Is your child more anxious than they used to be? Or, is your adolescent hanging out with the peers who are a bad influence at school? At Wisdom Within Counseling, we specialize in play therapies, art, therapies, music therapies, and nature therapies for children and teenagers. Therapy is a safe place for children to learn to identify emotions, talk about how they feel, and find healthy ways to cope. Child therapy can help youth deal with ADHD, sexual abuse and unwanted touch, having an alcoholic parent, eating disorders, selective mutism, speech problems, and misophonia, and anxiety.
What is ADHD and how can child therapy in Old Saybrook, Connecticut help?
Children who suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder often need help learning how to make friends and socialize. Your child might say something awkward or be unaware how they are hurting a friend’s feelings.
Children with ADHD often have trouble focusing on activities like school work. They crave movement, so nature therapies can be great for children with ADHD. When a child with ADHD is easily distracted, they may not understand what is going on in school. Due to having a low attention span, child with ADHD often need more help around schoolwork.
How can family therapy help when you have a child with ADHD?
Family therapy and parenting counseling sessions can help family members learn how to support a child with ADHD. As well, children with ADHD may fidget, squirm, and have trouble sitting still. At Wisdom Within Counseling in Southeastern Connecticut, our therapists offer puppets, play dough, games, outdoor recreation activities, and scooters to help children release emotions in physical ways.
We embrace a child who has ADHD symptoms and their constant need for activity and movement. Sitting and talking in a traditional counseling setting may not be a good fit for a child with is suffering from ADHD and needs play, art, yoga, music, and nature therapies.
To begin, click below for a phone consult for emotional confidence tools through creative, holistic child therapy in Old Saybrook Connecticut.
Let’s talk about sexual abuse and unwanted touch in children.
Unfortunately, childhood sexual abuse and sexual trauma are much more common than people realize. A loved one, grandparent, or coach is often the perpetrator as they already have a trusting relationship with the child. When a child is sexually abused, they need to understand boundaries of consent. it is okay to ask for a hug and allow you child to consent to the hug, to learn consent.
Often, children who are sexually abused develop an over fixation on sexual behaviors and become hyper sexualized. Child therapy in Old Saybrook, Connecticut can help children understand healthy boundaries.
Children who experience sexual abuse and sexual trauma need help from child therapy to deal with the physical and emotional pain.
After experiences of sexual abuse or sexual trauma, your child may develop bed wetting, anger, irritability, headaches, constipation, or nausea. You may notice your child is more emotionally distraught than before the sexual trauma occurred.
At Wisdom Within Counseling in Southeastern Connecticut, the team of therapists offer children and families a safe place to recover and heal after sexual trauma and sexual abuse. Play therapies, art therapies, and creative expressive arts offer a language beyond words for children to talk about how they felt scared, distress, or sad.
Play therapies can help children process their feelings after sexual abuse
Sometimes, children feel an emotional attachment to their abuser when they person who abused them is a family member. So, children may also need help processing guilt after speaking up, if their loved one is arrested or put in jail.
To begin, click below for a phone consult for emotional confidence tools through creative, holistic child therapy in Old Saybrook Connecticut.
How does having a parent who is an alcoholic impact children and teens in counseling?
When a parent is an alcoholic, it may feel like your child is walking on eggshells around them. Their parent who is an alcoholic may show episodes of aggression or emotional abuse. As well, parents who abuse alcohol do not know how to truly empathize or cope with distressing emotions themselves.
Therefore, when a child has a parent who is an alcoholic, that child misses out on a healthy childhood. A parent who is alcoholic will not be nurturing or sensitive emotionally to their child’s needs. Parents who suffer from alcoholism teach their children inadvertently that emotional abuse, yelling, or aggressive behaviors are okay.
How does having a parent who is an alcoholic impact a child’s relationships as they grow up in a negative way?
Children who grows up with a parent who is an alcoholic may choose a romantic relationship in adulthood that is abusive, like the one that resembles their relationship with their parent in childhood. Parents who are alcoholics are more emotionally unavailable and unstable emotionally. Instead of helping with homework or creating a bedtime routine, a parent who is alcoholic may be drinking at the bar late into the morning hours. Children may have to deal with parents who are suffering from hangovers, yelling, name calling, criticism, irritability, and negative mood states.
Unfortunately, children with alcoholic parents tend to blame themselves for the choice their parents make.
Sometimes, children feel that if only they were a good girl or a good boy, their parent would finally come home from the bar, stop drinking, or treat them more kindly.
A child may believe that it is their fault that their parent is calling them names or chasing them around the house. In fact, their parent has a severe alcohol problem and a child is not to blame for the abuse they endure. Therapy can help children who have a parent who is an alcoholic learn to cope with their emotions in healthy ways.
A child therapist at Wisdom Within Counseling in Old Saybrook, Connecticut can be a positive role model for your child.
