Imaginif...the spirit of Christmas lasted.

Child counselling is one of those hidden areas that many parents want to bust open. A good counsellor will explain to a parent what the counsellor is doing and how it works.

Knowing what happens can help parents, teachers or carers understand why it may seem that behaviours are not 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.

This will help you understand why child counselling often takes longer than you want it to.

Using a common and popular model of child counselling (Geldard’s Spiral of Change), there are 10 steps of child change:

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.

Talk to your child’s counsellor and ask what model they are working from. Ask to be kept up to date with where your child is at in the therapeutic spiral of change. Share information and do any homework that the counsellor sets for you.

If you do not want to or cannot afford to go to a child counsellor, consider using books to help solve problems or open up talk. This is called, bibliotherapy. Find out more about bibliotherapy by joining my mail list (you get a free report on exactly how to turn any book into a do it yourself counselling session).