there are no negatives in there it's all positive if you use the knowledge you've gained to good effect it is absolutely PRICELESS.

Let's say that you are in a relationship that you are not enjoying. Why are you still there? The answer may well be that you are hoping something will change to make it 'better'. Or you just don't feel that you have the strength to move away from it.

Your reasons for staying are unique to you. Inside, you know the real reasons. To come to the reasons you have used your knowledge. It is this that determines how you cope. It may be that you have reflected on your past and that you have the knowledge that you have done something in the past that you regret and that you are blaming yourself for. Reflect again on this and use your knowledge to inform you, not destroy you. Maybe you should have moved out of the relationship years ago but you did not. Don't dwell on this. It may be that you are feeling guilty for thoughts or things you have done that you consider are wrong. By all means reflect on your past but accept that we all do things that we regret, it's a part of learning. What you don't want to do is to continue to do something that you know is wrong. Don't try to appease everyone else, you can't win them all, so don't try to, accept that some people will not understand and accept your position. That is a matter for them, not you. Keeping a failing relationship alive because you are trying to please others is not a positive way forward. It leads to uncertainty. Being vague about what you really mean, to try to lessen the impact of the relationship's end, is more damaging that a clean break. Vagueness leads to unhelpful responses from those around you.

Ending a relationship cleanly and quickly may be brutal in the short term but spending months trying to wean someone off you is down right abusive!

Using your knowledge to define your problem will help you to come to a positive conclusion.

When people are unclear about what they want to change, attempts at finding solutions are often misguided. This can lead to frustration especially when nothing seems to be improving. If you are unsure about the exact nature of your problem take the time to trawl your knowledge and find the reasons behind your needs then act on them.

NEXT MONDAY

BE YOURSELF

Monday, 5 April 2010

LIFE-STYLE SELF-ESTEEM

SETTLE YOUR SOUL

It’s no good spending valuable healing time torturing yourself by going over your past life events. No matter what, you can not change them. They are what makes you good or bad!

Settling your soul starts with the acceptance that you can not change the past. Using your knowledge and experience to shape your future is what you should spend time thinking about. No one knows the core you better than you. Quite often psychologists, counsellors and social workers come into people’s lives, get them to talk about their past and analyse the information, giving it back to them in a very identifiable form. The person being ‘helped’ thinks wow, how fantastic and they have a feeling of relief. Months later that feeling goes and the question arises, ‘ok you’ve identified why I am like I am but nothing has happened since then. When are you going to make me feel better?’ Using a solution focussed approach to your problem gives you a way forward by encouraging you to think about how to shape the future not dwell in the past.

Settling your soul is best tackled by accepting who you are and understanding that you made past decisions with the knowledge you had then and that now your knowledge is different and that given the situation again you would not react in the same way.

We all have a past history, we all have negative experiences; we all develop differently. What we have to understand is that we are a product of our past. The way we deal with that past makes the difference. We can let past negative influences make us negative, or we can use the experience to adjust ourselves to a positive reaction and we can use the information to alter our environment to a positive place. Being subjected to many life negatives does not mean that you can’t change them. But it does mean that you have to make greater efforts to change your mindset to feel better about yourself and to find the positives.

Settling your soul means accepting your past and your self. Coming from a ‘difficult’ background does not mean that you are destined for a difficult future. In fact if you think about it, if your life experience to date has been difficult, then you should be able to use all of that understanding to make a better future.

DON’T BE HARD ON YOURSELF ENJOY YOU WARTS AND ALL!!!!!

NEXT MONDAY

USE YOUR UNIQUE KNOWLEDGE

Wednesday, 24 March 2010

Child Behaviour 5 Top Tips

DEALING WITH DIFFICULT
BEHAVIOUR


It has been said that children are born with a brain that is nothing more than a ball of confusion, and that what the child experiences, especially in their early years, shapes and organises there thoughts, beliefs and behaviour.

Children are not born with behaviour they learn it! From you!!!

