Psychological help and support from a qualified psychologist for families raising children with special needs.
Monday-Sunday 08:30 - 20:00
Kyiv, 17 Kovpaka St. (On the map)
Bila Tserkva, 191A Tarashchanska St. (On the map)
Psychological help and support from a qualified psychologist for families raising children with special needs.
Every family has its own recipe for happiness and its own ways of overcoming the difficulties that arise on the way to it. A family raising a special child lives at some moments an entirely ordinary, everyday life, and at others a life that is unique and hard to understand, not only for outsiders but even for friends. Still, any family, as a living organism, inevitably reacts to a child's developmental disorder or illness.
The goals of psychological help and psychological support for families raising children with special needs can be described as follows:
Current trends point to a clear growth in psychologists' interest in new and cognitive strategies that help change the attitude of the whole family toward a difficult situation and improve the ability to cope with current difficulties. Increasingly, specialists use group approaches to overcoming difficulties such as "The Family and a Child's Developmental Disorder." Groups are organized not only for patients but also for their closest relatives, where everyone can regularly share their feelings and current problems and receive comprehensive emotional and informational support, both from people in a similar situation and from a qualified specialist, a psychologist.
To get through difficult moments, we sometimes have to deny the obvious. It seems easier to forget the moments that cause pain. This is how the protective mechanism of our psyche works. But sometimes we also deny our feelings, or teach ourselves to isolate from them so as not to experience unpleasant and difficult emotions. How often one hears: "It's as if I'm not living, but watching a movie about myself..." If we give our emotions no outlet for a long time and do not acknowledge their right to exist and be expressed in our lives, this may lead to illness and depression. At psychological seminars, trainings, conversations and meetings, a person gets the chance to find a way out of the situation, to solve their problems, and to take care of themselves, their health, and the well-being and happiness of their family.
All parents of special children are alike in one way: their lives are divided into two periods, "before" and "after." The starting point of this division is the moment parents learn the diagnosis. This moment is very difficult and stressful, both for the parents and for all their loved ones.
Who is a special child? What does the child live by, what are the child's needs, and what is happening to the child? What future awaits? Is it worth expecting tangible help, and from where? Will the child be able to live a full life, and can they be helped to do so?
The everyday life of parents is ceaseless care for the child, following the doctor's instructions and doing activities with the child, talking and going for walks, and all these seemingly simple activities require enormous physical and emotional resources. Parents become companions of a special child and, in the whirlwind of days, simply have no time to realize what is happening to them. At the same time, they are constantly under the weight of emotions. It is a constant fear for the child's life and health, fear of causing harm, fear of breaking down, fear of getting tired and missing something... It is also exhaustion from constant tension, from lack of understanding, from daily worries. It is anxiety because you do not know how to proceed. It is guilt and anger, a lot of anger: "Why did this happen to me?" It is self-pity and sorrow that your life will never be the same again.
We will look at the situation together and try to find ways to resolve it. A big part of dealing with any situation is acknowledging that it exists. What will we do? We will discuss in detail, recall and re-live what happened before, and look for resources that will help you cope with the situation. We will talk, learn to express our emotions and feelings, and let go of the habit of pushing experiences deep inside.
Your child is the most important thing in your life, the dearest, most beloved and most significant. And this fact should not change depending on whether the child is ordinary or special. Parents' attitudes are projected onto the child: the child will feel the way you see them. Your uncertainty may turn into their withdrawal, your panic into their neurosis, your love into their love for themselves and for you. What will you choose?
How many children do you actually have? Puzzled? But your child is not only the one who was born to you. It is also the one who always lives inside you: your little inner child.
How well do you know this child, with its dreams and needs, aspirations and desires? How often do you let it out and allow it to play? Never? "Then we are coming to you!"
In fact, you should never forget your inner child, because only it can teach you self-love, self-respect, understanding, and acceptance of yourself and your needs and wishes. And that is normal! It is normal to want something, to wish for something and to keep achieving what you wish for. When your relationship with yourself is in order, problems in relationships with other family members will also arise less often, or not at all. If you cannot change the situation, change your attitude toward it.
