What we do
The Centre for Emotional Health is a national charity whose vision is for everyone to live an emotionally healthy life.
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Our mission is to promote an approach to life and relationships that equips and supports families* and communities to be emotionally healthy.
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*Family for us is an inclusive word and means not only those connected biologically, it can include anyone who is special in our life.
We provide high quality training courses and resources for professionals working with families, parents and carers including foster carers and adoptive parents in a variety of settings.
Our approach is relational and empowering and highlights the link between behaviour and feelings in the context of relationships. Our programmes develop self-awareness, empathy and self-regulation, supporting people to build and maintain positive relationships.
What is emotional health?
Emotional health is the set of skills and beliefs that shape our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It is affected throughout our lives by our relationships and our experience of the relationships around us.
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What does good emotional health look like?
Good emotional health is being aware of, understanding and managing our whole range of emotions. Positive relationships support us to build healthy beliefs about ourselves and others.
Our evidence-based emotional health model
There are seven components of emotional health, and while each is important within its own right, it’s how they work together that forms our emotional health.
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We've written a blog that explains our model and why emotional health is important.
The Nurturing Programme
All our work is underpinned by the Nurturing Programme which provides adults and children with the understanding, skills and ability to lead emotionally healthy lives, build resilience, empathy, self-esteem and support positive relationships.
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The American child psychologist Dr Stephen J. Bavolek developed The Nurturing Programme based on his research into family interactions where he identified four destructive parental behaviour patterns.
The Nurturing Programme was developed to address these, and uses the following four constructs as building blocks of emotionally healthy relationships:
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Self-awareness
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Appropriate expectations
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Empathy
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Positive discipline
โAlthough the four constructs were originally developed within the context of parenting, they apply to all areas of our work.
They are the building blocks for all emotionally healthy relationships, and are particularly important in forming emotionally healthy relationships between parent and child, teacher and pupil, and manager and employee.