Basically, behaviour can be put into two categories, acceptable and un-acceptable. Parents need to know how to respond to and deal with both in equal measure. Showing children how happy they make you feel when they are operating in an acceptable way helps to build their self-esteem and lets them know what is expected of them. Responding to their un-acceptable behaviour should be done in a way that shows them that what they are doing will not get them what they want, which is, a happy you. What you must not do, is to become angry and upset with them when they are learning life’s lessons. You need to be understanding of them and guide them.

Smacking and shouting means that you have gone past the stage of positive child development. You have ‘lost it’.

Being consistent is the key. From the very beginning of their life with you, you should continually spend time with them. The more the better. It is easy to miss the need to constantly show them how happy you are when they are acting in an acceptable way.

Because they are not causing you any problems there is a tendency to leave them alone. Wrong! You need to show them even more attention. If you don’t, they will quickly learn that the best way to get your attention is to act in an un-acceptable way.

“Children’s behaviour sometimes requires more serious attention. But, that doesn’t have to include actions that are hurtful, such as hitting, humiliating or yelling. Effective discipline only has to give children the message that their behaviour was a problem. If a negative consequence is used, it should be so light that it can be used several times a day without causing harm.” (Off Road Parenting, Pacifici Chamberlain and White)

Remember…

· Be consistent with your approach
· Keep talking to your child especially when they are being good
· Don’t wait until the behaviour deteriorates to the point that you become angry
· Use your body language to show approval. Smile, show them you are happy
· Spend lots of time with them and enjoy them

Sunday, 21 March 2010

REST YOUR MIND

The difficulty with life’s problems is that they tend to occupy massive parts of your mind. When you are ‘troubled’ the more you try to put the problem out of your mind the more it seems to be in your thoughts. If you have lots of life problems, as many of us do, they take over and our mind keeps throwing them at us one after the other. This state in meditation terms is often referred to as the ‘monkey brain’. I think it’s a really good description of the overwhelming way our minds function. The difficulty with the monkey brain syndrome is that it bombards us with negative thoughts and takes up so much of our mind that we can not access our logic and positive thoughts to make good quality decisions.

The answer is to learn to relax the mind especially when we are stressed. Easier said than done I know. But remember this:

WE ARE IN CHARGE OF OURSLEVES.

By this I mean that we are capable of changing the way we deal with our self! We have the ability to cognitively change the responses we use in any situation. For example, if your response to a naughty child is to become angry and shout, which is clearly not a rational response as it does neither them nor you any real good, you can develop another way of dealing with the situation by the use of a positive reaction that allows you to turn your anger into a positive thought process that lets you deal with the child in a much more constructive and less threatening way.

No one can effectively deal with every problem to their satisfaction. There will always be times when you wish you had reacted differently. Accept this and you will avoid one of the most destructive unresolved problem responses… The ‘volcano effect’ as I call it. This is the effect that can happen when you do not deal with any of your problems. The effect is a build up of volcanic, emotional, energy. The stuff that makes your stomach tighten. Allowing this to build in you without airing it causes a build up of pressure that sooner or later will erupt. The problem is, the final straw will probably be something very simple. Those around you will wonder why on earth you have reacted so violently. What they won’t know is the enormity of the pressure you have built up over a period of time that they have not been aware of.

The way to avoid this is to reduce the pressure regularly and in a controlled way. Opening up and letting people know how you feel can help. Doing this gives you the opportunity to relax the stress. If you can’t, then try exercising. You don’t have to take on a marathon or spend hours in the gym. A short walk can do the trick.

Every day take a little time out to think about the things that have caused you anxiety. It may help if you make a list. What you are aiming to do is to release some of the pressure. Meditation can do this. Meditating is a simple process. You don’t have to sit cross legged on the side of a mountain. Sitting on a chair, keeping an upright posture with a straight back and slowly breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth will do. The idea is to allow your mind to relax. To think of nothing in particular and allow your mind to move from the monkey brain state to a more relaxed state. Thoughts will come into your head. Don’t tell yourself to relax, it rarely works. Better if you allow the thoughts to drift in and drift back out again, as a wave on a beach. Try not to focus on any one thought. Listening to soothing music, or just the sound of your breath entering and leaving your body helps you to lose the drifting thoughts and puts you back into a meditative state. At first you may only manage a few minutes of ‘no thought’, but in time you will have longer spells. Regular meditation, even for five minutes a day will soon become something that you will look forward to and benefit from.