In such a family, the focus is always on the child with developmental problems. The child constantly needs comprehensive support and professional help. At the same time, the lives of other family members, their pressing needs, problems and experiences, move into the background. A family is a living organism that changes when at least one of its components changes. This means that one person's problem becomes the problem of everyone in the family. That is why it is wrong to help only the child with developmental problems: all family members need help.
When working with a family, it is necessary to study it carefully, identify the strengths and weaknesses of this integral organism, and find out the conditions in which a child with special needs lives in that family.
The structure and functions of the family, the interaction of family members, the family life cycle: we will go through all of this to understand how processes can be set right, what tasks to set, what goal is worth pursuing, and which goal is appropriate at each stage of development. All this is necessary in order to make not each person separately but the whole family happier.
The life cycle of every family is individual. But one thing is typical of all families: the presence of crises. At some point, people who created a family out of love and friendship begin to quarrel over nothing, try to hurt their partner as painfully as possible and poison their existence. What causes such family crises? Who is to blame for such quarrels, and can these problems be solved? Or is divorce the only way out?
The concept of the life cycle has its roots in psychology. A family functions according to two important laws of society: development and homeostasis.
Both laws make it possible to distinguish the following stages in the family life cycle:
A family's transition from one stage to another happens through points that we call a crisis. At such moments, the way of life the whole family had established during the previous stage changes, and with the start of a new round there is a need to review this way of life and adjust it in view of the new circumstances. Every person gets used to a certain routine, and an attempt to change what is already established is often met with resistance. Hence the crisis: the resistance of one or several (all) family members to moving to a new stage. The speed and smoothness (less trauma) of the transition depend on how much the common good matters more than the personal.
Of course, it would be good, even wonderful, if a prompter sat by the stage of your family life and suggested the right words and actions that can strengthen, support and preserve the family.
The bond between an infant and the mother is very close and does not last only during pregnancy. Maintaining this bond is vitally important: this closeness gives the child a sense of protection and safety. In fact, a child is completely dependent on their parents, but over time this dependence loses its intensity, and as the child grows, they become independent. Growing up, the child builds their own boundaries and creates their own mechanisms for communicating with the world and, at the same time, protecting themselves from it.
In the case of a special child, this bond never breaks and does not even become thinner over time. Parents are constantly captive to a thousand questions and thoughts about how their child's fate will unfold, whether the child will be able to fulfill their potential and become part of society. Under the weight of these thoughts and worries, they simply forget about themselves, their needs and prospects, sacrificing everything for the child's well-being.
Under total protection, a child can never become independent. That is why it is important to learn to let go, so that the child can explore the world on their own, even if by not entirely ordinary methods. But how can you find the balance point where your child's real needs and your own needs as a person meet? How can you overcome the constant feeling of guilt and the urge to keep fussing over the child that this feeling gives rise to?
Emotion is how a person expresses their attitude to every situation. On the one hand, the same emotions give us a sense that we are alive and create a sharp need to change something radically in our life and emotional state. Why, then, is it sometimes so hard to control our emotional reaction? How is it that we still cannot choose and sort our emotions, showing to others and truly feeling only those that are important and needed at the moment?
The view that the birth of a child with special needs is perceived as a catastrophe is mistaken. It is quite inappropriate that most parents consider their special children deprived and unhappy. In fact, many families who found themselves in a similar situation adapted to the new conditions of life without the help of professionals and found their own ways, if not of improving, then of adjusting the situation.
But in this case, it is important for the family's circle (relatives, friends) to recognize that these people have the right to be weak, to cry, to be upset, to give up. Indeed, everyone has their own way of coping with a personal small grief. People cry, take risks with their lives, hate themselves and those around them. Expressing one's attitude to a situation through emotions is natural. But it is also important to make these feelings and emotions conscious. For this difficult state of "lamenting" to have a result, a person needs to choose for themselves the kind of emotions and activity through which they will express their state.
Our task is to work out ways of expressing emotions in a healthy and constructive manner, which make it possible to formulate one's needs easily and simply without offending or harming one's loved ones and oneself.
All children have special families. And all families have special children. That is why it is so important to learn to perceive each other's uniqueness with respect, to build trusting relationships with different family members in different ways, and to accept family members as they are, without judging or condemning. And in this we will gladly help you!