The Birth Order Effect

Each 1.5 hour session will have a lecture, an exercise and sharing. In order to create a lively “in-person” feel and to preserve the integrity of what is shared, this workshop will not be recorded for distribution.

**Participants can earn 3 Continuing Education hours with full participation in both live sessions. Contact our administrator, Julie Voss, prior to the course if you are interested. A very brief follow-up survey will be required.

The first session will include info about how families are formed and sibling roles based on Karl Koenig’s book, Brothers and Sisters. We will apply the birth order model to families we know and share them with the group (without mentioning names.). Finally, we will create a statement about our own birth order as in, “I am a first born so I bear the responsibility for supporting my family.”

The second session will begin with the statement from the first. We will discuss the impact of attachment on child development. We will consider what it looks and feels like to be stuck in a birth order role and to have an insecure attachment pattern. How can we free the “inner child”?

We will discuss how the voice of our parents becomes our inner voice and how secure attachment is created. We will participate in an exercise to notice how the inner voice responds to specific scenarios and then write or rewrite the script to speak to ourselves with the non-judgmental voice of the loving parent.

The inner voice impacts how we communicate with others. We will practice a method of conscious communication that comes from the inside out. Children are truth tellers and they sense whether we are in alignment or not. When we speak to ourselves with loving kindness, we can then communicate with children in a way that is firm and kind. We can stay connected to ourselves while connecting with children.