Four Important Lessons for Divorcing Parents to Keep in Mind By: Gabrielle Anderson, LMFT10/11/2014 As therapists, we support many families as they walk through the darkness of divorce. Passions often run high while transitioning through such a difficult change. Divorcing as a couple is different than divorcing as parents with children. While you and your ex are walking through this difficult time, take time to remember what this experience can be like from the perspective of your children. Below are are a few tips and nudges to help you remember to protect your precious little and big ones while you transition from one family unit into two. Divorcing Nudge #1: Protect Your Sweeties From the Loyalty Guilt TrapIt is customary for parents walking through the processes of divorce to argue and fight. When children are involved, it is best to try to protect them from the fighting and discord. Whenever possible, send requests to your ex-spouse in an email or talk on the phone when children are in bed or away from the house. Children are wired to be loyal to those they love. When children overhear fighting, it often creates an anxiety in them and a sense of loyalty. How difficult it can be for a child to feel a split loyalty and desire to please or protect both parents. This is especially difficult for children experiencing an adversarial split in their family unit. Nudge #1. Protect your child from the loyalty guilt trap. When at all possible, notice this loyalty and help your child get to a place of neutrality where s/he does not feel the need to protect anyone emotionally but himself. Divorcing Nudge #2: Teach Your Children to Protect Their Eyes and EarsIn a perfect world, parents would comply with Nudge #1 and protect their children from the stress and turmoil of parental discord. Unfortunalty, no one is perfect and divorce is stressful. Nudge #2 is to teach your children to walk away from parental stress. If an unplanned encounter occurs or unexpected fight begins, younger kids can be taught to run and play in another area of the house, and older children can go listen to music or watch a movie...but the key is to remove your children and teach them to removes themselves from stressful situations. Children do not need to hear the hurtful words and tones. Remember. You are talking to and about their mom/dad. Protect their ears from the words and their eyes from the nonverbal communication. Children see all. They see the intense look in your eyes and the balled fist near your side. While you are trying to work through the pain and grief of divorce, protect their eyes and ears. Divorcing Nudge #3: Everything You Do with Your Attorney Costs SomethingSeparation and divorce can be expensive. Every email, phone call and subpoena that filters through an attorney costs something. Attorneys get paid for every minute task brought to them. This cost becomes quickly evident in your bank account, however what often takes longer to realize is the emotional toll taken by being in constant turmoil. Living in a state of hypervigilenece and scanning your environment for negativity will cost you and your precious bystanders. Beyond money, it will cost you peace and may cost you the respect of yourself and the respect of those who love you. Creating an environment of calm for your children takes purposeful determination and self regulation. Before you grab the phone to call or email your attorney, stop and think: in the long run, will this help or harm those I love the most? If it impacts your emotional health and your ability to create the calm atmosphere your children need during this transition, let it rest for a day and then decide. Divorcing Nudge #4: Purposefully Create 2 Whole Homes for Your ChildrenSpouses divorce one another, but children do not. When dividing up the household items and furniture, be mindful of what the experience will be like for your child. It is best to move furniture out of the house when children are in school or away from the house and never ask them to help. It is important to remember what this experience will be like for them. Before your children come home, make sure that the furniture in the family house is rearranged to create natural looking rooms, not rooms with giant furniture holes in them. Our eyes take in information and help us determine how to react to situations. Help soothe this sensory experience by making sure the home still has the warmth of a home. Do your best to make the second home look warm and inviting too. Often home #2 is an apartment or smaller house. Smaller spaces can still feel warm and family friendly. Maybe allow older children to help you pick out bedroom themes. Making mindful decisions about creating a second home for your children can help you decide what routines and structures to put in place. Home at mom's and home at dad's is the key. When children feel like visitors, it is hard for them to relax and renew. When to Seek Professional Support During a DivorceDivorce is difficult, but can be doable if you and your ex decide to navigate through the process mindfully and purposefully. Remember that your children are not divorcing anyone. Helping them walk through this change with love and validation will make all the difference in the world. If the process seems all too overwhelming and stressful or if your children appear to be struggling to adjust to the transition, it may be time to seek out professional help. A counseling therapist can help either parent or the children to adjust. If you or someone you love is struggling through divorce, nudge them to find help and support today.
