Course ID: ATS/3A
Instructors: David Bresler, PhD, Ramela McKenna, PhD,MD, Richard Berrett, PhD, Charlotte Reznick, PHD
CE Credit: 6.5 hours
Pre-Requisite: ATS/1B
Children are instinctively drawn to cartoons, comic books, and story telling. They love to draw and paint, and to role play mother, father, sister and/or brother independent of gender identity.
Childhood is a time of growth, learning, and modeling. It is also a time where the risks of traumatic learning are great.
As children become exposed to the myriad of feelings and issues that accompany the sorrows surrounding the death of a pet or grandparent, the rage of family violence, the embarrassment of being caught in a lie or stealing, and the endless stream of assaults upon their self esteem, powerful images can become imprinted into the mind that continue to effect them throughout their adult life.
All children must deal with pain and stress, but they are rarely trained how to do so. Since they typically have had little prior life experience and thus only a primitive understanding of the processes involved, kids tend to be highly susceptible to feelings of helplessness and insecurity when exposed to the demands of contemporary living.
This is evident when you encounter a child under the age of six with ulcers or irritable bowel disease, and certainly in adolescents who are wrestling with alcoholism or substance dependence.
Imagery can be an excellent interventional tool in working with kids who are attempting to cope with acute or chronic stress, pain, or medical illness, and it can also play an essential role in helping children to deal with developmental crises, accelerate learning, expand creativity, and enhance self-esteem.
For this home study course, we have selected some of the best information from our prior workshops on guided imagery and kids.
Section I begins with an overview of how using imagery with kids is different from working with adults.
Section II discusses the applications of imagery in helping children to deal more effectively with pain, stress, and trauma and demonstrates how to use the Inner Advisor technique with children.
Section III reviews the uses of imagery in a general pediatric medical practice to help kids cope more effectively with developmental and behavioral issues, and to reduce anxiety associated with medical procedures.
Section IV explores the uses of Interactive Guided Imagerysm with children and adolescents, focusing on the 7 characteristics of developing children.
Ways to utilize imagery techniques to enhance learning, creativity and empowerment in children are reviewed in Section V and Section VI, reviews the applications of Interactive guided Imagerysm in family therapy.
Finally, you will have the opportunity to either listen to or participate in a practicum designed to help you see and experience the world through the eyes of a child.
Besides being effective with children, the techniques can also be extraordinarily useful with adults when working with the "inner child," “wounded child,””adaptive child,””natural child,” or the "child within."
To view the table of contents, click here.
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