8 Home Treatment and Parental Participation

In Chapter 2 I mentioned how I began teaching parents to do a simplified form of shonishin at home. It has proven to be a very helpful tactic for enhancing clinical efficacy. In this chapter I will explain the details of how to do this.

The model arose out of the need for more frequent clinical visits than could be scheduled. There were quite real problems, like distance from the clinic, scheduling conflicts, and so on, but as I started using this method, I was also thinking in other clinical terms. It may be very helpful to have parents participate in treatment so that they can feel that there is (finally) something that they can do to help their suffering child. When a friend gets sick we feel concern; when an adult family member gets sick we tend to feel more concern. But when a child gets sick, especially one’s own child, these feelings are often stronger. If the problem does not resolve and is chronic and intractable in nature, many parents develop complex reactions, which themselves can tie into the child’s problem, sometimes making it more complex. Parents can come in exhausted from lack of sleep, from giving continuous attention and monitoring the sickly child. Some parents can develop feelings of frustration and even frank helplessness and start to feel overwhelmed, even when they have no choice but to keep going and keep trying. Some parents can feel guilty about their child’s illness, as though they did something wrong, or that they aren’t good enough to take care of their child.

All of these things can make the healing environment for the child more difficult. Anyone who has had children will have noticed that they are very sensitive, and they pick up on all the small things going on around them, especially with their parents. They pick up on and react to the emotions around them. This cannot but influence how things proceed and develop. Observing this, it was obvious to me early on that it could be very helpful to try to address it.

Thinking of a passage in the Nan Jing (Classic of Difficulties) (circa 100 CE) provided inspiration. Nan Jing Chapter 69 describes the following treatment principle: “for deficiency/vacuity supplement the mother.” Of course, in the field of acupuncture this has usually been taken to refer to five phase theory (see Chapters 9 and 10). It occurred to me that maybe if the parent started applying treatment at home on a regular basis it could be useful to give the parent tools to help them overcome their emotional reactions, make them feel like they could do something, and for those more despondent parents, make them feel better, especially as the treatment started working. Not only would the child be treated directly (by the therapist and parent) but the child would also be treated indirectly as the parental participation would help improve the child’s home environmental tensions and stresses, thus aiding the child too.

Over time as I taught parents to use a simple form of shonishin at home I noticed it is indeed a powerful tool for treatment. I also noticed that parents who are struggling with their child (the 6-year-old child who is hyperactive and very difficult, the baby that is cranky and screams a lot, the 2-year-old in the midst of his “terrible twos”), often find a changed relationship with their child. The home treatment involves a lot of touching, especially soft, caring touching, which helps the parent transform the nature of their relationship with the child, of how the child reacts to them, and how they react to the child.¹ Thus, wherever feasible I teach a simplified form of shonishin to parents.

__________________

¹ I present a simple five-level model of the role of these psychosocial effects in the introductory section of Chapter 17 where I expand the three-level model from Chapter 9.

Goals

Stay updated, free articles. Join our Telegram channel

Join