Gabrielle Anderson is the Director and a Therapist at the Family Therapy Center of Northern Virginia, llc She and the other team members can be contacted directly from the Center's Meet the Team page.
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Remember when the differences between you and the one you love felt good, refreshing and even complimentary? Meeting someone who is different from ourselves can be a gift. A private view into a world not our own. Someone to suggest new foods, venues, activities; to be stretched and grateful for it. Those are the days of a couple in love. Quite often couples complain of these differences in couples’ sessions. “She always leaves her shoes and clothes all over the bedroom and expects...” “If it wasn’t for me, we would be drowning in debt. I’m the saver and apparently the only one who...” “You are so scheduled. Would it hurt you to be a little more spontaneous?!” Remembering What it Felt Like to be a Couple in LoveRemember when you liked the fact that she captured your chaos and organized it? The days when you felt grateful that he pushed you and nudged you to spend money on yourself? When he helped you feel like you were worth it? What at one point made you feel complimentary and grateful, now leaves you feeling resentful and angry. Where did it all go? How do partners lose each other in the process of it all? Couples often need to be reminded-gently nudged to go back and remember the early days. The days when it felt ok and even right to be different. When there was still enough trust in the relationship to reveal one’s true self and feel like it would be accepted and appreciated. To be loved, truly loved despite it all. Is it Time for Couples Therapy? Couples therapy can help take the relationship backwards, to a place of equality and trust where being different felt safe. Where black and white could find their way to a comforting gray, and maybe just maybe to a new place; a place resulting from the evolution of two people refusing to be stagnant and stuck. Two who more than anything want to find a life that feels congruent with the evolution of themselves as well as the relationship. Whether you feel the need to reconnect with your past selves or move to something new, therapy can help freshen up the relationship and create the connection you crave.
Gabrielle Anderson is the Director and a Therapist at the Family Therapy Center of Northern Virginia, llc She and the other team members can be contacted directly from the Center's Meet the Team page. Although the structure of many couples counseling sessions may be quite similar, what occurs behind the closed doors of a session is well tailored to the needs of the couple. Every relationship has its own dynamic, one that is unique to the couple. Negative cycles appear in all relationships from one time or another. Learning to recognize how to not get sucked into the tornado funnel of distance can be priceless and will look differently from one couple to the next. One’s communication style, levels of emotional safety, trust, love, friendship, and passion are all components and ingredients of a relationship. Where each of these lie and how balanced and fulfilling of a connective opportunity they yield helps determine where the couple feels they are. Helping clients evolve their relationships and determine what it is they want from love and marriage can be a rewarding process to help navigate and assist. The Importance of Friendship & Respect in a RelationshipJohn Gottman, a well-respected couples researcher, has conducted many longitudinal studies with a focus on marital satisfaction. He claims to have the ability within 5 minutes to extrapolate and determine whether or not a couple will remain married or divorce just by analyzing the way in which they argue. Arguments are inevitable. Good marriages have bad years. Terrible events happen to good solid families. What separates the satisfied marriages from those that are unfulfilled? Gottman believes friendship is the key. Being truly interested in building bridges and connections with your partner and liking who your spouse is as a person, makes you fight fairer and work towards resolution instead of defensively planning your next move of attack. He states that developing a curiosity and a desire to really know your partner creates a bond that gets stronger through connectivity and has the ability to weather times of adversity and