Schools and physicians don’t seem to understand the ways in which trauma leads to symptoms that resemble ADHD. Thus, we all need to ask the right questions and dig a little deeper in creative ways to find out what may be troubling the child, so that our treatment is effective and not just a surface remedy for a misdiagnosis.

Seven-year-old Emily is continually nervous and her anxiety is keeping her from enjoying summer camp, sleepovers with friends, and after-school activities. Her parents don’t know what to do, and even her therapist is worried that Emily’s anxiety is starting to define too much her integral sense of self. Treating anxiety in kids takes a creative, often playful approach, says Lynn Lyons, author of Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents.

Conventional therapeutic wisdom aside, people typically don’t hurt each other because they’re out of touch, unable to communicate, or can’t help themselves. All too frequently, they do hurtful things with impunity and entitlement simply to gratify their own needs.

How do you create an atmosphere that your teen clients will value rather than resist? According to Ron Taffel, teens are looking for authenticity. When they find the real thing, they’ll engage.

When you sit down with a young client, should you set your own immediate reactions and personal opinions aside? Not if you hope to make real progress, says Ron Taffel.

Fifteen-year-old Grace doesn’t know it yet, but her troubling anxiety symptoms are run of the mill. Like most anxious kids, it’s not the content of her worries that’s the real issue, but the way her mind and body react to them.

How can both joyful and tragic events elicit tears? This question puzzles many clinicians, including some who are considered experts in the field of emotional expression. The problem is that few of us have received explicit training in theories of emotion. Physiologically speaking, emotional tears are elicited when a person’s system shifts rapidly from sympathetic to parasympathetic activity---from a state of high tension to a period of recalibration and recovery. And sometimes, clinicians can feel an urge to rush in and “fix things” that aren’t broken.

American parents today face a perfect storm of cultural and social circumstances that undermine the very foundations of parental authority. In response, mothers and fathers are beginning to see therapists as irrelevant and to challenge the entire social, educational, and economic context of childrearing.

 

Over the last twenty years, I've come to believe that integration is the key mechanism beneath both the absence of illness and the presence of well-being. Integration---the linkage of differentiated elements of a system---illuminates a direct pathway toward health. It's the way we avoid a life of dull, boring rigidity on the one hand, or explosive chaos on the other. The key to this transformation is cultivating the capacity for mindsight.