Revue internationale de psychologie scolaire et cognitive
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Abstrait

Building and Maintaining an Alliance with a Child Patient

Lubit R

I have often witnessed child therapists interacting with children in ways that undermine the therapy or even hurt the child. The key problem is that therapists tend to forget what it was like to be a child and therefore neither appreciate how certain behaviors will be experienced by the child, nor what the child needs to be able to trust the therapist and build a therapeutic relationship. Building and maintaining a therapeutic connection with a child is often a difficult task. The first challenge is that children rarely choose to go to therapy; it is generally imposed on them by their parents. A second issue is that therapists often feels obligated not simply to the child but to the parents, who the child may well be upset with and who may be treating the child in problematic ways. The challenge escalates when the therapist does not want to hear, and certainly does not want to believe, that the parents are mistreating the child. Under all of these pressures, it is easy for a therapist to fail to empathize with the child, and even to fall into invalidating the child. Doing this, will not only doom the therapy, but may hurt the child. Therapeutic success depends above all else on empathy and connection. With empathy and connection, children will benefit from sessions, regardless of the theoretical orientation of the therapist. Without them the therapist may hurt the child. Having left childhood behind long ago, I found the following ideas very helpful as guidelines for building and maintaining an alliance with a child in therapy