Working Therapeutically with Children

One or Two Day Training Workshop

This course was devised and is facilitated by Helen Cruthers

This workshop is for any professional working with children in an educational or therapeutic setting, who is wishing to enhance their creative and communicative skills.

The creative arts can play an important role in any therapeutic or learning encounter, giving children broader opportunities for self-expression, self-exploration, and self-development. The arts (movement, music, painting, drawing, puppets, sandtray work, metaphor) can offer new languages with which to communicate and encapsulate experience. This is especially important for those who find it hard or limiting to express themselves verbally.

We will focus on enchancing children's opportunities to:

• Express and externalize feelings and perceptions

• Articulate and communicate their experience

• Gain insight and understanding into themselves

• Contain powerful and complex feelings

• Explore their potential

• Build relationships

• Understand their emotions

• Keep themselves safe

The workshop focuses on the practical and emotional skills involved in communicating effectively with children. It explores relevant ethical and safety issues, and how to integrate new learning into the work context.

What's the next step?
Please feel free to contact me for any further discussion of how I may be able to help – 07753 474768 or
helen.cruthers@gmail.com.

The Therapeutic Power of the Arts

One or Two Day Training Workshop

This course was devised and is facilitated by Helen Cruthers

The creative arts can play an important role in any therapeutic work, giving individuals of all ages broader opportunities for self-expression, self-exploration, and self-development. The arts (movement, music, painting, drawing, puppets, sandtray work, metaphor) can offer new languages with which to communicate and encapsulate experience. This is especially important for those who find it hard or limiting to express themselves verbally.

Using the arts therapeutically can enhance clients' opportunities to:

• Express and externalize feelings and perceptions

• Articulate and communicate their experience

• Gain insight and understanding into themselves

• Nurture and strengthen their ‘inner child' – through play and creativity

• Contain powerful and complex feelings

• Explore transformation and potential.

The arts may also offer therapists the opportunity to enhance their own creativity, insight and self support. This workshop will provide a safe and stimulating space for practitioners to explore their creative energies. There will be opportunities both for personal exploration and for facilitating others' self expression.

Theoretical input will include:

• the role of the arts in humanistic therapy

• the Gestalt contribution

• ethical issues in working with the arts

• the arts and subpersonality/inner child work

What's the next step?
Please feel free to contact me for any further discussion of how I may be able to help – 07753 474768 or
helen.cruthers@gmail.com.

Hurting and Healing – parenting developmentally traumatised children

Many children, due to developmental trauma and poor attachment experiences, present adults with very challenging behaviours and destructive ways of relating. Traditional parenting approaches can sometimes exacerbate the situation with children who don’t feel safe enough to let themselves be parented and cared for. The nurture that is on offer – care, fun, commitment, family life – can feel too painful to accept, and rejection of the nurture (rather than the anticipated gratitude) can follow. This can be very challenging for the parents/carers.  

“Evidence suggests that these children do less well with interventions that do not take into account the traumatised neurobiological system and the need for repeated healthy relationship experiences.” (Bruce Perry, 2006)

Within this training, emphasis is placed on responding to the needs and feelings behind behaviours and attitudes – and on supporting the young person to grow towards being able to regulate around these feelings. This means supporting children to learn, over time, that even when they feel sad or scared or angry, they can find non-destructive ways of expressing these feelings. As an approach therapeutic parenting involves choosing ways of being with the young person that are most likely to provide opportunities to connect, manage, calm, and reflect.

What is needed is therapeutic responding – aimed at facilitating the young person not just to survive, but to thrive. Key concepts include:

Connection before correction –

• prioritising the importance of the relationship between carer and child as a healthy relationship with a sensitive, caring robust adult is what heals

Positive parenting –

• consistent, calm, non-rejecting – aiming to avoid further shaming

• clear firm boundaries alongside empathy for the child’s feelings

Warm acceptance of and respect for the young person -

• what they are currently able to manage, and how they currently need to survive

Parenting within this framework gives children repeated opportunities to feel and behave differently - to wire new pathways in the brain. This helps the young person feel safe which is the foundation for beginning to heal and to progress developmentally.

As a trainer, Helen creates and delivers workshops in the fields of counselling, creative arts therapy, working with young people, empowerment and anti-bullying, self support, self development, and parenting skills. Helen is happy to tailor-make training or offer consultation according to your needs.

PACEful parenting (based on the ideas of Dan Hughes)

Based on early developmental needs, PACE is a really useful approach to parenting, fostering and relating. This workshop will explore the meaning and practical implications of Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy in building, repairing and maintaining healthy and satisfying relationships with young people.

What's the next step?
Please feel free to contact me for any further discussion of how I may be able to help – 07753 474768 or
helen.cruthers@gmail.com.

Certificate in the Use of Creative Arts for Learning and Development

This course was devised and facilitated by Helen Cruthers and Ishtar Swaffield.

This training can be delivered as a 9 Day Certificate Programme and offers a offers a thorough introduction to the use of creative arts to facilitate learning and development in a variety of different settings. The course is designed for anyone involved with the development and support of others who wants to enhance their professional skills.

The creative arts, which can include movement, music, painting, drawing, puppets, sand tray work and metaphor can play an important role in any therapeutic work, giving both adults and children broader opportunities for self expression, self exploration and self development. For those who find it hard or limiting to express themselves verbally the arts can offer a new language with which to communicate and encapsulate their experience.

This course will provide a safe and stimulating environment for both personal and professional development, with opportunities to deepen participants' self awareness which is vital in working effectively with others. Learning will be both experiential and theoretical, and focus on developing the skills to integrate the creative arts into participants' current working practices. The course seeks to empower both workers and their client groups, enabling them to free their own creative energy. By the end of the course it is hoped that participants will have developed their own style of working therapeutically with the arts that is consistent with their own belief systems, the needs of their clients and their work context.

Comments from previous participants:
“adventurous, emancipating, experiential, educational, splendiferous, refreshing, shifting, empowering... an offering of riches”

What's the next step?
Please feel free to contact me for any further discussion of how I may be able to help – 07753 474768 or
helen.cruthers@gmail.com.

Creative Therapies for Schools Counsellors

Two Day Training Workshop

This course was devised and is facilitated by Helen Cruthers

This workshop is tailored to the particular needs of counsellors working in schools with young people, giving opportunities to enhance their skills communicating with their clients.

The creative arts can play an important role in any therapeutic work, giving clients broader opportunities for self-expression, self-exploration, and self-development. The arts (movement, music, painting, drawing, puppets, sandtray work, metaphor) can offer new languages with which to communicate and encapsulate experience. This is especially important for those who find it hard or limiting to express themselves verbally. This is particularly relevant for young people and in the school context when therapeutic work can be time limited.

Using the arts therapeutically can enhance pupils' opportunities to:

• Express and externalize feelings and perceptions

• Articulate and communicate their experience

• Gain insight and understanding into themselves

• Contain powerful and complex feelings

• Explore their potential

Comment from previous participant:
“I really enjoyed the opportunity to work in a creative way.”

I believe that the arts can also offer counsellors and therapists the opportunity to enhance their own creativity, insight and self support. This workshop will provide a safe and stimulating space for practitioners to explore their creative energies. There will be opportunities for personal exploration, for facilitating others' self expression, and for exploring together relevant practical and ethical issues.

What's the next step?
Please feel free to contact me for any further discussion of how I may be able to help – 07753 474768 or
helen.cruthers@gmail.com.