What is Psycho-education?

Firstly, psycho-education sounds a bit scary, but it is actually something that we can all benefit from, not just people who have a diagnosed mental illness.

Psycho-education is just a fancy word for learning about yourself. It is learning about what makes you tick, what drives your behaviour, what motivates you and what helps you change. In the biz we call this insight. Learning about yourself in a supported environment can feel validating, to finally feel understood, it can also help develop self compassion for who you are as a person.

Learn about yourself

Unfortunately, having more awareness about yourself on it’s own doesn’t necessarily create change. For example, you can know that you yell at your kids because you feel triggered in some way, however in the moment, this knowledge doesn’t help you do/act/say something different. Knowing why you do something and continuing to do it can actually make you feel worse, because you can become your most critical judge "I should know better", "I'm so stupid why do I keep making this mistake", "I know why I do this, I should be able to just change". This self judgement can become one of the roadblocks to actually changing. So if knowing why you do something doesn't make you change... what does?

Awareness about yourself is the first piece of the puzzle because it is very hard to change something that you don’t understand. So insight is the first step to learning about yourself and deciding for yourself where you are stuck and what you need to help unstick you.

Find the missing puzzle piece

The next step is learning skills to use in the moment and in the background to help make different choices, practising these skills this is what creates change, and it is the doing over time that has an impact on our well being. The skills we teach in our workshops are targeted strategies to either:

1. Calm you down so you can think. Our thinking brain doesn’t work as well when we are activated and overwhelmed in some way (e.g. anxious, annoyed, frustrated, angry, etc). Once you can create a calm resting head space your thinking brain will come back online and this can help create clarity, allow you to step back from the situation and think about what you would like to do (as opposed to reacting in the moment).

2. Help you problem solve. Learning about your roadblocks to change, where you are at, what you would like to change and the steps to do to make that change a reality.

If you would like to learn more about yourself, about your role and identity as a mother and make some changes to enhance your emotional well being please come and spend some time with us at our workshop "Finding you: I'm not just a mum!" Throughout the workshop series you will learn about yourself and practice skills to help enhance your well being to live a life more aligned with your values.

Learn from each other

We look forward to seeing you at our next seminar session and workshop series.