pain. Couples Need to Feel Emotionally Understood and Connected Sue Johnson, another contemporary pioneer in the field of couple’s satisfaction argues that couples need to understand each other at an emotional level. She believes that when arguments and disagreements arise, couples sitting in their emotional brain can quickly recognize what they are truly fighting about and not just how it initially appears. Feeling this emotional connection can almost be addicting. Couples begin to seek it out not just to squelch disagreements, but also to feel that much closer to each other. Johnson believes that teamwork and partnership are vital to a lasting fulfilling relationship. She looks at problems within the relationship as being a fault of the dynamic that the couple has created as opposed to looking to blame the individual spouses for the demise of the relationship. Teaching couples to understand their spouse’s emotional needs and desires and helping them to feel heard by their partner breeds connectivity and a deeper bond. When couples begin to routinely reach for one another, trust begins to build. Protecting this trust and union is often what builds the foundation of a newly evolving relationship and dynamic. The Waxing and Waning of Passion in a Marriage More than friendship, arguments and teamwork, where does passion fit into marital satisfaction? Esther Perel, a world renown couples therapist with a special focus on erotic intelligence, talks about the positive power of tension. Perel believes that couples need to develop separateness in order to spark romance. Helping couples develop individuality helps the couple re-kindle desire. She believes that intimacy and sexual desire are very different entities and attempts to help couples re-create a healthy degree of mystery within the relationship. Looking at a marital dyad through the lens of roles can be an important step to understanding and dissecting waning sexual desire. When couples begin to fill too many roles for each other, it leaves little room for sexual mystery. Perel believes that knowing too much of our partner’s inner and outer world can cause us to not need to seek them out passionately and may even create an environment for sexual numbing to occur. Sorting out the Pieces of the Marital Puzzle With such differing information, how does one sort it all out? One word: Balance. Some couples come into my office with a well-established friendship and genuine love for one another. They know well how to be a team player and feel that their spouse believes in them and wants the best for them. Maybe they are living through a family trauma or lost the romantic spark. This couples probably does not need to learn connectivity and teamwork. Another couple may include one spouse who has grown accustomed to meeting his/her own needs in a self serving manner and who seems to struggle with focusing this energy on the family and spouse. This spouse probably does not need more understanding in creating differentiation and separateness, but may need to learn to look to the other spouse and understand his/her needs and desires. Even still, another couple may come into therapy after practicing fighting to win at all costs. This couple may benefit from learning to sit inside his/her partner’s shoes and begin to feel what it is like to be the other. To gain empathy and connectivity by experiencing a little of what it is like to be married to oneself can be a powerful motivator to change. Then of course there is the family of young children. Where the role of being a 24/7 parent begins to snuff out the role of passionate pursuer. This couple may need help creating distance from the baggy t-shirt, pony tailed mommy and overwhelmed over tired daddy and may need help initiating mystery and separateness. How do you Know if Couple's Therapy is right for you?Only you can answer whether or not you are ready for couples counseling. Therapy is hard work and you really have to be ready to take an honest look at yourself and your dynamic. I have seen therapy do wonderful things for many people, but you have to be ready. So often couples come into therapy hoping that the therapist will "fix" their partner. It is rarely about that and most often about collaborating together, as a team to create a dynamic and level of connectivity that is worth fighting for...learning to fight for what is best for the relationship and not just fighting to win.
