Creative Counselling

Working with Children

Many of the skills that are used in counselling adults can be transferred to counselling children, especially skills relating to art therapy and Gestalt experiments.

One of the main aspects of working with children that is different from adult work is their use of non verbal means of communication. Children's natural language is that of play and in therapy children will use play to communicate with the therapist.

Counsellors work within the 'symbolic distance' that the play offers by not relating the child's story or play to the child's real life. So, for example, if a child whose father is known to be aggressive and violent is playing with animals and the big animal is seriously beating up the small animal, the counsellor will say: 'that bear is being really beaten up, isn't it? Ow, ow ow!' or some such. She or he will not say, "does anyone do that to you?"

This is not just received wisdom. Whenever I have come to close to breaking the symbolic distance, the child has started to withdraw. If the child wants to talk in clear words, then they will. It can't be forced.

Children also work using paint, water, sand and other media. There is a corelation between the messiness of a child's play and the amount of healing that is taking place. Pouring great globs of paint into a mixing pot, only to discard it at the end of a session is entirely therapeutic. It can take some time for a counsellor to get used to the idea of the paint being 'used up' rather than 'wasted'.

Many children find that their play is facilitated if the counsellor can be playful too. It is a difficult line to walk: to be playful enough to give the child permission to play and to make their play interactive, without losing one's own ability to watch what is going on and to allow the child to lead.

Sometimes when the child is in the middle of playing, a beginning counsellor can feel very deskilled. Sitting on the carpet tracking a child's play can feel like 'doing nothing'. (For an extended example of what tracking might look like, I recommend the book Dibs: In Search of Self by Virginia Axline.)

Many is the time I have had the sense: What on earth am I doing? How can I call this therapy? But now I recognise this feeling for what it is. The child is deeply into unconscious (or at least unspoken) material and whether or not I know what is going on, therapeutic changes are happening. So now I can relax and trust the process.

There are a number of other issues to consider when working with children.

• Unlike most adults, children usually have no control over the circumstances in which they live and their choices may be very limited.
• Parental consent is usually necessary to work with children under the age of 16, although there is a grey area concerning the ability of older children to give consent for themselves.
• Confidentiality is more restricted than with adults. If a child is being harmed, it may be necessary to disclose this to the appropriate authorities. This needs to form part of the initial contract with the child.
• For Child Protection reasons, it seems sensible to see children in a room with a viewing panel which is accessible to other adults. It is not safe for the child, or for the counsellor's reputation, if a child is seen in complete privacy.

For these reasons I prefer to work with children within the support of an agency and not to see them as private clients.