Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy
The difficulties and challenges that children and young people experience can impact on specific areas of their functioning and overall development, such as family life, peer relations and school. Not all children express their difficulties in the same way. Situations where children feel unable to use words to express their thoughts and feelings can indicate that children do not feel they have the tools to understand why they are feeling this way. At times children and young people can show others how they are feeling though their behaviour while at other times they can explain their thoughts and feelings clearly to others while still feeling stuck in difficult negative patterns.
Child and adolescent psychotherapy aims to build an in-depth, shared understanding of the child’s overall development and personality, including strengths, weaknesses and ways of relating. Extending from that understanding psychotherapy aims to support a child or young person to find new, more adaptive ways of expressing and regulating his or her emotional state, in the hope that this will enable him or her to build and sustain more positive and secure relationships with adults and peers. In working with children a child psychotherapist works through carefully observing and responding to a child’s play and communications and uses this as the basis for the therapeutic relationship. Adolescent psychotherapy can involve both talking and creative activities with the aim of establishing a therapeutic space within which the young person can express and understand their difficulties and any underlying emotional states. Thus, child and adolescent psychotherapy aims to promote a return to a healthier and more satisfying developmental trajectory, to help children and young people reach their full potential while building more satisfying relationships, resilience and self-esteem.
