Assistance

Help and assistance from someone professionally trained and qualified outside of the immediate family or situation can help. Sometimes this may be only short term, with six meetings needing to take place. This may lead onto longer term work, which can be over several years of a child or young person being seen once a week. Because everyone and every situation is different, it is important to identify how best to help and find out what works best for you.

Psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapy may be beneficial in helping children and young people to overcome sleeping or eating difficulties, tantrums or if they are finding it hard to make friendships. Children and young people may find themselves feeling anxious, depressed, or lacking in confidence. Sometimes this can lead to eating disorders and self-harm. Quite often parents, teachers and other professionals seek help when they notice that a child or teenager is unhappy.

Psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapists may also be useful in helping children and young people who are struggling in school, have a learning difficulty, disability or are on the autistic spectrum. They may be underachieving or feeling that they can no longer cope. Sometimes children, and in particular young people, can exhibit aggressive behaviours when things are going wrong in their lives, with them being angry with those they often feel the closest to. Such challenging behaviours require assistance and it is possible for a psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapist to help by attempting to find some understanding through working with the child or young person.

As a psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapist, I have been trained to fully understand the difficulties of children and young people by closely observing their communications. By looking at how the child communicates through not only their language, but importantly through their play and behaviour, it is possible to begin to understand their difficulties that I am then able to put into words.

Relationships

Because psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapists are interested in understanding not only the presenting difficulties, but also how this fits in with the whole family and the places where difficulties occur, we often think about relationships and how these may or may not have an influence.

Some children encounter various difficulties with relationships, or in some instances, forming attachments with their parents or carers. Attachment difficulties or disorders are particularly common amongst fostered or adopted children, which can often lead to adults feeling that they cannot get close or even feel unable to parent their children. Children themselves can often feel ashamed and confused, as they find that the close relationships to their parents or carers that they yearn for, are the very thing that causes them distress, anger and insecurity. I have many years experience of specialism in assisting not only children who are fostered or adopted who find it hard getting close to people, but also children who for many reasons struggle with allowing their own parents to develop loving and caring relationships with them.