Imaginif

Children go to counselling to help integrate problems or difficulties. Something may have happened to them, they may have witnessed something awful, or their behaviour is unacceptable to the people around them.

Parents and carers often expect instant change; improvement in the child’s behaviour and thought processes. Just as counselling may initially stir up adult difficulties and make things tougher to begin with (often things get worse before they get better) so too does this happen with children.

Knowing what happens in child counselling can help parents, teachers or carers to grasp why it may seem that nothing is changing immediately. Although child counsellors are mostly open, sharing and caring people, we do sometimes forget that not everybody understands the way we work or why we work that way.

Just as making a cake or new recipe is guided by a recipe, so do we child counsellors have recipes for helping to create change - a model (case plan) of how we plan our sessions with the child and what we do step by step. This is often referred to as our therapeutic intervention or our framework of counselling. In court, child counsellors will often be asked to state what their treatment plan for the child was. Having a plan means having something to follow, something to guide the way child counsellors work and what they do.

A common framework of child counselling is Geldard’s Spiral of Therapeutic Change (pictured). This spiral will explain to you what a child counsellor may be doing with your child behind closed doors. It is called a spiral because often the process of child counselling is not linear, clear cut and plain sailing. When things get uncomfortable or scary, the child will often withdraw from the counsellor and the counsellor needs to go back and start the process of joining over again.

The 10 steps to counselling children:

1. The child comes to counselling because there is an emotional disturbance of some sort
2. The child and counsellor join (relationship building time)
3. The child begins to tell their story when they trust and like the counsellor
4. The child’s awareness of issues increases
   1. Often the issues are too painful or embarrassing and the child will deflect or withdraw.
   2. The counsellor helps the child to deal with their resistance to the pain. If successful, the counselling process moves to the next step.
   3. If the child cannot deal with the pain and continues to avoid then the counsellor changes the media (art, books, sand play, toys, etc) they are using to help reach the child and they go back top the stage where the child tells their story. Often a different media enables a child to tell their story in a different way.
5. The child continues to tell their story and to get in touch with strong emotions
   1. Once the emotional flood gate is open, many new or hidden emotions come out.
   2. New issues often emerge here and can cause further emotional disturbance for the child. It is the counsellors job to take the child back to the beginning of the spiral of therapeutic change and to start the process over again.
6. The child deals with their self destructive beliefs
7. The child looks at different options, choices and ways of behaving
8. The child rehearses and experiments (in the safety of the counselling room) with new behaviours
9. The Child reaches resolution and is ready to face the world again
   1. Sometimes the child will throw up undisclosed issues at this point and the child therapist needs to start at the beginning again to deal with these issues separately.
10. The goal of child counselling, adaptive functioning is achieved.

Child counsellors all work in different ways and have different tools of trade. Some child counsellors only use themselves and their words as a tool for therapeutic change. Others will only ever use paper and pencils. A child therapy room may boring or it may be full of wonderful and exotic looking treasures. There may be paint, glue, feathers, books, dolls, dress ups, toys, puppets, the list of resources is endless. 

If you are taking your child to a child counsellor you are well within your rights to ask the child counsellor what model of counselling they work from. If they tell you just the theories they work from (usually they will give you names of people who have worked out why kids sometimes become emotionally unravelled), ask them to explain in a step by step process how they will create change in your child, not why they will create change in your child.

If you are a child or family focused therapist, Imaginif offers supervision. Face to face, telephone or email supervision can be arranged if you live in Australia. If you are looking for some protective play resources or innovative ideas on how to use common items in therapy, have a browse through our protective play shop or register in our safety talk forum to receive a copy of our eBook jam packed with therapeutic games and activities designed around the BITSS model of protective behaviours.

Reference: Geldard, K & D (2002) Counselling Children. Sage:London

You may also be interested in these short articles about children, trauma and child therapy:
Teaching emotional intelligence
The affects of childhood trauma
Learning ability in traumatised children
The effect of trauma on secure attachment in children

Article by Megan Bayliss