Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today is the day many people will enjoy romantic dinners, chocolates, lovely cards and beautiful flowers. They will be told how much they are loved and appreciated by their significant others, parents, children and other important people in their lives.

Valentine’s Day is a wonderful holiday meant to celebrate love and loving relationships. However, this can be an extremely difficult holiday for those who have experienced domestic violence. The presence of flowers can have a different meaning if the only time you ever receive flowers is after a beating. What if the person who professes to love you also beats you? Tells you that you are ugly, worthless and a horrible person? What if your partner forces you to do things you don’t want to do? It can be difficult in those situations to celebrate today.

We work with our clients every day to help them see their inner beauty and their value and worth as an individual. We help them to reclaim their sense of self and find the love for themselves they have lost somewhere in the mess of domestic violence. We don’t need others to love us to be worthwhile individuals. While love from another can be wonderful and fulfilling, we can be o.k. by ourselves and truly love ourselves for who we are. This is the value we work with clients to find and to reclaim.

Today as you celebrate Valentine’s Day remember your worth as an individual and please remember the people that we are working with in our services. They are working hard to recover from the abuse they have suffered and learning to live with new traditions and new found skills. Please consider making a donation to Hope House to help us further our work with amazingly strong and beautiful people--people worthy of love. The best Valentine’s Day present I will receive today is knowing that I helped someone, in some small way; find her voice and her sense of self- worth and love she has for herself. 

To donate, go to hopehouse.net and click on the donate button. 

Theraplay - Enhancing the Bond Between Mother and Child

This week’s guest blogger is Thada Pulliam, one of Hope House’s Child Therapists.

When women arrive at Hope House with their children, there is often a disconnect between them. Mom may have been distancing herself from her child in order to keep her abuser's attention off the child and focused on her.

One of our goals when working with our clients is to enhance attachment, trust, self-esteem and joyful engagement between a mom and her child. To accomplish this, we use Theraplay.

Theraplay is a structured play therapy that focuses on attachment and relationship development.

Theraplay treatment can involve:

• Structured activities such as 1) the 3-legged race where the mom is providing direction; 2) mom directing the child to copy her eye or hand movements.

• Engaging activities:  1) the child hides a cotton ball within their clothes and mom must find it; 2) hand games such as creating a special hand shake, or playing patty cake.

• Nurturing activities:  1) mom checks the hands, arms, legs and feet for hurts, and then applies lotion with soft strokes while singing a lullaby; 2) while applying lotion to feet, mom recites “this little piggy”.

• Challenge activities: 1) mom places an item such as a book or pillow on the child for the child to balance; 2) thumb wrestling.

As a result of these activities, we hope to re-establish a sense of specialness, togetherness and fun between mom and her child.