Gabrielle Anderson is the Director and a therapist at the FamilyTherapy Center of Northern Virginia, llc. She and the other team members can be reached directly from the Center's Meet the Team page. I received word from my brother that an old friend committed suicide recently. I have to be honest. I couldn’t even remember who he was. My sister suggested I check Facebook and reminded me of a summer during college when I knew him and he began to know my family. Tom and I were in each other’s lives for a short, short time. We became friends, hung out a bit; he would come over to my house and do things with my family. Later that summer he began to date my sister. He was in my life for yet a blink. When I checked my sister’s Facebook page to remind me of who he was, I couldn’t believe how much Tom looked the same as he did 20 years ago. I looked at his wife and his two children and suddenly felt pain. Everyone looked so happy, so together. I felt sadness for the trauma his children must be feeling and for the dark loneliness his wife must be experiencing. I have a family of four. Seeing his family felt too similar to filter. I couldn’t help but wonder what on earth happened during his last 20 years to make him end it all. On and off last night, I drempt about Tom and his family and my sister. I woke up confused that I was grieving someone I didn’t even know and couldn’t even remember. Grief's JourneyGrief can be complicated. My grief wasn’t about missing Tom, but was more about experiencing a snapshot of my life all over again. Remembering that summer and his heart felt impact on my family opened up a part of my life I hadn’t thought about in years. I was experiencing my own vulnerabilities and mortality too. Quickly and without hesitation, my mind connected the dots to all the other losses I experienced this year; and made me wonder what else I would be experiencing. When emotions don’t make sense, sometimes it is better not to ignore them but rather to curiously investigate. For an hour last night and some this morning, I went back in time to a place 20 years ago and reflected on my recent life as well. Surprisingly, that small journey cost me a little. The Many Face of GriefGrief indeed has many many faces. My mother died unexpectedly seven years ago. Having five siblings it became apparent quite quickly that everyone grieves differently, at different times and for different things. Some of us grieve quietly, others agonize demonstratively. Some grieve more for the actual person others more for a time of their lives that will never return or something that will never be. It’s funny how a loss can point to things that you didn’t realize were there. I don’t miss Tom. I don’t even know him. But grief doesn’t really know the rules. It didn’t know that as soon as I saw his picture I would be reminded of that summer in an instant. I wasn't even fully aware of how much of my present life and anxieties were becoming entangled in the memories until I became curious and began to investigate it further.
I’m sorry you were in so much pain, Tom. I’m sorry wife and kids that he left so early. I’m sorry to my sister for the complicated grief she must be experiencing too. On the grand 1-10 spectrum of grief, I am at a 1 or 2. Understanding that there is indeed a spectrum, is a priceless tool to navigate it mindfully. Gabrielle Anderson is the Director and a Therapist at the Family Therapy Center of Northern Virginia, llc She and the other team members can be contacted directly from the Center's Meet the Team page. What are Common Symptoms of Anxiety?An elementary aged child was asked to think about her anxious symptoms and worry thoughts and turn them into a cartoon character. This is what she created. Pretty scary stuff! Keep reading to see how this scary picture and others like it can be used in therapy to help children (and brave adults) gain power over their feelings and calm down the brain's limbic system. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), meditation and other modalities can help create calm as well. Anxiety looks very different from one person to the next. In some, it is an almost constant buzzing, in others it presents as sweaty, heart racing panic attacks. Some report not being able to enjoy social functions and others cry uncontrollably. Worry thoughts can be common as well as harmful debilitating self talk. Anxiety, no matter its form, is uncomfortable and something we see at The Center every day. Too Busy & Driven? Not Living Mindfully can be a Common Cause of AnxietyAnxiety can come from many different sources. Northern Virginia is a perfect breeding ground for anxiety. We work hard long hours alongside others who work just as hard. We are an intelligent population with intelligent, driven successful peers. Sometimes ambition, competition, and the comparisons we do to stay ahead and crisp, can keep us out of touch with ourselves and with what keeps us grounded. Not caring for oneself can be quickly depleting. Not measuring up or feeling "if I just did…" can leave one constantly looking ahead instead of being present and enjoying small moments in life. When we stop being present and are not choosing our life choices mindfully, we begin to feel an inner incongruence. This