Interactive workshop / discussion with Dr Vanio Papadelli and Dr Angeliki(Gelica) Zoumpouli

My son has attended Bromley Greek Language School for two years, and it has been a true gift for our family. Tina Moira’s dedication, along with the teachers’ and volunteers’ commitment, and the parent/carer community has been invaluable in terms of maintaining our bonds with the Greek language and culture. Soon after joining the school, I felt inspired to contribute by supporting the school performances using my background as a drama and movement educator in Primary and Higher Education, and in community settings.

With over twenty years in performing arts education and a growing focus on the field of arts and mental health, especially around perinatal health and parenting, I’m now training as an Integrative Arts Therapist. To this end, I was delighted to initially support two workshops for parents and children brilliantly designed and facilitated by Dr. Gelica Zoumpouli — a highly knowledgeable and esteemed Consultant Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist, tutor, and fellow parent. Dr. Zoumpouli and I gradually built a meaningful and nurturing collaboration. Our shared passion and distinct experiences in supporting people’s wellbeing led us to co-design and co-facilitate a workshop for parents in May 2025 titled “Creating Boundaries: How to Say ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to Our Children.” 

The workshop was well-attended by parents. Everyone engaged with the activities with honesty and a playful attitude, and they were willing to be vulnerable when reflecting on their own experiences as children and now parents. We were honoured to be part of such a safe, shared and humbling space with other parents. 

First part 

Exploring boundaries in the body: within the self and in relationship with others facilitated by Dr Vanio Papadelli

Rules, boundaries and limits

‘Noone likes to be defined or told what they need when they don’t think they need it’ (Berry, 2020: 216).

In the world of parenting, few things are as essential—and as misunderstood—as rules, boundaries, and limits. As parents, we want our children to feel safe and free to develop the full potential of themselves. Creating ground rules and setting boundaries and routines is paramount yet not easily implemented. In the workshop, we addressed these challenges through embodied activities, reflection in small groups, and whole group discussion. What I offered was informed by my individual experience as a parent of a neurodivergent child; a teacher of students with mixed abilities and needs; and a trainee Arts therapist. Philippa Berry’s writings in The Book You Wish Your Parents Had read (And Your Children Will be Glad That You Did) (2020) have also been instrumental.

The differences between rules, boundaries and limits were discussed in the workshop. While a ground or house rule is something that you make for your child (and is non-negotiable), a boundary is something you set for yourself, like a personal bubble you don’t want anyone to pop. A boundary is an imaginary line that defines what is accepted and what is not accepted for one’s personal space—what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not. Boundaries help us express our needs and feelings clearly and assertively. A limit defines the edges of what’s acceptable and often signals that someone is close to crossing a line.

Summary of activities 

In the workshop session, we started with a breathing exercise and visualisation to enable participants to become aware of their own bodily and mental boundaries. By paying attention to the inbreath and outbreath patterns, they were invited to reflect on how they tend to relate with the environment and with others. How much they can let go of; how much they ‘cling’ to or try to control; how emotions and thoughts are carried in their body.

Participants then shared gestures representing their child’s morning emotional state—sparking both insight and laughter and understanding how we are affected by our children’s emotions.

In the first partner exercise, everyone lined up in two facing lines opposite their partner. Partner A was the one who set the boundaries by saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. B was allowed to approach further on the command ‘Yes’, and stay still or move back on the command ‘No’. This revealed the importance of understanding how we tend to set boundaries for ourselves; how permissive, inconsistent or rigid we tend to be and how can we cultivate a firm yet elastic sensitivity towards our children. After changing roles, a participant proposed to allow B to be occasionally defiant. We thoroughly enjoyed this variation and there were some imaginative and humorous instances leading to excellent realisations about how we may feel when we’re not listened to by our children … and how liberating or tempting it feels to disobey!

We then broke into two small groups to brainstorm together on what is needed to create a space that enables our child’s personality to develop with confidence and allow us as parents to feel safe and respected. Some participants stressed how important it is to model so children learn how to set boundaries for themselves and build their self-esteem together with their resilience and emotional intelligence. We pondered together on why it is so hard to set boundaries, however. We may also lack awareness of our own boundaries while it can feel exhausting when demands of our children are irrational or unpredictable. Due to our own upbringing and our own internalised parent, we may feel triggered when disrespected. However, it is crucial to remember that boundaries benefit the child and the parent and strengthen the connection between them.

HOW TO SET BOUNDARIES – MAIN TAKE AWAYS for parents:

‘What children – and all of us – need is love plus boundaries, not one or the other’ (Berry, 2020: 212).

