250 Cushman Street, Suite 2G
Fairbanks, AK 99701
Your once-happy child is anxious and tearful. Your son keeps running out of his classroom. Your teenage daughter is isolating and self-harming. You see your child always alone at school events. You’ve been called to the school yet again because your daughter hurt a classmate at recess. Your teenager is being bullied and refuses to go to school. Your son still wets the bed. Since COVID, your child has anxiety about being out in the world.
Your child’s challenges impact the whole family. You are worried about your job because you are called out so often by your kid’s school. You are constantly occupied managing your angry middle schooler, and don’t have time for their younger siblings. You lie awake at night worrying about your teenager’s cutting. You are already so overwhelmed with your own stress and worries that you just don’t have the energy to deal with your kid getting in trouble at school again.
You’ve tried talking to them, you’ve tried offering suggestions. Your efforts at discipline turn into power struggles. You know your kid needs help, and you aren’t sure what to do.
Kids today face the same challenges kids have always faced: changing families, separation and loss, bullying, the ready availability of drugs and alcohol, even experiences of abuse. They also face new challenges that past generations did not have to navigate as young people: the emerging role of technology in every aspect of our lives, and the big disruptions that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to family stability, school, and social life. As a parent it can be hard to know how to guide your kid through things you are still trying to figure out for yourself.
How would life change if you and your child could talk openly about what is going on? What if you both had tools to use together when emotions get high and situations escalate? Your child can learn to manage big feelings, and to come to you for support when life’s challenges feel too big. With the relationship between you and your school-aged child or teen feeling solid and supportive, your child will be able to go out in the world with confidence to learn and try new things. You can learn to see the needs behind the behaviors, and help them meet these needs in healthy ways.
In therapy, you and your child can have a safe space to explore what’s going on and start to connect their experiences, their feelings, and their behaviors. You can have a supportive space to talk, together and individually, about the challenges your family is navigating and how you can help them. You can learn together about tools and strategies to help your child manage their emotions and communicate what they need appropriately. Your child can learn skills to help them navigate relationship with their peers and teachers. You can have support to plan with teachers about how best they can support your child at school.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a modality that help us to use our thinking to make us feel better. Your child will learn to challenge unhelpful or self-defeating thoughts and find ways to reframe them to feel more empowered and hopeful. With Trauma-Focused CBT, strategies from CBT are applied to help a child understand painful experiences, manage their emotions around those experiences, and gain perspective on how those events fit into their story, but don’t define them.
In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy we incorporate strategies for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness. Your child will learn tools and skills to help them to notice how they feel, feel better, learn how to navigate relationships, and balance their thoughts and their emotions to access their own wisdom.
The ARC Model was developed for children who have faced a lot of challenges in their lives. You can’t always protect your child from having to go through hard times, but you can give them the tools to handle what life brings their way.
In this modality of therapy, we work on the relationships between your child or teen and their caregivers as the foundation for our work. You want your kid to know that you have their back, and that they can come to you when problems are too big for them to face on their own. Sometimes you both might need help to talk about the hard stuff in a way that feels supportive for you both. We will also look for the ways that you and your child enjoy time together, and build on those.
The second area of focus is on managing big feelings, so they can learn to understand how their experiences connect to their emotions. They will be able to recognize what is going on when they feel bad inside and know what to do to feel better.
The third main focus is on helping your child figure out who they are and find pride in being themselves. This can include their own likes and dislikes, their pride about their family, and their culture. We will explore what your kid feels good at and build on their success. Feeling competent and effective somewhere in their life helps a young person to feel empowered, gives them something to look forward to and derive pleasure from, and makes the world feel more hopeful and less chaotic.
