Debra Vickroy, MS, MFT
PSYCHOTHERAPY
Psychotherapy is a process that involves sharing information about yourself – feelings, thoughts, history, ideas, perspective, relationships, etc. – in order to improve your mental and emotional health. It can be effective for many people in resolving personal and relationship problems. But it is not effective for everyone.
When engaged in the process of psychotherapy, it may be important to realize that bringing about change in ones inner world (thoughts, feelings, ideas, etc.) may take time and result in some distress or disruption because change is often uncomfortable.
Children and Families in Psychotherapy
It is important to recognize that children have their own voices and their own resources for resolving their own problems.
The resources that children bring to their own therapy include an active and alive imagination, their feelings, their senses and their limited life experience. Children often engage the world through their imaginations, senses and feelings much more than they do through intellectual thinking. Therefore, these are the realms that psychotherapy must use to reach and help children.
Adolescents on the other hand, need to develop their critical thinking and problem solving skills, so respond readily to using intellectual thinking in addition to their imaginations, feelings and senses.
It is exciting to watch children grow beyond the trauma and problems that brought them into therapy.
Working with children invariably means working with a community of people in addition to the child. Children are part of a family in which parents and siblings sometimes need to be considered and seen to facilitate healing. They are also part of a school community in which they sometimes exhibit problems and which can also help in addressing these problems.