Families dealing with an anxious child often unknowingly “help” their child by doing the very things that make anxiety stronger. This workshop will give clinicians strategies that, from the very first session, show parents and children how to identify and interrupt the cognitive, behavioral, and physiological patterns of anxiety in children.
Brief hypnotherapy is particularly suited for children and adolescents with psychosomatic disorders, be-cause it exploits their natural abilities to fall into trance and uses a language of symbols and metaphors. It is based on the Ericksonian belief in the abilities of a child and is astonishing in its effectiveness.
Many clinicians focus on breathing, calming, or other distraction techniques when dealing with anxious children. However, focusing on "getting rid of the worry" often backfires, and leaves children and teens feeling more hopeless than engaged. But, when we use short "relaxation" practices with children to shift their patterns and beliefs--when we use this time of focus to deliver and seed valuable information--we create great opportunities for change, engagement, and skill-building. In this hour, I'll describe the tricks to getting the most out these exercises, without stepping into the trap of elimination.
The first factor that is of central importance is developing a strong therapeutic alliance with the client, mainly through empathically relating to him/her. Second, it will be shown how to guide adolescents and younger children to identify the specific Activating Event (AE) that is bringing about their unhealthy negative emotions through triggering self-defeating cognition(s).
Ericksonian Psychotherapy emphasizes the importance of utilization. When treating children, as therapists, we need to keep in mind that we also need to utilize whatever happens during therapy whether that can be a given behavior, if the child brings a toy for the consultation, their likes and also provide them with a wide array of resources they can access during therapy.
The panelist will compare and contrast their approaches to working with children and adolescents. Fundamental principles will be offered. Relevant research will be outlined.
Self-efficacy is an essential topic throughout life. Even babies like to control their environment, for example by moving a mobile by a wire attached to their foot. During school years and later on self-efficacy is very important. The contrary is helplessness, the opposite, which can lead to hopelessness and depression. While in certain situations we are able to influence our environment (or processes) directly, such as learning harder in order to get better math marks, this is not always possible.
After decades of working with anxious children and teens, I have two unshakable truths: families MUST be involved in treatment and anxious patterns are shifted through experiential learning. Working with the FOUR critical concepts to manage anxiety in families and the SIX patterns that must be interrupted, this workshop will describe HOW to create active, engaging assignments for families to do between sessions and describe the TEN favorites that I return to again and again.
Hypnotic conversations explore, evoke, engage and reallocate and experiential resources. Having hypnotic conversations with young people who meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), presents challenges both in relating and accessing resources. The challenge extends to helping their parents to better parent by seeing them as resourceful and capable.