Counselling for Children in Reading, Oxford, Wallingford and Thame.
If you’re here because a child or teenager needs a little help then I’m sorry to hear it. It can be heartbreaking to watch our own children suffer. It’s hard to see them suffering and it’s also hard to realise that no matter how hard we try, we aren’t always the solution. I’m afraid that the past two years have been terribly damaging for children and adolescents. I’m completely inundated with enquiries and am working to full capacity already. Therefore, if your child is experiencing difficulties in 2022 then please believe be, you are far from being alone.
If you live in or around Reading, Oxford, Wallingford or Thame and need some child psychotherapy for your teen, tween or primary aged child then perhaps I could help.
I have been working with children of eleven years and upwards ever since I began my work as an adult psychotherapist / hypnotherapist. This was permitted because I spent almost twenty years as a secondary school teacher and so knew the age-group inside out. I have also recently qualified as a counsellor for children and adolescents (a two year MA in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy) in order that I can broaden my skill-base and work with younger children too.
How could I help your son or daughter?
I have learned to integrate my initial training in hypnotherapy into other forms of therapy suitable for children as young as four years of age. Some great things have happened already.
Bedwetting (enuresis), toilet accidents (encopresis), separation anxiety, general anxiety, social anxiety, exam nerves, sports performance issues, insomnia, phobias, anger management, school refusal and other issues in children as young as six have all been worked with successfully.
I am combining and adapting adult forms of psychotherapy and hypnotherapy into a model suitable for young people of four to eighteen years of age. I am learning to use puppets, music, art, lego, play and sand in order to learn about and work with the unconscious minds of children.
These are all means of helping a young person to process, come to understand and resolve their difficulties. These are all means through which children and young people can come to appreciate and harness their strengths. Counselling for children isn’t a matter of sitting them down and talking them half to death.
Since training as a child and adolescent counsellor young people have become a third of my case-load. I love working with them and I love seeing them resolve those problems which brought them to see me.
Why can’t you just hypnotise them and get it done?
Hypnotherapy is a wonderful tool. It can do so much to help people and yet it has its limitations with children and the younger they are the more its limitations become apparent.
Younger children are often unable to focus their attention for the time it can sometimes take to use hypnotherapy to its greatest effect. Sometimes they are so young that their grasp of language is insufficient for a purely talking therapy. Furthermore, talking therapies fall short when children are at a stage of their development where they are unable to verbally express or cognitively comprehend their feelings, fears and thoughts.
It was for these reasons (and my inexperience) that I once refused to work with children under the age of 11. I realised, however, that others could do it and that I could learn to do it too.
I also realised that there was an enormous need for people who were adequately trained to work with children and that this need wasn’t being met. There is absolutely nobody, to my knowledge, in Oxfordshire and Berkshire formally trained in both hypnotherapy and child / adolescent psychotherapy. So, here I am.
A properly trained child and adolescent psychotherapist can work to achieve things, when these approaches are combined with hypnotherapeutic methods, which others cannot.
Other forms of therapy can reveal their unconscious minds.
Freud once said that dreams were the ‘royal road to the unconscious mind’. If you’ve ever closely watched a child freely playing then you’ve seen that there are other roads too.
What a child paints or draws, how they play, what they do when presented with a tray of sand can all be observed and used to decode what is really going on for that child at that point in time.
This picture of a sand-tray contains all kinds of potential symbolism which can be used by a skilled child and adolescent psychotherapist. These approaches, when combined with empathy and forms of hypnosis and mindfulness appropriate to their age can achieve great things.
The following are excerpts from google reviews which are freely available online:
“We saw Paul for a very short time, 4 or 5 sessions in total spread out over a number of weeks and I could see big changes happen very quickly. My son is now a different child”
“Paul must be the best therapist I have come across. He helped my autistic son to gain self esteem and confidence, for which I am truly grateful.”
“Thanks Paul. I have my son back.”
Wallingford, Oxford, Thame and Reading. Resolved! Psychotherapy for Children could help!
If you’re looking for counselling for your child then Resolved! Psychotherapy for Children could be the answer. When combined with other forms of child therapy, hypnotherapy can greatly accelerate the process.
“We took him to one therapist for eighteen months and all they did was play.”
Well, perhaps there was more going on than simply play but I did appreciate the point. Eighteen months is a long time for any parent or child to wait for improvement. I work a little more directively than do many child therapists, believing that autonomy, freedom of expression and the time needed to achieve therapeutic goals are important, but that results within a reasonable time frame are important too.
Therefore, if you live in or around Reading, Oxford, Wallingford or Thame and are looking for some help for your teenager, tween or younger child, please consider giving me a call. Perhaps I could help.
As you can see below, I now have my own room in Reading, a room which is fully equipped for play therapy, sand-tray work, puppets, music, art and crafts. Such activities are wonderful ways of working with the child’s unconscious mind, building a relationship and eliciting material which can then often be used in hypnotherapy sessions.
You can contact me via telephone: 07786123736 / 01865600970 or 01183280284. You can also email me at paul@resolvedhypnotherapy.co.uk. You could also contact me using the contact form in the footer of this page.