1. LISTEN AND EMPATHISE – TUNE INTO YOUR CHILD’S FEELINGS.
   
2. STATE NEEDS WITHOUT JUDGING or BLAMING THEM, e.g. by saying ‘I cannot allow you to have my keys’, instead of ‘you cannot be trusted with my keys’.
   
3. SET YOUR BOUNDARY WITH AN I-STATEMENT (describe to them how you feel: e.g. ‘I’m finding this music too loud. I would like you to turn it down, please’ rather than, ‘Your music is too loud, turn it down please’)
   
4. FRAME BOUNDARIES WITH AS LITTLE NEGATIVITY AS POSSIBLE

e.g. ‘Walls are not for painting on. Here is some paper’ instead of ‘Don’t paint on the walls’.

5. AVOID EMPTY THREATS OR GIVING MIXED MESSAGES (following through and explaining to your children why you did this is important.

e.g. ‘I carried you out of the room because you cannot make a noise when someone is trying to study’

6. SPEAK CALMLY and KINDLY EVEN WHEN YOU ISSUE COMMANDS.
   
7. LEARN WHEN TO BE FIRM AND WHEN FLEXIBLE (pick your battles and recognise when it is ‘survival’ time. Ignoring sometimes is the best solution…!)
   
8. KNOW YOUR LIMITS ARE APPROACHED AND WARN YOUR CHILDREN BEFORE your reach them.
   

Balance between elasticity and firmness	AVOID trying to RESCUE!
Willingness to repair after rupture	Empathy
Affect Attunement

Second part – the importance of mirroring and containment, facilitated by Dr Angeliki(Gelica) Zoumpouli. 

In this part of our workshop, we touched on how concepts such as automatic emotional and cognitive empathy and projection can help us start to understand some of the complex phenomena and exchanges that happen between ourselves and our kids. Then we discussed (but also experienced through immersive role play) how concepts such as “marked and contingent mirroring” and “holding/containment” can help us deal with those. 

Projection

In contemporary psychological science and psychoanalysis the term continues to have the meaning of seeing what is in the self in the other/ in the outside world. We explained in the workshop that the neuroscientific basis of this (emotional automatic empathy) is through mirror neurons, and while it is a prerequisite for successful communication, it is also a primitive defence mechanism that helps us unconsciously deal with overwhelming stress (or indicates underdevelopment of personality). We have all experienced the situation where we find ourselves feeling an intense emotional state and we don’t know why/ how we have come to experience this. Especially with our children, this can be a daily encounter that we may find ourselves in an angry and confused state and not knowing what belongs to us and what to them! Our boundaries can be immediately threatened in this scenario because when our child uses projection, they unconsciously want us to come to experience how they are feeling in order to understand them, and this by definition blurs the boundaries between ourselves and our children! So… are there any tools to help us?

Marked and Contingent Mirroring

Marked and contingent mirroring describes how a carer (often the mother) helps a baby/child begin to develop an understanding of her own emotional states and the foundation of self-regulation (also called Mentalization.)

The mother responds contingently to her baby’s emotional states and does so by mentalizing what might be motivating the baby to behave in the way he is – i.e. when the baby is crying she may conclude that the baby may be angry or upset because the baby is hungry or has a dirty nappy (i.e. their mental state is contingent to their need). 

She then mirrors the emotional state that she imagines the baby is in the middle of and she
also marks this mimicking of what she thinks is the baby’s mental state. She deliberately engages the infant (using eye contact, and a certain amount of exaggeration) talking in a cheerful, sing-song voice, or holds the baby particularly gently. 

In that way an important there is a message given to the baby:

“This is what I (your mum) think may be going on for you right now [say, anger] – this is you “being-angry”, it is not me being-angry with you!…” and it is not the end of the world!

When this happens repeatedly it helps the developing baby begin to develop a sense that…

“I have a mind, and that mind can exist in different states – happy, sad, frightened, angry, etc…” Which is the beginnings of mentalization…(taken  by Anna Freud Centre)

So in this seemingly simple interaction a lot is going on: the mother has to first “take in” the emotional state of the baby (through automatic empathy/ projection) and then to use her cognitive empathy and her marked and contingent mirroring to respond to it in a simple easily accessible way using her emotional state to mirror the baby’s (which needs to be marked but not over-marked), her vocal tone, and accordingly respond.

This also sets the foundations of “containment/ holding”.

There are two concepts of major importance in the literature of psychoanalysis, that are introduced by two renowned representatives of British Object Relations School: holding introduced by Donald Winnicott and containing introduced by Wilfred Bion (Williams, 2012). Winnicott’s major approach to the very early mother-infant relationship was based on the idea that, infant as an unintegrated being would become integrated through a good enough mother who provided the necessary holding environment to her infant by holding him/her until the infant could differentiate himself/herself from the mother (Williams, 2012; Winnicott, 1956/2001). 

