Do you envy other people's children? This child with a problem is a typical "other people's family" child.
Before entering high school, this girl had excellent academic performance, grade ranking, and various awards, which are the capital that parents can show off in the circle of friends.
Of course, girls have also successfully entered the local key middle schools. Parents in other families secretly envy them and go home to educate their children. Unexpectedly, this girl had psychological problems.
Entering high school, girls are no longer top-notch grades, and slowly begin to depressed. In the end, due to sick leave and unable to keep up with schoolwork, the girls refused to go to school anymore, and the parents had no choice but to drop out of school for their children.
The school teacher also recommends that parents take their children for psychological counseling. But after the parents took their children to do it several times, they were not satisfied with the results of the consultation.
The reason is that this is not a child’s disease alone, but a “disease” of the entire family.
The parents of this family place too much emphasis on their children's grades, so that the children equate grades with self-worth. When performance drops and you can't keep up with your own efforts, the self-worth system collapses. Children will naturally be depressed.
and so on, all belong to the family's poor living conditions.
Children who grow up under bad living conditions, after entering puberty, various psychological problems begin to emerge. For example, severe behavioral disorders, addiction problems, eating disorder , and even schizophrenia.
Why do you say that children are so affected by the family? Because all aspects of child development are decisively affected by family background.
You can evaluate it,Does your family have the elements of good psychological flexibility:
- Open communication. Allow and encourage children to express their ideas, and parents can truthfully say their own suggestions.
- Good emotional communication. Does not contain ridicule, suppression, and derogation.
- can handle rights, roles, and tasks flexibly. Family tasks can be flexibly assigned, so that each member can experience a sense of value.
- can use social support. Don't refuse to ask for help.
- Cohesive common concept, mutual recognition and value between family members.
Children who grow up in families who do not have one of them are more prone to physical and mental disorders.
So if you want to treat your child's problems, you have to work on the family instead of just staring at the child for behavior correction.
What is the difficulty when taking children for psychological counseling?
Psychological counseling is mostly a verbal therapy. For adults, it is easy to accept and understand. But for children, the effect will be greatly reduced.
Because some children are young, they are not able to understand the counselor's words or psychological education; because only children older than six years old can understand the complex questions of the counselor.
Some children have entered the rebellious period, and they think that the counselor is the "accomplice" of their parents and adopt a passive resistance to psychological counseling;
other children are shy or have entered a state of depression, He didn't speak at all during the whole process.
So for children, game-style psychological counseling is more acceptable. Because the game meets the special talents of children during childhood: the ability of imagination, fantasy and emotional performance.
mentioned in the book " Game Space System Treatment of Psychological Problems for Children and Adolescents ": Through games,Let family members enhance emotional communication with each other, and the new rules of behavior developed in the process will also help to discover the differences between each other.
The game is also a kind of exploration, which can help express the internal conflicts of family members. Learning objects, affairs, situations, and roles through game behaviors in order to develop higher mental processes.
Let the whole family enter into psychological counseling, which is to do family systemic treatment. The goal of system therapy is to guide the visitor from a position of incompetence and helplessness to a state of self-efficacy of .
Parents think that by sending their child to the consultation room, the child will begin to change and get better. In fact, the best progress can only be made when a child has the support of his parents.
So what is the systematic family therapy ?
System therapy does not directly change people, but creates a changing environment
After entering the consultation room, the psychological counselor will first help the family and locate the "problem." (Parents who go for family counseling can evaluate their first counseling experience through the following content.)
1. The counselor introduces himself to the visiting family, and briefly preaches the counseling setting/counseling psychological education. The purpose is to enhance the safety of family members and make them familiar with the counselor and the counseling environment.
2. The counselor invited every family member who visited to describe in detail the problems involved in the behavioral level.
3. The counselor helps family members to make specific or specific expressions. For example: When did the problem start? What prompted you to make up your mind to come over for psychological counseling? What are the first signs of the problem?
4. For young children, psychological counselorsUse simple words or through games to externalize the problem. For example: Mom and Dad brought you here because they wanted to know how to make you happier. Or let the child express through drawing. An angry child may be full of strong colors and exaggerated and uncomfortable graphics.
5. Understand the family's expectations of the counselor.
6. The psychologist assessed whether there is an urgent problem with crisis intervention in this family? For situations where family members are at risk of suicide, the psychological counselor needs to inform the family to accompany them 24 hours a day and provide a suicide prevention hotline.
