Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy – why are we interested?
We met with Silvia Tosi and Natasha Zhivolkovskaya a few months ago (thanks to Lena Grigorieva, who put us in touch). All three of us practice Gestalt therapy and work with children and adolescents on a daily basis. I (Karolina) in Poland, Silvia in Italy, Natasha – now in Lithuania (before the war and repression) – in Belarus. Each of us works in a different country, (dealing with psychotherapy of children and adolescents), but the problems of the youngest ones turn out to be very similar in a global world, where young (and not only) people lead a double life – one physical with their families, peers, at school, in the place where they live, and the other – a parallel life – on the Internet. What emerged from many of our conversations was a picture of a young person living in a world that, on the one hand, offers never-before-attainable opportunities (related, for example, to access to knowledge, entertainment, travel, and contact with people from all over the world), but on the other hand doesn’t offer much in the way of ways to experience grounding and security. We all live in a world where you can have hundreds of friends on social networks, but it’s hard to have a few good acquaintances, friends, or neighbors on your street or block. One can be in many communities, but not feel a sense of belonging or connection to any of them. Life on the Internet gives young people the illusion of closeness to those who are very far away, while at the same time life “in real life” shows that a close encounter with another person, flesh and blood, who is next door, lives in the same apartment, experiences good and bad moments, is sometimes nice, sometimes not – can be impossible to “accommodate” and is often beyond them.
On the phone, to which one is hooked up like an IV, 24 hours a day, the reality of luxurious living is mixed with the cruelty and brutality of wars, giving the impression that both are “flat.” This online reality seems both real and unreal, in the sense that it exists (we are, after all, watching bombed-out houses and the faces of suffering people minutes after a tragedy), but by switching the screen, it is easy to become disassociated and treat information about an event as a better or worse movie, rather than something we bodily and emotionally experience.
Young people are soaking up a world that has never changed at such a pace as today. What was current a year ago is now obsolete and not worth remembering. The world is full of information, content, and stimuli that encourage us to consume more and more without any pause for assimilation and integration of experiences. The mind processes huge amounts of information without concentrating on any of it.
On top of all this, adults (parents) live in a rush. To keep up, you have to get up early, drive a long time to work, and come back late. All this to buy a life for himself and his family that he has no time to enjoy. Parents are rarely emotionally available, families lack constancy, being together, shared rituals and bonds. Even during your time together, you are separate.
When confronted with such a reality – emptiness wrapped in colorful packaging – young people do not know who they are. Without real contact with loved ones, with family, with family of origin, with community, without rooting, they live under the illusion that anything is possible, and the way to reach adulthood is to “invent” oneself and live according to this creation (at least for a while).
The mental problems of children and adolescents are a litmus test of the hardships of the world we as adults have created for them. Young people have trouble feeling (starting with perception, since they don’t touch much of the “world” outside their own homes and electronic devices), feeling their own emotions and reading other people’s feelings (“is what I’m feeling really what I’m feeling, or is it what I think I’m feeling?”), they experience constant tension that they find difficult to recognize and express, and in adjusting to a jittery world they form an unstable image and sense of self, resulting in mental disorders and illnesses. The young are as lost and lonely as ever.
Child and adolescent psychotherapy – why Gestalt?
Child and adolescent psychotherapy in the Gestalt current, in which we work, provides a good theoretical and methodological basis for our work. It is a therapy focused on the here and now, its meaning is to experience and explore oneself in contact, support is given by feeling one’s own body and relationship with the Other. Child and adolescent psychotherapy in the gestalt current also abounds in proven working techniques that “work” well with young people. We know from our clinical experience that children and adolescents are not “lesser adults” and the methods and approaches to therapeutic work with these two groups of people have their own specificities and are very different in assumptions, goals, opportunities and contact methods and techniques from therapy with adults.
In preparing the program of the Study of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, we had the intention of creating a basis for work that has a good theoretical and practical background and at the same time responds to the clinical problems that young people and their families face in their daily lives and we as professionals in the offices. We have planned 15 meetings, which are a certain essence and allow us to touch on the issues that most often arise in the work of child and adolescent psychotherapy. We have invited specialists who/who will deepen certain topics, and we intend to develop this program, co-creating it together with the Participants.
You are cordially invited on behalf of the Leadership Team – Karolina Slifirska