Your child can receive healthy influences and positive coping strategies from counseling at Wisdom Within. Lastly, children in therapy can gain healthy emotional development tools to better understand alcoholism and stop blaming themselves.
Obsessive compulsive disorder, anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and eating disorders in child therapy
Children who suffer from eating disorders also commonly have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms. As well, children as young as four years old may develop extreme picky eating behaviors or sensory issues around food. Additionally, if your adolescent is frequently dieting, over exercising, or counting calories, these are signs they have an unhealthy relationship with food. When your child expresses body shame, criticizes their own body, or fears gaining weight, these are signs of an eating disorder.
Eating disorders in children can be life threatening and therapy is important sooner than later.
Children can benefit from counseling to overcome food fears and anxiety associated with specific foods. Other symptoms of eating disorders in children include skipping meals, avoiding certain food groups, weight changes, and rigid rituals before and after eating food.
Lastly, children and teenager with disordered eating habits need counseling to overcome feelings of fear, anxiety, self-hatred, guilt and shame associated with eating.
To begin, click below for a phone consult for emotional confidence tools through creative, holistic child therapy in Old Saybrook Connecticut.
Can selective mutism, speech problems, and misophonia be helped in child therapy in Old Saybrook, Connecticut?
Misophonia is a hatred or dislike of sounds.
Certain sounds like chewing can lead to emotional disturbances and irritability. Uncomfortable sounds can lead to negative behavioral responses, anger, fight, flight, and freeze responses, and anxiety.
To add, misophonia is a strong reaction to specific sounds. Having a diagnosis pf misophonia leads children to have a reaction to sounds such as dripping water, friends or family chewing, snapping gum, or repetitive noises, such as pen clicking or pencil tapping.
Commonly, with misophonia and sensory problems, children react in negative ways when irritated by sounds they find disturbing.
As well, children may become angry, frustrated, enraged, or panicked when they hear their trigger sounds. At Wisdom Within Counseling in Southeastern Connecticut, offers child therapy, which can include lifestyle recommendations.
How can therapy help families understand misophonia?
In therapy, children can feel the support from their family around certain triggering times like meal times. Children may refuse to eat in the cafeteria at school due to sounds of other children chewing. Also, children with misophonia may need noise cancelling headphones.
Ear plugs may also be an option to reduce noises that are emotionally challenging. Counseling for children can help empower and educate parents on a sensitivity to sounds. Family members can create “noise-free” zones within living spaces such as a child’s bedroom. Child therapy in Old Saybrook, Connecticut can help children feel safe around certain sounds.
Selective mutism, speech problems, and misophonia are often related to anxiety disorders.
Selective mutism is a disorder child may develop when they stop speaking in certain or all environments, after they were confident speaking previously.
A child with selective mutism may be newly nervous about a new social environment. Sometimes, children with selective mutism are anxious, uneasy or socially awkward. Selective mutism can look different for each child. Not longer speaking at home or not speaking to friends to teachers at school is common. At times, children are rude, and other times they are shy and socially withdrawn.
How does a child with selective mutism appear?
A child with selective mutism may look tense and stiff, tense or agitated. In more severe cases, children with selective mutism may have temper tantrums when they get home from school due to the sensory overload and pressure of not talking at school. Children with selective mutism may not feel it is safe to express themselves. At times, a trauma like a parent’s divorce, sexual abuse experiences, or multiple abrupt moves can cause a child to develop selective mutism.
The team of therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling in Southeastern Connecticut support a language beyond words through art, yoga, music, drama, and nature therapies.
If your child is not speaking due to selective mutism, our group of therapists specialize in offering other ways for your child to communicate. Wisdom Within Counseling in Southeastern Connecticut specializes in helping children gain confidence and overcome anxiety.
What are holistic, creative therapies in child therapy in Old Saybrook, Connecticut?
Whatever the case, yoga, music, art, nature, and play therapy can help children overcome emotional obstacles. A child’s natural state of being is through playing and being creative. So, at Wisdom Within Counseling, we know how to step into a frustrated child’s world.
In child counseling, your youngster can rebuild trust in the world and confidence in themselves. As well, children need joyful movement therapies to gain self-esteem and positive coping tools. Children do not do well just sitting and talking in a traditional counseling sense.
Art, yoga, music, drama, and nature therapies help children express themselves in many different ways.
From play therapy, children can process their life story, heal from emotional pain, and do so while a safe emotional distance from their problems. As well, play therapy and expressive art therapies can bring your child’s suppressed feelings to the surface.
Where can we help children who need therapy?
In New London County in Connecticut, Wisdom Within Counseling helps children and teenagers in Bozrah, Colchester, Franklin, Griswold, Groton, Lebanon, Ledyard, Lisbon, Lyme, Montville, New London, North Stonington, Norwich, Preston, Salem, Sprague, Stonington, Voluntown, and Waterford, Connecticut.
