A Safe place – Counselling for children and teenagers to explore their strengths and any challenges or difficulties they are facing
I offer one-to-one counselling for children and teenagers, (3-18 years), near Lichfield Staffordshire. I also offer online counselling sessions for children 8 years and above.
I provide a safe place where children and teenagers can bring their vulnerabilities. Building on their strengths they respond to my approachable, emphatic, and non-judgmental approach. This builds trust and enables them to explore any challenges they are experiencing.
In addition, I provide support for Parents.
Counselling for Children
Coming to counselling may seem a strange experience for a child. It is important for your child to feel comfortable in the work so they are able to engage and access the support they need. Using what’s familiar to your child, such as play, (e.g., toys, sand, puppets, books, play dough) and the expressive arts, (e.g., drawing, painting, clay, craft activities) helps to create a sense of normality and safety. These mediums provide another way for a child to ‘talk’ and express themselves.
Using these familiar toys and mediums I help youngsters to express and explore their feelings and to look at their strengths. Working this way helps children to find the words to describe the challenges they are experiencing.
As well as being fun, the expressive arts and play enables youngsters to communicate and explore their feelings and difficulties at a much deeper level than simply through words alone. They can help your child make sense of their experiences, provide emotional release and aid healing with any traumatic events they may have experienced.
This creative approach to counselling addresses a diverse range of challenges providing a positive environment for self-awareness, self-expression, and self-development, as well as improved emotional well-being.
Counselling for teenagers
Teenagers have a reputation for being difficult to engage and communicate with. My approach is to explore, with the teenager, what their interest/s are and what this means to them. This may be the music they like, the words to songs they like, or the video games they are into. In this way, I can enter into their world. Exploring the characters in a video game or the avatar they have chosen can lead easily to exploring the challenge they are experiencing.
The expressive arts are also available. Some teenagers like to create their own music or songs which express their feelings and the challenges they are facing. Sculpture is also popular as a way of visually showing what is going on for the teenager. Other teenagers like creating stories, maybe for a video game. These stories are a way of expressing the challenge/s faced and can be a way of finding a way to meet and overcome them.
When appropriate, working together, we can look at problem-solving for a particular difficulty and generating a number of helpful strategies that the teenager can use.
Support for Parents
Supporting your child through their development is one of the most important things that parents do. Sometimes you or your child may experience a challenge that leaves you, as a parent, unsure of the best way to help your child. This is when it can be helpful to seek another ‘pair of eyes’ to look at the difficulty.
The challenge could be bed wetting, sleep or eating difficulties, helping your child to happily attend school or a whole range of other things. Together we can explore what is happening. Having a non-judgmental listening ear hear your story and the challenge you face, can, in itself, resource you to be able to see beyond the difficulty. Together we can explore different ways to overcome the difficulty and decide on what interventions and strategies would be most helpful to overcome the challenge that you and your child are facing.
I offer one or more sessions to support you to find a way forward in helping your child. There is also after care provided in the form of phone calls or emails to discuss how the chosen interventions and strategies are working and to tweak these if necessary. Follow up face to face or online meetings are also available if required.
a mine craft pic (Medium)
avatar (Medium)
cards
Bear
feeling faces
FP elephant 2
FP multiples
craft activities
Get In Touch With Dolores Today
Rugeley Community Centre
Working online and In Person:
Rugeley Community Centre
Burnthill Lane
Rugeley
WS15 2HX
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