Resolved Counselling for Children

20/01/2022

Hello all

What a week this is shaping up to be. I've been busily working with the nation's adolescents for quite some time but something has snapped this week.

On Monday alone I booked in five new clients. They were all adolescents from 13 to 16 years of age. All of them were experiencing anxiety and most of them had begun to refuse, or showed great reluctance, to go to school.

After two years of uncertainty it seems as if the chickens are finally coming home to roost for great swathes of the nation's young people. Parliament itself, despite its keenness for restrictions, knows this to be true, as the following excerpt from its website shows shows:

"According to NHS data, the mental health of children and young people in England has worsened since 2017.1 Even before the pandemic, children and young people were facing a mental health crisis...

Three lockdowns and the social distancing requirements of the pandemic have made the situation worse. Children and young people have struggled with the loss of normal social structures, being unable to socialise in person with peers and not being able to attend school or university... Research from the Centre of Mental Health shows that, in England, 1.5 million children and young people under 18 will need new or additional mental health support as a direct consequence of the coronavirus pandemic."

It's heartbreaking to see how many children have been broken by the events of the past two years. Many of them are children with good homes, great parents and secure friendships around them. Even formerly emotionally healthy children have now had their resilience tested to breaking point.

I'm so glad to be in a position to help some of these young people to recover from what amounts to an assault upon the nation;s well-being I have devoted the majority of my life to working with adolescents, first as a teacher and now as a psychotherapist / child and adolescent counsellor.

If your child is in need of support and help then I am almost uniquely qualified to help. In Reading and Oxford I am, I believe, almost the only person qualified with a UKCP registration for both hypnotherapy and child and adolescent counselling.

Counselling is great for getting things out of your system but it doesn't, according to many of my clients, do much to equip people with coping strategies and other, practical, ways of dealing with things. Hypnotherapy is wonderful for many things but most practitioners are quite minimally trained and that training they do receive is aimed at working with adults.

As a person trained (to UKCP standards) in both disciplines, I could help your child with self-harm, OCD, depression, anxiety, school-refusal and a great many more problems besides.

CAMHS is completely overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of suffering children from whom it receives enquiries every minute of the day. If your child is suffering then perhaps I could be able to help.

It's certainly worth the price of a phone call.

07786123736

Best wishes

Paul

03/08/2021

Hello all

A year ago I was visited in Oxford by a doctor who was writing a book on the subject of pain. He himself had been suffering from IBS for some time and had run out of options regarding its treatment.

He came to me because he wanted to understand more of how pain could be treated with hypnotherapy. He was primarily seeking material for his book but he obviously had a personal interest also.

He and I spent some time together discussing how I work and we also worked through some approaches regarding my approach to IBS and pain management.

It seems as if this session worked for him, for his book explains how he has been almost a year without any IBS symptoms.

This book devotes three pages to how he and I worked together and explains, in several more pages, the concept of hypnotherapy and how it might be of use to those suffering from IBS and other sources of pain.

It's a serious medical book, being nominated for the Royal Society prize for books on science.

Have a read. It's available on kindle, amazon, audible and physically in hardback. I'm proud to be featured in this book and if you'd like to discuss how I might help you, as I helped him, then simply get in touch.

Best wishes

Paul

The Painful Truth: The New Science of Why We Hurt and How We Can Heal

07/06/2020

Hello there

This is an interesting article on the impact of the UK's lock down on teenage mental health.

It's also a more nuanced appraisal of the effect of screen-time on adolescents than many an 'it's going to rot their brains' luddite has written in the past.

It's not just teenagers. I'm working with a number of young people at the moment and the seemingly endless friend-deprivation is undoubtedly taking its toll on their ability to lead happy lives.

Quite what it's doing to the social development of toddlers will prove an interesting source of many studies to come, I'm sure.

It's all quite tragic and I feel desperately sorry for those young people whose lives have been blighted. Significant birthdays have drifted by; graduations, proms, exams and more have been cancelled. My own daughter was heart-broken that her school play was pulled, for it was her 'last chance' to feature in such a production.

Fingers crossed that it all comes to an end soon, not just for the sake of the economy but also for the sake of the mental health of us all.

Best wishes

Paul

Surveys are beginning to shed light on the impact that the lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19 is having on mental health and well-being. Early findings from these surveys suggest that loneliness is a particular problem for teenagers.

13/05/2020

Hello again

Today is the 51st day of lock down. That's 7 weeks in which your children have been unable to see their friends, visit theme parks, meet people in the park and so on.

It may have been an unexpected response but the nation's 16 and 18 year olds are also heavily p*ssed off with not being able to do sit their exams. End of stage celebrations such as proms and graduations aren't happening. Rites of passage go unmarked. Life is a grey blur as the Spring drifts by and Summer promises little better.

It's really beginning to bite now and I'm noticing this in the teenagers I'm working with and in the ones who are now beginning to approach me in order to get some help.

Irritability, anger, depression and anxiety are on the rise and parents. often beset by their own fears, feel helpless and unable to help.

If all this sounds familiar to you then I'm here to help. Yu can call me on 07786123736 or email me via paul@resolvedcounsellingforchildren.com.

I look forward to hearing from you and to helping your teenager to get their feelings back on track again.

Best wishes

Paul

28/03/2020

Hi all

It has taken a good few months, between clients and studying, to build this site but now it's done. There's one small snag which I can't yet work out how to fix, but nothing is perfect and persistence wins the prize.

Have a look, have a read and bear me in mind.

Best wishes

Paul

www.resolvedcounsellingforchildren.com

20/03/2020

Hi there

After two sessions a child's fear of spiders was resolved.

It was done with playdoh, a little story I made up on the spot, some plastic things called bunchems and graded exposure therapy. Altogether it meant that this six year old could go home and hold a spider in a jar without fear. She did the work, I provided the means.

Perhaps your child could achieve the same with regard to his or her own fears.

(photo used with permission)

Best wishes

Paul

19/03/2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0AuAMK3O2M&feature=youtu.be

Hello. This is the new introductory video to my new website www.resolvedcounsellingforchildren.com. I am training to become a child and adolescent psychother...