dissonance and inner conflict can manifest itself as anxiety. What are we Modeling for our Children? Anxiety and Your Child...Many of the children we see who struggle with anxiety seem to be wired for perfection or performance. Wanting to do it "right" or "perfect" can be a trait we teach our children silently. Our children have our genetic coding and predispositions, but they also watch us and learn how to navigate life and life choices without a word needing to be shared. Not all anxiety in children and adults is learned. Some feel vulnerable after a painful experience or trauma and channel the emotions into anxiety. Some experience a tremendous amount of worry thoughts that take up way too much brain space and begin to interfere with focus and daily happiness. The habit of internalizing negative experiences can lead to chronic anxiety and can be dangerous. Stopping it before it does real damage is the key. Infection Induced AnxietyWe do not just have ambition and drive in NOVA, we have ticks…and lots of them! Ticks carry more than Lyme Disease. Bartonella, Babesia and Mycoplasma are a few infections that can cause debilitating anxiety/depression and if left untreated can create significant neurological damage. Strep antibodies can also create panic and OCD in children and teens and in some cases, adults. This is known as PANDAS. When other agents create the anxiety, such as Chlamydia Pneumonia, it is referred to as PANS. When anxiety is intense and there does not seem to be a cause or known trigger, look to rule out infection as a potential influencer. Often physicians who present themselves as "Lyme Literate Doctors" are good specialist choices to visit. Diagnosing infection based anxiety is a process that relies on more information than blood tests alone. A thorough clinical assessment is highly recommended if you suspect infection based anxiety or panic. How to Cope with AnxietyThe first step in coping with anxiety is to understand its origin and to experience it for what it is. Sometimes people are quick to medicate anxiety without first exploring some of the above possibilities or going to the source itself to heal it. It is all too easy in our Northern Virginia culture to squelch the fires of anxiety by reaching for a beer or that second martini. Often screen time is used to melt away the feelings and distract the mind. Looking to the source can be painful, but useful. Is it Trauma? Fear? Are you losing touch with yourself and your loved ones? Could it be infection based? Look for the cause before reaching for a temporary fire extinguisher. When you know the cause, you can get assistance. If life is out of balance or you have unfinished emotional business to care for, therapy can help. If you need to find ways to calm your body and control your run away negative thoughts, counseling can help teach you these methods. Learning to listen to your negative self talk, turning it around and replacing it with healthy positive self talk can be empowering. Noticing how your body reacts to stress and emotional pain and what anxiety looks like in your body BEFORE it turns into panic can be an invaluable tool when learning to get ahead of panic attacks. Learning to take deep slow breaths to calm your heart and slow your thoughts can be key to reducing the symptoms of anxiety and decrease panic attacks. What Does Treatment for Anxiety Look Like?Adults can improve anxiety by learning the habits of Mindfulness and by practicing the tangible skills taught in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Our therapists are trained to help teach and monitor these skills. Sometimes, though the anxiety is embedded in trauma or is creating too much hyperarousal (extreme buzzing and almost non-stop physical symptoms) that CBT feels like putting a bandaid on a gushing wound. In cases like these, EMDR, Meditation/Visualizations, Art Therapy, Sand Tray or Play Therapy may be a better option to first calm the limbic system part of the brain so that the cognitive, more rational part of the brain can be accessed. Going to the cognitive brain first when someone is in a state of hyperarousal can be often be a mistake and can create frustration in the one suffering. Using methods such as relaxation, EMDR or Creative type therapies can calm the body and mind and help create a foundation for CBT skills to then root beneath. Our clinicians are trained in these modalities and can help from age 3 through adulthood. To request an appointment or for more information, click here. Creative Therapy ApproachesOne method to calm the limbic system and create empowerment over anxiety and other traumas is the use of a drawing series. Let's look back at the cartoon character above. In the series shown here, a young girl was asked to sit in the anxiety and create a cartoon character that embodied all of it. The next step is to have her get inside of herself and determine how she feels within her body and where she feels each emotion when she is within proximity of this creature (this is another picture not shown0. The third step is to make her face the anxiety and begin to feel empowered over it. She is now asked to do what ever she feels compelled to do to the character itself. This child chose to put her anxiety