‘Inside the Mind of the Child and the Parent” October 17-19, 2014

At the IPI weekend ‘Inside the Mind of the Child and the Parent” October 17-19, 2014, Vali Maduro and Janine Wanlass made an interesting distinction among our therapeutic approaches with adults, adolescents, and children.  We adjust our approach to their manner of communicating unconscious conflict: Adults communicate in words and dreams; children communicate in play, and adolescents communicate in actions.  Jill Scharff described the importance of working with couples as parents.  We open a space for them to talk about their child, hear their complaints and disappointments, help them face their fears, and develop with them an emotional language with which they can think about and communicate with their child.   Some of them may work in depth, seeing how they express the link to their own parents and to each other in the way that they parent their children, and learning how their difficulties as a couple tend to reflect unconscious aspects of their couple conflict.

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