What is Adolescent Psychotherapy? (Teens of age 11 or more)
Adolescent psychotherapy is aimed at helping young people make sense of their feelings, thoughts and behaviours. This can entail traditional talking therapy, or can use other techniques which draw on the expressive nature of young people, such as art therapy.
What is my approach and how do I work with young people and their families?
Teenage years can be tough for young people in terms of understanding, discovering and building up their identity and also dealing with many other issues. These years can be tough for parents as well in terms of understanding their growing children and establishing the ground for them as both understanding and boundary setting parent. Most of the time, this dual strain may lead to feeling that there is no way out for both.
During these years, most of young people suffer from not being understood by their parents, teachers or peers. Also building up an identity might mean going over many aspects of the self.
Based on my experience, I know it can be difficult for young people to open their inner worlds to another adult. I do care a lot about confidentiality and from the first session on, I am very clear about the boundaries that would protect the ground for both my patient and their families. I think that every young people needs to be respected in terms of confidentiality. I also try to help families to understand their children on what is happening, what could be done and how better they can handle the situation and connect with their growing child again.
Apart from talk therapy, I also try to integrate somatic experiencing techniques and art therapy in to our work.
The first session is held with my young patient and their family as long as there is a consent. The individual sessions with my patients take on weekly bases and family sessions mostly happen once in 4-6 weeks.
Individual sessions take 50-mins and family sessions take 1 to 1.5 hours.
What is Child Psychotherapy? (Ages between 4-10)
Child psychotherapy helps children and young people to make sense of their feelings and thoughts through different types of techniques like play therapy. It usually has a beneficial effect on relationships at home and school. As children become less preoccupied with their confusing emotions, they get better able to express themselves and concentrate on academic aspects.
What is my approach and how do I work with children and their families?
Our journey starts with in the womb. Even before getting born, we are already the reflections of what our parents imagine of us consciously or unconsciously. As adults, sometimes it could be easier to understand our emotions with the knowledge of our history. Although children can feel everything, they still don’t have enough tools to process their emotions. They can understand their world through the medium of their parents, teachers or adults who are close by. If they can not understand what they feel, if it hasn’t been contained enough or converted to a beta element for them by their parents to easily process it, they can have difficulty in making sense of it and once a child has a trouble in understanding and expressing him/herself, from relational to academic, a lot of problems can emerge.
I work with children from the age of 4 to 10 through the medium of play therapy where play becomes their words for expressing themselves. Play is the only ground for children to make sense of their worlds. I use free-play and psychodynamic play therapy techniques to help my young patients. I also integrate art therapy techniques into our work.
During the first session, I only meet with parents to hear the history of their child in order to evaluate better and during the following sessions, I invite my young patients and benefit from some projective test methods like:
–Rorschach Inkblot Test, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and Children’s Apperception Test (CAT)
During the evaluation period, I have 2-3 individual play therapy sessions with my young clients. Once the evaluation period ends, I give a feedback session to parents. If we start to work together, I support families with regular feedback sessions.
Also, for young children, I integrate parent-child play modalities like Watch Wait Wonder (WWW) to help parents to understand their children better.
The individual sessions with my young patients take on weekly bases and family sessions mostly happen once in 4-6 weeks.
Individual sessions take 50-mins and family sessions take 1 to 1.5 hours.
e-mail: cansuozsoymadrid@gmail.com
Phone/Whatsapp: +1 (647) 4724353
Psychotherapist Cansu Ozsoy 