monster in jail (called encapsulation), lock up it's hands, feet and fingers, lock the jail in four places, gag it's mouth, soften it's prickliness and re-shape it's eye brows. We then check back in with the child to see how she is feeling. When children and adults are asked to approach their trauma or scariness head on and then learn to become empowered over it, the trauma/anxious feelings decrease and the empowerment increases. Some clients need to do more than one drawing series, while others choose another modality to continue to calm the limbic system. EMDR participants experience a similar experience as those who create via art. It seems to be about finding a safe way to revisit something uncomfortable…to sit with the scary and BE OKAY. I have had some adults brave enough to try this drawing series with great success. Please. Do not try a series like this without proper training. The series is intensive and involves more pictures and steps than what are shown here today. Gabrielle Anderson is the Director and a Therapist at the Family Therapy Center of Northern Virginia, llc She and the other team members can be contacted directly from the Center's Meet the Team page. This Blog Contains Sensitive Information That is not Suitable for Young Children. Reader: Beware of Mature, Anxiety Provoking Content. A now college aged student who we will call Anna remembers sexual abuse that occurred when she was a young child. Sexual advances made on her at a college party brought about a flood of memories from her childhood that had been repressed for almost a decade. Getting to trauma therapeutically can be tricky. Sometimes victims experience a flooding of emotion, stress hormones and disturbing memories throughout the therapeutic process. Expressive type therapies help control the volume of flooding and can enable the client to process through memories and emotions safer. Anna was especially brave and curious to try alternative methods of therapy. Throughout the process, as you will see, she utilizes art, sand, poetry, music and more to help her approach the memories and cleanse the experiences. We invite you to walk through some of her process with us… Sand TrayAnna’s family was religious. They were very much involved in their church and attended the same church since her mother was a teenager. Anna’s family knew her Sunday School teacher well and had been friends with him and his wife for years. Everyone thought the teacher’s love and dedication to the children was remarkable. What Anna never told anyone was that her teacher was secretly molesting her. Anna talked of his methods of “grooming” that helped him gain her trust. Grooming is a manner of manipulation that allows the perpetrator to specifically target what an individual needs in order to trust. It often confuses the relationship because victims often mistake grooming methods for love. Candies, cookies, gifts & religious figures were all used in her sand tray to show the grooming. He groomed her as well as her parents. Anna also represented the other girls she suspected may have been targets. Looking back, she could see how he treated other girls similarly. She choose to perch one girl upon the lava with a serpent unknowingly ready to strike her. Another was barely crawling out alive. Her teacher was now older and a grandfather. She placed his new granddaughter in the sand tray, on the monster, as a way to communicate her fear that she may become his victim as well. The little one is looking to his wife, her grandmother to protect her, yet Anna states his wife seemed either oblivious or numb to what was happening and never intervened to save her. Anna mentioned that when she became 14 years old, she apparently became “too old” for him thus spitting her out of his mouth. This powerful sand tray gave us rich information to explore and help her process. To show how a sand tray can help move clients through the healing process, here Anna is able to create a bonfire of all the grooming materials used to lure her into a trusting relationship. She has powerful firefighters coming in to rescue the children and bring them into safety AND to insure that the grooming materials continue to burn and stay contained in the fire itself. Kinetic sand trays like this can be very very empowering for clients to experience this type of control. Notice the Sunday school teacher's wife is still numb, looking off into space, still in denial that her husband could do such acts of pain and destruction. His wife's lack of response and protection is a source of of pain and betrayal for Anna that she is working through. Music TherapyMusic can be used by all ages to aid in healing trauma. Anna has always had a love for music, so using it as a way to help her heal and process seemed natural and organic. Throughout her therapeutic journey, Anna choose songs that spoke to where she was that week or month. The songs helped her make sense of her emotional journey. Some were used to cry out painful feelings (The Lonely: Christina Perri), others just made her sit in her pain and feel it (Elbow: Some Riot). Although this was a dark time of her recovery process, sometimes Anna needed to sit in the dark within the darkness of herself. Music kept her company and helped