When dealing with trauma, either with a capital or small ‘t’, not everyone can verbalise their emotions, or indeed their thoughts.

Very young children certainly struggle, as they haven’t yet gained the capacity for expressing through language. Any trauma, upset, or unresolved events, present or past, could be negatively affecting their behaviour and emotions, at home or in the classroom.

This can also be true for some adults… It can be a background feeling that something doesn’t quite feel right inside of you, but you can’t put your finger on exactly what, or if you can, you don’t know how to ‘fix’ it.

Unprocessed trauma, which is really about a lack of left/right brain communication, causes negative feelings, that can leave us extremely distressed.

EMDR really helps clear this up, however, for young children or adolescents it may not be appropriate to use this form of therapy. That’s when we can use a method called Drawing & Talking, which allows children to express safely, in a symbolic way, something that may seem dangerous or confusing to them.

D&T is not about therapist intervention, it’s the child really doing their own healing via the drawings.  They just speak about their picture during each of the 30 minute sessions, without the therapist asking questions about them, just what they’ve drawn.

This form of ‘intervention’ was established 13 years ago in the UK and has been used in over 7,000 schools and organisations throughout the UK. Private therapists like myself, also use it to help children and young people feeling happier within themselves, allowing them to move forward in life.