Child Psychology

Objectives

The therapist’s role comes up with great responsibility. And therefore we have a very intense internship program at Vishwas Healing Centre.

We at Vishwas Healing Centre offer a broad foundation in the area of child psychology. We believe that there is a tremendous amount of social and emotional development takes place especially during early childhood to late adolescence and beyond. Here emotional development refers to how the child feels, understands, and expresses their emotions.

Emotional development is expressed in very young children through the expression of basic emotions like fear, joy, anger, and sadness. More complex emotions such as confidence, hope, guilt, and pride emerge as the child develops. Emotional development also includes a child’s ability to feel and understand other people’s emotions through empathy. Learning to regulate and express emotions appropriately is difficult for many children. Helping children understand their emotions early can have a powerful impact on current and future emotional development. A Psychologist can help children understand and express their emotions in a more healthy, positive way.

Broad Framework

Preschool-age children (3–5 years old)

Anchoring is a useful psycho-therapeutic technique for inducing a certain frame of mind or emotion, such as happiness or any positive state of mind which is needed for preschool children. It usually involves a touch, gesture, or word as an “anchor”, like a bookmark for the desired emotion, and recall it again later using that same anchor. The most common use of anchoring is to access resources, feelings, and states when you want them. Replacing unwanted feelings and thoughts with desirable ones is freedom indeed.

Middle and late childhood (6–11 years old)

Pattern interruption is an effective psychotherapeutic approach for storing keywords into a child’s subconscious mind. This can work well especially with middle and late childhood. Well, the child whose pattern is interrupted becomes highly influenceable. Pattern interruption is really useful in that it shakes up a child’s typical thoughts and actions and opens the possibility for something new. To fully overcome ineffective behavior patterns, the goal is to eventually recognize you are about to do it before you do it. The awareness itself doesn’t interrupt the pattern. The awareness is what enables you to become more aware of when you do it so you can change the behavior. Like any personal development technique, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Adolescence (12–17 year old)

Swish, also known as Swish Pattern, is a psychotherapeutic approach that is very useful for replacing an unfavorable emotion or behavior with a more useful one, especially for adolescents. Every memory has emotions attached to it. Some emotions are good (good memories) and some are bad (bad memories). For instance, a teenager moved to a new school, and tomorrow is his/her first day at the new school. He/she doesn’t know anyone there. How will he/she feel? He/she might feel nervous, anxious, or worried. Yet he/she knows that by feeling this way, he/she will come across this way to others and make it more likely that he/she will be alienated. It’s a vicious cycle. He/she might associate “anxiety” with the condition “the first day at a new school”. It would be better if he/she associates “excitement” instead. So we can use the Swish technique to make that happen. The idea is to keep remembering how excited you felt and hold onto that feeling.

General Guidelines

• Interventions and therapeutic strategies in clinical settings.
• Interns will have frequent tests & this apart will have to make presentations & complete assignments on time.
• The intern will be required to observe cases.
• Interns will do basic psychotherapies and counseling under supervision.
• Project-related skills training will continue at the discretion of respective supervisors.
• The certificate will be issued only on completion of the above-mentioned requirements of the curriculum.