On the other hand, Bion’s notion of containment grew out from his clinical experiences with psychotic patients with problem in their thought processes which as an analyst he thought, processed, and presented them their own experience so that they could be able think of and give them meaning (Anderson, 1997; Bion, 1984; Britton, 2012). Such features corresponded preverbal stage and led him to use metaphorically mother-infant relationship and mother’s role in this formulation (Bion, 1984; Britton, 2012).

If we  try and apply this in our relationship to our children, we are requested to literally provide a holding environment for them to develop their personality (part of this could involve literally “holding them” in the midst of breakdowns!), but also contain their raw feelings,  by attempting to understand their verbal and non-verbal communications through marked mirroring.

In our role play exercise, Group A had to describe without words that they have had a difficult day at work; their boss and colleague argued with them and the boss ended up threatening to fire them. They had to explain this to their partner.

Group B (the partners) had to attempt to understand that partner A is trying to describe by marking their emotional state and by attempting to make sense of the non-verbal narrative.

We had time to reflect in little groups about what we took away from the role play.

Key take away messages from the exercise:

–When you don’t have the “words” to describe what is happening to you or what happened in your day, you feel very limited in how to interact with your loved ones. You feel hindered and also you may have to emphasize your emotional expressions, to indicate your distress. This can be true for our children, but not only. Sometimes we may find it difficult to find the words to describe how we are feeling, even if most times we are articulate. 

–When your children (or others) communicate to you emotional states or events non-verbally it can feel very difficult to understand them! It takes a lot of energy to “follow them” closely and to try and understand them.

-The good news is: You don’t have to get it right 100%. If you mark most of the emotional states that the child communicates to you in a way that means that you are not distressed or threatened yourself, just by being there and by attempting to understand your child, you are already providing a “holding” space and containment! This is “good enough”. 

-The child is likely to feel validated and at least part of the intense emotional state will be diffused just by marked/ contingent mirroring and holding/ containment. 

Main key take away messages from Part 2:

• Sometimes it may take up all your energy as parent to just “contain” your own emotional state. If all you do in one day is to survive and not retaliate towards your child this may be a good enough achievement for one day!
• It is important to try to be aware of our own emotional states. Some days are more difficult than others. Some days we wake up and just feel anxious or low. It makes a difference to know which part of our emotional state belongs to us and which part belongs to others (including our kids!), which is also a way of awareness of our own boundaries (see part A).
• When you don’t know why you are experiencing a very intense emotional state it may have been projected by someone else. Try and be playful with this: see it as an invitation from someone to understand how they are feeling (but also that they are not in a state to communicate with you in an articulate way). 
• This may be the first pointer that marked/ contingent mirroring may be of help…Try by just mirroring the emotional state but in a way that indicates that you can handle it and it is not threatening your own identity. This can be by a sympathetic comment (Aww…  I can see you are upset?), by warmth and concern in the vocal tone, use simple and direct language. 
• Sometimes it is not about finding a solution to a problem that is presented, sometimes it is all about being there and trying to find one!

The feedback from the workshop was really positive:

All participants found the workshop very helpful, well organised and designed. They thought there was a good mix of theory and practice. What they enjoyed most was the different scenarios, the group exercises and role play. They would have liked to extend the duration of the workshop if possible and dedicate longer time to group discussions.

We can’t wait to facilitate more workshops on parenting and mental health! Our future plans also include workshops on neurodivergence for both teachers and parents, as well as educational workshops about how to optimise learning based on positive reinforcement and attunement, for teachers.

Recommended books:

• Berry , P. (2020) The Book You Wish Your Parents Had read (And Your Children Will be Glad That You Did), Penguin Life.

• Green, Ross, W. (2021) The Explosive Child [Sixth Edition]: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children, HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

• Jenner, Sue. (2008) The Parent/Child Game. Bloomsbury Publishing.  ISBN: 0747596808, 9780747596806 (a very helpful and practical guide to set boundaries drawn from a rare combination of attachment based and behavioural psychology) 

• Tawwab, Nedra Glover. (2021) The Set Boundaries Workbook: Practical Exercises for Understanding Your Needs and Setting Healthy Limits. Piatkus. ISBN: 034943137X, 9780349431376 [a more generic practical approach to setting healthy boundaries to others (not only our children)]

• Siegel, Daniel J., & Bryson, Tina Payne. (2011) The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind. Delacorte Press. ISBN: 978-1780338378 (for a very informative developmental look on children and their different needs depending on their developmental stage. This can help us choose the right ways of intervening/ setting boundaries depending on their needs.)