Part 6: The Therapist…
Image Credit: Mikhail Nilov
Our Counselling/Therapy Session:
Our video appointment was just between me, my husband and the therapist. Pierce was not present and was asked not to join.
The video conference was scheduled for an hour and was an introduction to who they were, their background and their practice. We went through the consent form for the counselling/therapy session and from there, they handed the floor to us.
We shared our concerns about Pierce, how he opened up to us not long after the school year started (Grade 2, age 7) and told us that he was starting to experience anxiety at school, and that he found learning and school work stressful. I talked about how we considered perhaps Pierce just needed more time for adjustment, given that second grade was a huge leap in learning expectations, and how we both quickly realized that his level of anxiety seemed to grow and it wasn’t something that we could easily alleviate.
We shared how my husband employed meditation, mindful breathing, running him to school every morning to curb his energy and slow his mind to help him focus on learning with some success. We shared how we talked as a family, how we talked openly and tried to work through his anxieties and explore the root cause of them. We also shared that some days were more successful than others, and how many days ended with Pierce trying to convince us that he needed an emotional support dog to bring to school to manage his anxieties. IF it doubled as security and licked bullies into submission, he would be okay with that too. We had always hoped to foster a love of learning in our son, but the anxiety was taking away from that. For my husband, there were some other things that he wanted from therapy in addition to helping Pierce with his anxiety. One was to help his focus (I’ll address that in another post), two, was to learn to let go of frustrations at school, and three, was to calm his desire to control, or rather, micromanage situations.
To be honest, the feedback that we received from the session was...underwhelming. The therapist was kind and validated that we were taking the right steps to help Pierce - meditating, breathing, exercising. Respectfully, there wasn’t much more they added at that time - nothing that we didn’t know - and not having talked to Pierce, nothing they could really expand on. Initially, I was frustrated and felt like we wasted our time and money (resources that were already stretched thin because of COVID). It was a sensitive time and feelings were already heightened with the world on lockdown.
Again, in all fairness to the therapist, it was an initial session and consultation, and they were limited in their scope of what they could do. Later they did provide some information sheets that they believed might be of help.
Thereapist’s Resource Titles:
Thinking Traps
Thinking Challenge - Untwisting thoughts.
Emotional Validation Brief
Challenge Negative Thinking
The resources they provided were lists and descriptions of common thinking patterns, ways to challenge unhelpful thinking (or cognitive distortions), and strategies to help children feel heard and understood. Important resources!
Much of this, we were mindful of and had incorporated in our every day lives and conversations with our son since he was little. Intuitively, since the age of 3, we recognized the way he viewed life and approached problems, new situations, and how he processed change - hence our endless family conversations to offer different outlooks, new perspectives, and strategies for him. As we told the therapist, we kept a very open dialogue with our son (and our daughter), which was always accompanied with a heavy dose of empathy, and validation.
Though this therapy session (with this individual therapist) wasn’t as productive as we had hoped…it was still informative - helping us recognize that cognitive behavioural therapy was not the answer we needed at this moment in time. This is not to say that it wouldn’t be helpful in the future, just that perhaps it was too early in our journey for answers. This meeting more or less helped solidify that we needed to seek a different kind of professional guidance for our son.