Alina Comendant PTSTA-P
Field of audience: P

Language: English
Level of audience: All

Transactional Analysis has many undiscovered gems in child and adolescence psychotherapy that we can pass on in our work with children in order to promote OK-OK relationships based on dignity, self-worth and agency.

I believe the future belongs to our children and in this matter I conducted an informal research on children’s emotional development. As a result, I concluded that when working with children- we need to strengthen the Child ego state.

Working with children requires “strengthening the Child ego state” because most children in psychotherapy have undergone trauma. Trauma inhibits the child’s senses, body, emotions, and intellect, causing the loss of aspects of the developing self.

Strengthening the Child ego state restores the child’s ability to learn about his yearnings, trust his senses and establish healthy self-identity. I see it as an integration process that happens through the experiences the psychotherapist is offering to the child.

The workshop introduces an illustrated mind map for the child psychotherapy with ten areas to be strengthened and offers ideas about interventions, contracting and treatment options. The proposed experiences are designed to discover the OK-ness of the child and to strengthen this core OK-ness that will lead to autonomy- the goal of transactional analysis.

The workshop will facilitate experiential learning involving both theoretical aspects and experimenting playing with the map of strengthening the Child ego state.

The stages of life and connection with ego state of Italian TAJ author M.T. Romanini (1991,1996) will be added, as will how we build our interventions with children while taking into consideration particularities in working with children (Pierini, 2014). References to child development from the relational/self psychology/object relationship perspective (Hargaden & Sills, 2002) will be provided, as well as Gestalt Play Therapy (V. Oklander, 2006).