NEXT MONDAY

SETTLE YOUR SOUL

Sunday, 14 March 2010

Deal With Unresolved Issues

DEALING WITH UNRESOLVED ISSUES.
by Kenn Griffiths.

All of us at some time or other have had times in our lives when we have not dealt with some difficulty that has arisen. By dealing with it I mean that we have not addressed it emotionally. It has been left unresolved and every now and then it comes to the forefront and evokes a negative emotional response, a inner hurt. For some people there are many of these unresolved issues that sap emotional energy and have the effect of stopping them moving on, effectively keeping them a prisoner with them as the gaoler.

The starting point to change is this: YOU CAN NOT CHANGE THE PAST, what’s gone is gone, you now have to live with the effects. What you can change is the perception you have about the past and it’s effects. If you only view it as a negative it will cause a negative in you. But if you can use the experience, no matter how bad, in a positive way then you move yourself from negative to positive. Using life’s difficulties positively means using the experience to make you a better person. A person that you can live with, a person that you like! No matter what the problem you will not be able to move forward effectively without ridding yourself of your self imposed gaol. That place that you keep yourself in, the place that stops you from enjoying your future.

Try this, imagine that you have a magic wand, and when you wave it your unresolved problem is now resolved. Ask yourself, “what would my life look like if I resolved this problem”. Well, what does it look like? How do you think you would feel? What would you do now you have rid yourself of the burden? Would other people know something was different about you? How would they know? What would you do that signalled to them that you were different?

In reality you can not remove the past but you can resolve your issues about it by dealing with you!

Now try this.

Let’s say that your issue is absolutely unresolved, it has never been viewed in any form of positive light and you can not live with it. On a scale of 0 to 10 this is ZERO. Now at the other end of the scale you have dealt with it in a positive way. This doesn’t mean that it never happened. It has, and you can’t remove the past. However, 10 is ‘resolved’, you can live with it and you have changed the experience from a negative to positive, you’ve used it to help you grow.

Now decide where on the scale you are. Let’s say you are living with the effects, but you do reflect on the issue regularly and it depresses you. The fact that you can think about it moves you from Zero. So you are not there. You have not moved through it so you are not at 10. You are however, wanting to resolve it and work through it. Sometimes you feel a little positive but not for long. You’re probably at 4. Moving forward, what would you have to do to get to 4.5 or even 5? It could be something very simple like telling yourself that you are going to deal with it eventually or simply accepting in yourself that you can not change the past. Whatever it is, is entirely up to you. You know what is needed. No one else has your experience and no one understands you better than you. So when you look to resolve issues you resolve them for you not someone else. Only you know what your preferred outcome should be.

Don’t become a prisoner of your past
Unresolved issues are your gaol
Turn your negatives to positives
Let go of your past, you can’t change it
Don’t suppress problems, deal with them
Dealing with problems gives you experience so that future problems are dealt with more easily


Exercise:

Clarifying Preferred Outcomes.

If you are playing a tune on a trumpet that no one knows how can they join in?
This exercise is to help you to define what is realistic and can be resolved, bringing your from a no tune to a tune everyone knows and can join you in.

Let us say that your problem is that you become angry when you are trying to sort out the children’s contact with their other parent. You would like to be able to handle your anger better and talk about the contact without it becoming a volatile situation. Now make a list briefly describing the problem as you see it and what needs to change.

Next ask yourself how you will know when the problem you are facing is no longer a problem. Then write down your preferred outcome. Be specific using positive language in your writing.

Example: I will know that I am handling my anger better when I am able to talk to the other parent without anger driving my responses.

Use your notes to help you define what your preferred outcome looks like and to give you the direction to move forward.

If you are struggling with any issues and need to talk about them why not take advantage of the mychildcontact.com expert’s page: info@mychildcontact.com

NEXT MONDAY

REST YOUR MIND