Parent Support
Supporting You to Support Your Child
Navigating the aftermath of a child's disclosure of sexual abuse or exploitation can be a challenging and overwhelming experience for parents and carers. At this crucial time, it is essential to recognise the impact such events have, not only on the child, but also on the entire family unit.
Understanding the Impact
Parents and carers often face a spectrum of emotions and uncertainties following a disclosure. It’s vital to acknowledge that these feelings are a normal response to extraordinary circumstances. As an ordinary family dealing with these extraordinary events, you are not alone.
Developing Skills and Knowledge
As a parent/carer, you are managing your own feelings about the abuse, as well as supporting your child, and you can feel really lost. The Hope from Hurt Service is there for you too supporting you and help you in developing skills and understanding in areas such as:
Understanding Trauma: Gaining insights into how trauma affects children and families can help parents respond more appropriately.
Understanding their communication: behaviour is a form of communication. Hope from Hurt will enable you to understand how children communicate their trauma and their feelings through their behaviour and also develop strategies and techniques to support your child.
Coping Strategies: Enabling you to understand and develop positive coping strategies, while supporting your child in doing the same.
Understanding the impact on you: lessening the feelings of isolation, the worry of ‘making things worse’ for your child. Parents often don’t know where to turn, so I can advise on next steps and what these entail.
Self-care: I help parents understand the importance of looking after themselves to enable them to look after and support their child.
Support for the Entire Family
Child Sexual Abuse/exploitation can affect everyone in the family, including siblings, who may be dealing with a lot of complex emotions as a result. The Hope from Hurt Service extends to them also, so that they can offload their feelings, understand them and work through them
Next Steps
If you are seeking support and guidance, please fill out the form provided. Sinéad Hegarty Consultancy will support you and your family through this time in your lives, giving you the skills and tools to help you and your children.