Using arts and imagery to help children and teenagers talk about their lives

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This webinar from four senior child and adolescent psychotherapists will bring you a wealth of creative ideas and interventions to support your work with vulnerable children. The practitioners will demonstrate how the use of images and the arts are powerful communicative tools for both children and teenagers.  Saying to a child, “Can you show me?” rather than “Can you tell me?’  can bring psychological safety as well as ease of expression, when everyday words so often do not do justice to what they want to say. Literal words can misrepresent, underplay, hide rather than reveal, and frequently offer only approximations to any recalled experience.

The presentations are illustrated throughout with moving therapeutic work with children and teenagers to demonstrate key interventions and empathic statements.

Without help to talk about painful life events, children are left simply reacting, with all manner of fall out in terms of behaviours that challenge, physical complaints, bodily disturbances, and mental health problems.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  With the use of symbols and images, children can stand back and reflect instead of react. They can share with their emotionally available adult, what needs to be talked about, witnessed, grieved, protested about, as well as what needs to be delighted in, laughed about, and savoured.  Research shows that this act of collaborative sense making, affect labelling and mentalisation is highly preventative of long-term mental and physical ill-health.

Benefits from viewing:

• Learn many ways to support children to use images to externalise their inner world
• Understand how feelings when organised and externalised in art images, can be contemplated, safely from a distance, and then assimilated.
• Understand how images can be used by children and young people to bring unthought about feelings and self- states to conscious awareness which brings empowerment to make positive changes to their lives
• Learn about the sheer relief that children so often feel in having ‘said it’ in a way that is listened to understood and made sense of by an emotionally available adult.
• Learn about the danger of un-storied emotions and how using art media and emotion cards can bring vital narrative contextualisation that leads to recovery from trauma.
• Watch key interventions and ways of empathising that bring about real change in a child or young person’s life, setting them free from debilitating mental health issues.