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Therapy and
Support for Children
Childrens therapy is a term used to define the use of creative pursuits or activities in a therapeutic process and aim to facilitate well-being, positive mental health, change, interpersonal skills, affect regulation and trauma interventions. Creative or expressive therapies can enhance the therapeutic process
“more directly and more immediately than do any of the more traditional verbal therapies” (Zwerling, 1979).
Unlike conventional ‘talk therapy’, which is often unsuitable for very young children or children with learning or speech difficulties, creative therapies promote the child’s self expression through creativity, the use of imagination and kinetic engagement while providing a safe ‘distance’ from the underlying issue itself, allowing the child to communicate inner and outer experiences that words cannot.
Children and trauma
Creative mediums are very well suited to working with children or adolescents who have experienced trauma. Trauma affects many areas of the body and brain, for example, the brainstem, which provides for life supporting autonomic functions, including defence mechanisms and these defence mechanisms can reflect early patterns of trauma, giving the therapist clues as to how best attend to the child.
Each individuals capacity for social interaction is shaped by the earliest experiences of synchrony with the primary caregiver, where healthy attachment is formed through physiological and emotional regulation, the harmonic state of homeostasis” (McGrath, p83).
Creative therapies not rely on the client being able to access to the executive functioning cortical area of the brain which has only a limited ability to process trauma (van der Kolk, 2015) and is thus suited to even very young children and adolescents.
Play Therapy
Play therapy provides a neurosequential model (bottom up) and a facilitative relationship where the therapist attempts to understand how the child views her world through the act of play. First developed by Virginia Axline in the 1940’s built and incorporated the Rogerian ideas of congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding. Play therapy is less of an intervention and more the actual mechanism for change for the child.
Benefits of Play Therapy
Panksepp (1998) identified play as a primary process in the more primitive parts of the brain, thus play therapy is well suited to developmental traumas or children experiencing attachment issues. Play therapy has been shown to be an effective method of treatment for children presenting with myriad issues including internalising and extrenalising or disruptive behaviours (Garza and Bratton, 2005; Schottelkorb and Ray, 2009; Kottman et al., 2017).
LeBlanc and Ritchie (1999) meta analysis research on play therapies have shown us that play therapy is
an effective intervention regardless of the presenting problem of the child” (Yasenik, L., & Gardner, K., 2012, p. 20).
Art Therapy
Art Therapy emerged in the 1940’s through the work of Adrian Hill in England and Margaret Naumberg in the United States. Art therapy provides a means of connection and meaning (Moon, 1998) and involves art making within a therapeutic relationship where the methods and outputs of the creative process may reflect the clients unconscious thoughts, feelings or behaviours. There are many approaches to art therapy, due to the constraints of this essay, these will not be explored.
Benefits of Art Therapy
Art therapy has been shown as an effective treatment for a variety of presenting issues, such as abuse, behavioural disorders, trauma, and other forms of mental ill-health.Donald Winnicot (1971) realised that art could be a transitional object for the child, and therefore transformative in a clinical setting The experiential nature of art making involves the holistic nature of being in that it incorporates kinaesthetic experience and all of the senses and acts as a
transitional object in that it is a concrete record of therapy and a reminder of the client– therapist relationship between meetings”(Malchiodo, 2007).
Art allows the client to externalise their internal world in a safe, neutral way that provides for curiosity and helps clients test reality.
In the art therapist’s presence, the art work is an expression of how the self organises internally as well as in relationship to others. It is a visual reiteration of the interplay between person and their environment” (Hass-Cohen, 200:21).
Viewed in a neuro-sequential framework, art allows for accessing the unconscious, limbic resonance and affect regulation and enables therapeutic atonement while promoting neuro-plasticity. Art therapy is effective in supporting adolescents with loss or abandonment issues also;
The fear of abandonment underlies many of the other fears and disturbing feelings that are expressed by adolescents” (Moon, 1998, p. 167).
The creative process of art making and the vital therapeutic relationship permits an adolescent to communicate these fearful and dangerous feelings, non-verbally while staying in contact and relationship with the therapist.