her organize the emotion. Some songs helped Anna say good-bye to her offender and make peace with the pain he caused others (Jar of Hearts: Christina Perry & Here Comes the Flood: Peter Gabriel). Though much of this purging took place at home, Anna brought her songs into the office and shared them during therapy. What a powerful powerful way for her to excrete her pain and navigate her every changing feelings. Poetry, Expressive Writing, Drawing & CollagingAnna took the time to write letters to her offender. These letters were never sent or mailed, but were for her process. She verbalized experiencing relief by putting some of her emotion on paper. Although Anna agreed to allow us to use much of her therapeutic process within this blog, the letters were too personal to share. Instead, she is sharing a creative depiction of what it felt like to be lured away from the safety of her biological and church family and left to pick up her own pieces. We feel privileged to have the permission to share this beautiful piece of poetic expression. Dancing with a Winged CreatureThe giggly chubby handed child runs after the beautiful butterfly. He is back for more fun and dancing. Chasing each other around the garden, the curly headed child unknowingly follows him out of the safety of her yard. Faster and faster, her little legs carry her. The winged creature glides through the sky, swooping down and around her. Swirling around and around with the magic and sparkle of tiny fairies. Farther and farther they run and chase and giggle and dance. Exhausted by her adventure, the little one stops to rest. The butterfly flies away. As she pauses, it becomes apparent that she no longer recognizes where she is. Tears begin to well up in her tiny little eyes as she searches the sky for her delightful friend. She scans the field for anything familiar. Soon he appears; her beautiful flying companion. Swooping down with deliberate speed, he dives in close enough for her tiny little hands to reach out and touch. But wait. Ouch! That hurt! That wasn’t a dance at all. She begins to cry again. This time tears of pain. Pain mixed with fear. What is that buzzing sound? What happened to the gentle soaring flutter? The winged creature rushes in for another prick, another poke, here and there; again and again. Numbness sets in as the toxins infuse her body. Why is he doing that? Where is the magic? She cries out for her parents. No one can hear her cries for help… no one can feel her anguish. Confused and stunned, the tiny little girl collapses to the ground and slumps down by a rock; with her head between her knees she begins to weep. Tears mixed with dust and sweat mingle and fall to the ground below her. She was seduced by the beauty of his wings and by the playful parade that led her away. She suddenly feels completely alone, isolated and afraid. As if paralyzed, the small child huddles frozen, in the middle of the field, unable to move. Unable to find safety. In the distance, she hears scurrying and hurried footsteps. Her head is too heavy to move, her neck too weary to twist. She slumps defenseless as the footsteps mix with frantic screams. She hears her name, but still can not move. Her parents frantically race to her side. Without looking up, she receives their embrace. Weeping, rocking, holding, protecting; her parents can hardly breath. No one can end the embrace. Huddled in a pool of tears, they stand and prepare to depart. The walk back home becomes a sober realization that love and fences and watchfulness are not enough. That the skies are full of beautiful magical creatures waiting to sprinkle fairy dust on our children. That all anyone can do is continue to love, continue to protect and continue to watch the skies for the eary sounds of buzzing. After writing expressively about the dangerous bee, Anna decided to draw a picture of it. It didn't take long before she felt the need to destroy it. You can feel the religious overtones within the collage drawing. Anna wanted him to be taken down by his own beliefs. A pitch fork, hell's flames and an open watchful eye helped diminish his powers. The bottom of the collage depicts the symptoms still evident while the right shows growth. Anna purposefully had the words and a staircase climbing off the side of the board to imply hope for the future. Though this is not an exhaustive collection of Anna's therapy and only shows the darker side of her treatment, we are grateful that she gave us permission to share what we have. It is our hope that by sharing examples of treatment, it will give you, a prospective client, a glimpse of what expressive therapy can look like and how it can help purge feelings and propel one forward without relying completely on talking. One does not need to experience trauma to become involved in expressive therapies. Anxiety, illness, transitions….any hurt can be examined and navigated via expressive therapy.
Gabrielle Anderson is the Director and a Therapist at the Family Therapy Center of Northern Virginia, llc She and the other team members can be contacted directly from the Center's Meet the Team page. This Blog Contains Sensitive Information That is not Suitable for Young Children. |
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