Child & Adolescent Therapy
Does your teen have trouble dealing with their emotions? Is their behavior sometimes make it difficult to connect with them? Have they experienced sudden loss or trauma?
As they grow, adolescents develop social skills and emotional intelligence. This awareness helps them to develop into healthy, happy, and successful individuals. But some children have trouble processing their emotions and this often leads to behavior that negatively impacts their school life, home life, and overall well-being.
What Valley-High offers for adolescents
Therapy can offer your teen a safe space to work through their thoughts and emotions. With the help of a specialized therapist, teens can resolve problems, modify behaviors, and make positive and lasting changes.
The following are a few different types of psychotherapy available to adolscents and families. Each offers unique approaches and techniques to bring about positive outcomes. Sometimes a therapist may choose to use just one specific treatment, and other times he or she may find a combination of various treatments is the best approach.
DBT informed treatment
By focusing on core principals and skills from DBT therapy such as mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness, a therapist can work with your teen on getting better at understanding and regulating their emotions, responding to big emotions in healthy ways, and navigating relationships in positive ways.
Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR)
If your teen has experienced traumatic events or struggles with really negative thought patterns, this treatment could be beneficial for them. A trained professional works with your teen to help them identify faulty thought patterns and beliefs and replace them with more positive and adaptive beliefs with the help of bilateral stimulation.
Family Therapy
Family therapy is great for helping families improve communication so they can resolve issues. Sessions can include the entire family, just one or two individuals, or can even just be available to the parent to help learn tools and strategies for learning ways to support the teen's mental health and navigating dificult parenting situations.
Who is Therapy Right for?
At every age, children can be faced with life’s challenges. The following are some of the events and scenarios that can impact a child’s mental health and well-being:
- The death of a loved one
- Bullying
- Physical or sexual abuse
- Domestic violence
- Moving or attending a new school
- Divorce
- Social anxiety
- Depression
- ADHD or neurodivergence
- Eating disorders
Therapy is not a quick fix to a child’s behavioral or emotional issues. It is instead a thoughtful and comprehensive process that provides children with insights and skills so that they may become masters of their thoughts and feelings. This, in essence, is how children develop into happy, healthy, and successful adults.
If you would like to explore treatment options for your child, please give my office a call.