Using Trained Counsellors

In Monday’s blog, I explained the need to provide counselling for children who are placed in family-based alternative care. This is needed regardless of whether they came from an institution, whether they had to be removed from their family for their safety, or whether they lost their parents and have no other relatives. All these scenarios provide children with a traumatic background, and if they are not provided with counselling to help them deal with this, the chance of their placement in a family working becomes much smaller.

The first problem is getting people to understand how important it is to provide these children with counselling. The second problem I regularly encounter, is making people realise how essential it is that the person who will provide the counselling is someone who is trained to do this.

On more than one occasion has someone who was finally convinced of the need for counselling suggested to me that they talk to the children, or that the manager of the project could do it, or that we could let some visiting volunteers talk with the children. These were ideas that I had to put an end to immediately. Of course, all these people can talk to the children, but they cannot provide counselling. And attempting to do so risks causing serious harm to the child and possibly even to the person doing the counselling without adequate knowledge and understanding.

Counsellors, who are often psychologists or social workers – but can sometimes also be people without professional qualifications, who have been trained by professionals – have a lot of skills to help the child and to help protect themselves. They know how to build up a trusting relationship with the child, which allows the child to open up and share things that make him feel vulnerable or even scared. They know how to interact with children at an age and developmentally appropriate level. They know how to listen to the child without any judgement and without taking the grief or suffering of the child onto themselves. They know how to deal with the child when he has shared a horrific experience, in a way that helps the child process what has happened and heal from it. And they know what to do when they walk away from such a counselling session, to protect their own mental health.

All of these things need to be learned. And attempting to provide counselling without the necessary knowledge can cause a lot of problems. The best-case scenario would essentially be that the inexperienced person would simply fail to get the child to open up. In this case, it would only have been a waste of time, without further negative consequences.

If somehow the inexperienced person should succeed in getting a child to open up about their traumatic experiences, it would be like opening a Pandora’s box. When, once it has been opened, you discover that you have no idea how to deal with this or how to deal with the child, it is not a case where you can just stuff everything back into the box and close the lid again. If the child has opened up and shared traumatic experiences, not having someone there to help him cope with all the memories and emotions that suddenly whirl around, can be an additional traumatic experience that can severely impact his mental health and behaviour – not to mention his inclination to ever open up about this to anyone again.

Meanwhile, the inexperienced person cannot unhear what she has been told. And the emotional and psychological toll of hearing these kinds of stories from children, when you are not equipped to handle them and protect yourself to a certain exent, can be very high. It may end up being a traumatic experience for the person volunteering to do some lay person counselling.

So, please, make sure that the person who offers counselling to the children is equipped to really help the children work through their experiences, as well as being equipped to protect themselves during the process.

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