CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHOTHERAPY
WHAT IS CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHOTHERAPY?
Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy (also known as child psychotherapy) seeks to help young people improve their understanding of themselves, of their experiences, and of how they go about their relationships. Child psychotherapists work with a range of issues including low mood and/or low self-esteem (depression), anxiety, difficulties in relationships (including bullying), self-harm and behaviour problems. The aim is to help young people increase emotional resilience – to build the capacity to bear intense distressing feelings so that they can be turned into thoughts rather than being converted in to symptoms. Instead children and young people can be freer to explore their potential and to find the internal resources to continue with their development; they can be freer to learn, more able to maintain healthier relationships and to make a positive contact with the opportunities coming their way.
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Difficulties that children and young people face can impact them in different ways, including in school, at home in family life, and in their relationships to friends. When young people are struggling to understand these situations they are often unable to helpfully express their thoughts and feelings through words. Child psychotherapists have particular skills in carefully observing, understanding and responding to what children and young people are communicating. Through the relationship with the therapist, children and young people are helped to make sense of their experiences in a reliable, trustworthy, and predictable setting over a period of time. Troubling, aggressive, painful or hurtful feelings, and confused thoughts that were being expressed through challenging behaviours and/or symptoms, can begin to be understood and put into words so that they stop interfering with living day to day.
If you would like to speak about the type of work I do to decide if this is the right fit for you or for your child, please get in touch using the details on my Contact page.
FOR YOUNG ADULTS
There could well be lots of pressures on you right now - perhaps due to issues related to studies or to work, things to do with family members, with your partner, or your friendship group. Navigating through what is happening socially, developing new interests and relationships, at the same time as keeping good connections to longstanding people in your life (like your parents), is far from an easy thing to do. It is normal to worry about whether you’re doing things right, and normal to feel that other people have a better grip on handling this than you do.
If you’re finding that the following things are happening a lot of the time, and that it’s been going on for a while, it might be helpful to seek therapeutic support:
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- Feeling quite disconnected from others.
- It can be quite a struggle to want to take care of yourself.
- It can feel as if there’s not a lot of point or purpose to the future.
- Feeling hopeless, sad or anxious can happen a lot.
- It can feel as if there could be something wrong inside of you.
- It can be very hard to concentrate or pay attention.
- Your appetite can fluctuate.
- You’re having thoughts about harming yourself and wanting to die.
- Changes in your mood can occur quite quickly and/or for no obvious reason.
- You have lost interest in previously loved activities.
- Difficulties adjusting to a new stage in life.
If these things are familiar to you and often occurring, then it might be worth considering therapy. Please Contact me if you think this might be a good idea and we can talk about how best to go forward.
FOR PARENTS
All parents experience difficulties at some point in knowing how to best support their child(ren) or young person. It can be deeply distressing to witness their sadness or anxieties and to see how these feelings are being conveyed to others. For instance, this might be from being quick to anger, withdrawing from spending time with family and friends, or through worries about school work.
Transitioning from adolescence into young adulthood is one of the most strenuous and toilsome of the developmental achievements. There are many tasks involved, including adjusting to being in a adult body, regulating one’s emotions, developing independence, forming an identity and self-concept, managing and re-negotiating family, peer relationships and gaining control over one’s impulses. A roller-coaster of emotional changes in teenagers comes with the territory. There is a natural instinct, or interest in, testing boundaries during adolescence.
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Due to the pressures of these tasks your young person will rely on you for emotional refuelling at times, as well as perhaps needing to be able to reject you at other times. They may want to both be left alone and to be loved at the same time – seemingly contradictory wishes. It can be very hard and pierciengly hurtful to be on the other end of these types of struggles. Young people are both striving for more independence (both in action and thought), as well as trying to find ways of managing the parts of themselves that are more vulnerable, and still needing support with the difficulties of teenage life. So it is not at all easy to know how to respond.
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It might be feeling as if the attempts you are making to help your young person with their distress are somehow redundant or ineffective. Or perhaps it feels that what you're doing is causing more difficulties in your relationship with them. Gaining some professional advice might be a useful source of support for you.
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How do you distinguish between behaviours and relationships that are standard and normal for young people today, from those that might warrant support?
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Relentless or sizeable shifts in mood over a sustained period of time.
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Both over-eating or not wanting to eat.
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Changes in concentration and attention.
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Changes in behaviour in relation to school, eating, and friendships. ​
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A young person who is often either tearful or withdrawn.
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If there have been significant changes within families such as a bereavement, separation or new partners.
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Please Contact me to have an initial conversation to see if I can be of help.
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FOR PROFESSIONALS
There a number of services I offer, should you be concerned about a child or young person with whom you work, or about a foster family, or a group of young people in your organisation.
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Specialist Assessments: I provide Psychoanalytic Developmental Assessments of a child or young person.
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Placement Support for kinship carers and foster carers.
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Consultations: I provide work-discussion groups for professionals, including teachers, social workers and health-visitors. I offer a developmental and relational model for thinking about the mental and emotional health of children and young people in your care. I facilitate staff-groups to help with the understanding of the impact on staff of both managing and responding to complex, disturbing behaviours in children and young people. For instance, for teachers who are managing self-harm and suicidal ideation, or social workers who are managing children and young people who are behaving in challenging ways.
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Training sessions to school staff and holiday-camp volunteers on issues connected to child and adolescent mental health including:
- Working with self-harm and suicide
- Attachment Theory
- Surviving Adolescence; adolescence as a developmental stage