By Michelle Ambalu
How Therapy Helps Children
Expressing thoughts and feelings in a way that helps us to feel understood by others is one of the most important abilities we can possess. Many issues children experience often result from barriers hindering the growth of this ability. It is of paramount importance to facilitate the development of this ability by helping children and their families identify and express their feelings in a way they have not been able to before.
Children may be experiencing or exhibiting issues such as anxiety, sadness, behavioral difficulties, poor social skills, trauma, bereavement, coping with divorce, and many other issues. Some of these issues result in part from a child’s inability to express themselves authentically due to their belief that others may not accept their feelings. Children need adults to communicate to them that their feelings are acceptable and not dangerous, wrong, or silly. Despite parents’ love and best intentions for their children, sometimes the help of a skilled therapist is needed to assist parents in communicating this to their children in a way they can understand and take in.
In working with children it is helpful to utilize their heightened imagination and creative potential to explore their thoughts and feelings and help them gain mastery. Children do well with insight-oriented work due to their decreased resistance to exploring abstract thoughts, feelings and dreams with talk and play therapy. This allows work to be done on a deeper level, allowing for lasting change.
When your child is in their therapist’s office drawing a picture, playing with a doll house, or even singing a song, he or she is letting them into his or her inner life through story-telling. The therapist’s job is to notice themes, patterns, and potential feelings present in their stories, and to help them process and communicate their inner life to others. With therapy, a child gets the opportunity to recreate their world with me, practice social skills, process and overcome scary feelings and prior trauma, and to triumph.
A Case Vignette (example from my own work with children to illustrate this approach)
I was in my twelfth session with a nine-year-old boy who was diagnosed with ADHD, just like almost every other young boy in treatment, it seemed to me. He had spent the last few sessions trying to prove to me what a bad kid he was by trying everything he could to make himself unwanted. This session he started with something different. He took a moment to examine some objects in my room, stared into my eyes for about seven seconds and then said, “Your purse is bigger today.” Before I could respond, he took out his handball and began hitting it against the wall, which is something he knew was ‘against the rules’.
Before attempting to put a stop to the pounding, I took a moment to think about what had occurred before the handball made its appearance. He was curious about the room and made a comment about my purse. I also thought of his jealousy of his younger brother who is the biological son of their mother, unlike my client whose birth mother died when he was a baby. In my response to him, I took a risk and said, “You mentioned my purse was bigger. What do you imagine might be in there?” He missed the ball which was on its way back to him from the wall, and sat on the floor with the ball rolling slowly to him. He looked up and said, “A new kid is in your purse, and you don’t want me anymore.” This was the day the therapy really began.