After the first conversation, the idealized effect should be achieved (self-evaluation by the counselor after the first consultation):
- Use the information collected in the first interview to make hypotheses, Get ready for the next consultation
- In the first interview, I established contact with every family member and helped them feel as comfortable as possible
- showed a clear conversation structure to guide the whole process_ li43li
- Establish a working relationship with your family, don’t be “too professional” or appear too personal. Accusations and criticisms
- all the solutions tried before
- understand the family's world view, the language mode, communication style and problem perspective of each family member
- begin to understand the family recurring around this problem The interactive mode of
If the family-style system counseling goes well, the counselor can combine the game method to let family members realize the new way,Deal with family issues.
Game method 1: Applying metaphors
metaphors can activate the perceptual and image-like comprehension ability of the "right hemisphere".
Use metaphor as an indirect communication method, which is less likely to cause resistance. Through a form, an impression, or an expression, concrete refers to another topic.
For cases where parents come to family counseling for children with low learning ability, psychological counselors can use metaphorical methods to make parents understand the children; let the children accept themselves and reduce anxiety.
" Game Space Children and Adolescents Psychological Problems System Treatment " will use metaphors for such children: the difference between "a Mercedes-Benz" and "a diesel engine car" .
Anyone familiar with engines knows that diesel engines need more time to warm up. But as long as it is activated, it will run very well.
This inspires the child's confidence even more, and makes the child feel that as long as he "starts" well, he will not be worse than other children. Compared with the original criticism and disappointment of parents, this is obviously more acceptable to children.
or a discount store computer. Its hardware configuration is very good, but some components are not well debugged with each other. If too many programs are started at the same time, I don't know when it will crash. So at this time, we need to close some programs or press the restart button, so that we can continue to work.
Parents and children can understand that for children, don't give multiple tasks at the same time. Let the children complete one of the tasks first, accumulate successful experience and behavioral experience, and then they can develop better and better.
These can all be presented in the form of story metaphors in the game consultation method.
Game Mode 2: Ritualization
Rituals convey a sense of order and safety, strengthen family cohesion, and are a protective factor in the development of children.The daily rituals in the family will provide direction and positioning for the children.
For example: bedtime story; before leaving the house, you have to say goodbye to your family. The school's flag-raising ceremony, award ceremony, etc. allow children to experience a sense of seriousness and honor.
So for ritualized operations. Careful preparation is a prerequisite for ritualization, otherwise the ritual will appear empty and unnatural.
You can self-test the ritualization of your family by asking the following questions:
- Is there any form of mutual problem at home that can express "It's great to meet you"?
- Those rituals can enhance the family’s "feeling that we are one" and also estimate individual freedom?
- Are there any family celebrations? What are the good forms when larger families get together?
- How can the existing rituals be rearranged so that everyone can feel valued in their consciousness?
- Is there a family culture of mutual appreciation, mutual celebration or mourning?
- Is there any important time that passes without ceremony? For example, the death of a loved one or the divorce of parents?
The lack of rituals will weaken the identity of the family and the individual.
There is a problem family. The family is an only child and is in puberty. He has a bad attitude towards his parents, and even beats and scolds his parents for not getting the pocket money.
The ritualization issues of this family include: father’s birthday, celebrated every year, family gatherings. On mother’s birthday, there is no celebratory atmosphere or behavior.
For daughters, although they will be accustomed to it, this ritualized asymmetry will be reflected in the daughter's different attitudes towards parents and the daughter's gender identity.
In the subconscious, the daughter has anger and attack on the father. Because the father did not treat the mother fairly. There is not only anger towards the mother, but also guilt. The anger was that the mother swallowed her anger, making herself look sick. The one who apologizes is that as a daughter, she did not win "respect" for her mother.
Under the contradictions and conflicts of multiple emotions, the adolescent daughter expresses the problems of the whole family through behavioral disorders.
Then, through game-style processing, the family must perform reciprocal rituals, allowing daughters to express their apologies to their mothers and propose compensatory rituals.
Behind every problem child, there are always various family problems. "Playspace Children and Adolescents' Psychological Problems Systematic Treatment" is a "textbook" for children and adolescents' systemic treatment. The author Rudiger Retzlaff is an authority in the field of family treatment of children and adolescents' psychological problems.
The family-style counseling method mentioned in the book is widely used in the field of psychotherapy for children and adolescents. Help troubled families escape the vicious circle of "the more they want to solve the problem, the more they fall into the problem".
rigorously explained the framework premise of systemic treatment from the theoretical level, and then entered the field of practice, teaching in detail the construction of the treatment system, language and action-oriented interventions, simulation interventions and other interventions.
Because systemic therapy draws a lot of inspiration from children's psychodynamic therapy, human-centered therapy, behavior therapy and other therapeutic schools, it is suitable for reading by psychotherapists, parents, psychology students and researchers.
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