Friday Continuing Education Series: Regaining Balance: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction for Separated and Divorced Parents, Elizabeth Salin, LMFT and Ruth Jaeger, LCSW

Friday, June 9, 2017

Regaining Balance:  Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Separated and Divorced Parents

One of the biggest stressor of adulthood is divorce. In your clinical practice you often work with parents who are experiencing separation and divorce. You often seen your separating and divorcing clients feeling disorganized, dysregulated and isolated.  The expectable intensity of divorce lessens parents’ ability to respond to their children in a calm and sensitive way during an extended period.  Nationally, almost 50% of all children will have experienced the divorce of their parents by age 16.  Divorce is considered an Adverse Childhood Experience which can not only adversely contribute to children’s current wellbeing but also their later physical and mental health.

Addressing parents’ stress during separation and divorce is critical in helping parents maintain secure attachment with their children and promotes resilience for both parents and children. There is research that supports that Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction practices help adults manage their stress reactions more effectively.  Using mindfulness mediated stress responses gives parents awareness and choice to respond more flexibly to themselves and their children and to help support a secure attachment.

Ruth Jaeger and Liz Salin have extensive experience working with children and families during the divorce process.  They developed a class, Regaining Balance, to integrate the fundamental components of MBSR with attachment theory in order to improve resilience for parents and children.  This model is adjunctive to individual therapy by offering the opportunity to learn mindfulness practices in a supportive group setting.

This talk will discuss how divorce impacts adults and children and specifically how Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction practices support families during the challenge of divorce.  The talk will be didactic and experiential.

Elizabeth Salin, LMFT, specializes in helping families during the separation/divorce process. Strongly influenced by attachment theory, child development, resilience research and mindfulness practices, she works to support connections between children and parents and strengthen the support system for the parents as they learn to parent in a different context.  Liz helps spouses focus on their strengths and hopes for themselves and their children to create the best outcomes for the future restructured family.  She has had the privilege to see families reorganize in ways that support everyone. 

Licensed in 1976, Elizabeth Salin has many years of experience providing individual psychotherapy with adults, play therapy with children and parent/co-parent counseling. She has taught Human Development to graduate students and teachers at Dominican University, has been a Senior Clinical staff member at the Center for Families in Transition and created and taught the Pre Mediation Orientation for parents in the Sonoma County Courts.

She is a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher (U Mass) and completed training to teach mindfulness to children (Mindful Schools, Marin Mindfulness Institute).  

Ruth Jaeger, LCSW, has worked for over 30 years with adults,children and adolescents in clinical and private practice. In her work with children, her emphasis has been to foster parents’ ability to create the family environment that supports their child’s optimal development. Ruth uses a variety of modalities in order to best meet the needs of her clients and has found that adults and children have benefited substantially when incorporating mindfulness meditation with the new skills and insight they gain in therapy. 

In addition to her psychotherapy practice, Ruth has taught Psychology at Dominican University and Early Childhood Education at College of Marin. She was Clinical Health Educator at Kaiser Permanente providing temperament, sleep, and behavioral consultations to parents and stress management counseling to children and teens and helped develop an ADHD Group Screening protocol. She was Clinical Director at the Community Institute for Psychotherapy and at APPLE Family Center where she provided clinical supervision and training. Ruth has consulted with numerous preschools and provided employee mental health workshops at local businesses.