Children, Teens, and Young Adult
Children, teens, and young adults sometimes need professional help to navigate our complex world. So many of our interactions happen with rapidly changing social cues that are easy to miss when we don’t know where to look. Overwhelm, acting out, anxiety, and depression set in for children who do not understand why they feel different from others. Unfortunately, childhood is often where problems such as eating disorders and self-harm begin. Left untreated, the patterns continue into adulthood as unconscious coping mechanisms and self-soothing attempts. We use Art Therapy, Sandplay, Play Therapy, and Dream Interpretation as natural inroads to healing a child’s symbolic life.
“The treatment…is not a kind of psychological water cure, but a renewal of the personality, working in every direction and penetrating every sphere of life.”
―C.G. Jung
Offerings
Sandplay
Sandplay is an ideal therapy for the child’s world. By nature, children are unable to tell the story of their emotional experiences. The child chooses figurines to place in the sand, using them to tell a symbolic story that builds over time as successive Sandtrays are constructed. The Sandtray becomes a vital link between the conscious and unconscious, naturally uniting opposing ideas and energies that are troubling, and transforming the psychic energy into a communication between the child and the therapist.
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.”
―C.G. Jung, CW 6, P197
Active Imagination and Art Therapy
Carl. G. Jung created Active Imagination for previously unconscious images and symbols to reveal themselves during the processes of drawing or painting.
These moments of timelessness often happen when painting or making images in any medium, when time changes in quality and becomes suspended, when surprises happen that come from a world not consciously anticipated.
-Bianca Daalder-van Iersel , 2017
Symbolically speaking, images with trees tell a life story that is featured throughout time in myths, fairy tales, religions, and spirituality. Trees are our friends in childhood, carrying meaning far beyond the plant kingdom. Trees provide shelter, bridging the child’s imagination with their environment. Trees give us sanctuary, a home away from home, a liminal space to connect with a fantasy world beyond earthly understanding, a place to unload stress and feel a different kind of harmony.
“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.”
―C.G. Jung
“At times I feel as if I am Spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons”
―C.G. Jung
“To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images- that is to say, find the images which were concealed in the emotions- I was inwardly calmed and reassured. As a result…I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find the particular images which lie behind the emotions.”
―C.G. Jung
Play Therapy
Play therapy assists the child to grow and develop in age-appropriate physical, emotional and cognitive abilities. Play frees the flow of energy from the use of defense mechanisms. Play facilitates the development of the child’s unique identity while encouraging healthy adaptations to the ever-present demands of family, school, and society through experiences.
“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child…is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
―Donald Winnicott
Clouds and Creative Imagination
“As the clouds shift shape,
we are reminded that we too can change
and move from a seemingly fixed frozen place…
healing through the emergence in us
of new and vitalizing energies.”
―Edith Sulwold
A word about our founder’s history:
Rebecca Spear, LMFT, began working with children in the winter of 1987 during her undergraduate term at Bennington College. With an educator grant to bring hands-on science to the local elementary school, her interest in working with children became a lifelong passion. Through certification in orthotics and prosthetics (pediatric rehabilitation medicine) at NYU Post-Graduate Medical School, obtaining a Master’s Degree in Cross-Cultural Education to teach science, psychology, art, and gardening to grades K-12, and completing a second Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology with Depth Therapy Emphasis, Rebecca is dedicated to understanding and serving the underserved child population.
