Integrating Parents into EMDR
EMDR for Kids and TeensIt's really important to integrate parents, caregivers into the therapy session. First of all, they're the ones bringing the child in, and they're identifying the child as the patient. So you need to hear their story. However, you also want to listen to the child. You wanna be the child's advocate. So as child therapists, we all know that there's a a little dance that we need to do to be able to balance out your therapeutic relationship with the child and have that alliance with the parent.
Because you don't have that alliance with the parents, they're never gonna listen to you. There's a variety of ways of doing this. For the most part, I prefer having the parents give me the information in the first session or second session, and then finding out their treatment goals, getting the treatment goals from the child. From an EMDR perspective, I'm always going to, if I can, go with the child's worries and bothers because that's how the trauma is stored for them in their own symptoms and behaviors. I know that whatever the parent is bringing them in for is gonna get resolved if I work on what the child has identified. And I have to explain that to the parents so that they don't feel like I'm completely ignoring them.
I like to have then in subsequent sessions, the parents in on the session for ten, fifteen minutes, get an update of how the kid's doing. I always ask, tell me one thing that they're doing well. Tell me one thing you'd like to be different, and then I incorporate that into what we're gonna be working on that day. And then I like to bring the parents or caregiver in at the end just to, with the child's permission, give a basic overview of what we're worked on and prepare them for what's gonna happen in between the sessions. If you don't incorporate the parent into the session, it makes working with the kids a lot more difficult.
Well, this is the reason that there's not as many child therapists as adult therapists because working with parents is really difficult and really tricky. And they get in your way a lot, and a lot of times they're the source of the problem. And so you need to finesse that because certainly, blaming the parent isn't going to be helpful because this is their child, and they are the one in control. So you need to have them in alliance with you in that therapeutic process for sure.
So it's a definite dance. It takes a lot of energy for a child therapist, and it's essential and worthwhile.