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Throughout time, and across different cultures, dream analysis has been at the base of human creativity. Learning to work with dreams, as a source of healing, is beneficial to one’s own health. Many people are curious about their dreams and the meaning behind them. However, it is not uncommon for people to forget their dreams before they get out of bed.

The first secret behind dream-tending is to be consistent in remembering the events in your unique world of dreams. The practice of keeping a dream journal is crucial to understanding your dreams. A dream journal can be anything—a notepad, diary, computer, or smartphone, for example—that you use to jot down your fleeting thoughts and emotions immediately after you awake. The idea is not to write every detail of your dreams, but to write down every detail that you can remember.

At first, this may be just a descriptive word or two—perhaps a sentence or phrase from the few vague impressions left over from dreamland that describes how you felt when you awoke. As you continue to write down what you can remember after waking, it will gradually become easier to remember the next dream. The reason that consistency and immediacy are so fundamental when attempting to remember dreams is because dreams provide a natural access point to your subconscious. Think of the process as strengthening a muscle: when used every day, the ability to remember dreams becomes easier and easier.

It is important to keep this in mind: don’t judge or scrutinize your dreams while you are jotting them down. Just let it happen. Your dream journal may seem dreary or nonsensical at first, but you will soon fill it up with substance from your creative mind.

For more information or to speak to one of our staff at the West Valley Counseling Center, please contact us at (818) 758-9450 or email us at info@westvalleycounseling.org

West Valley Counseling Center is located at 19634 Ventura Blvd. Suite 212 Tarzana, CA 91356

The Heart of the Matter: Help for Super Parents

As a Super Parent, you are a natural teacher. But even Super Parents don’t have all the answers. How can you help your children avoid the abuse of drugs and alcohol? How can you encourage your children to express their natural emotions in healthy ways?

Listening to Your Child with an Open Heart, Part 4: Early Adolescence and Transitioning to Middle School

by the staff of West Valley Counseling Center

For the past several months we’ve been discussing with you, the parents, how to help your children grow in healthy, positive ways and avoid using drugs as a coping mechanism for the emotions and events that affect their lives.

In our last blog, WVCC staff member Bennett Goldberg, M.A., wrote:

On the average, children who learn how to establish meaningful relationships as toddlers, small children, and adolescents are unlikely to get involved in substance abuse, violence, unprotected sex, or other maladaptive behaviors.

In this blog, we’ll flip through Dr. Stanley Greenspan’s book Playground Politics: Understanding the Emotional Life of Your School-Age Child. We’ll take a look at emotions and thoughts your children deal with as they head toward middle school (ages 10 to 13, approximately).

Who Am I, and What Do I Want to Be?

According to Greenspan, from ages 10 to 12, children develop a sense of their inner selves, and their self-esteem becomes more stable. Children also:

• develop a set of internal values (“I want to be a good student” or “I shouldn’t be mean”)
• begin to be able to think about the future (“I want to be a fireman” or “I want to be a teacher someday”)

What Do I Value? What’s Important to Me?

Greenspan recommends three ways for parents to help their kids nurture self-esteem and feel genuinely good about themselves:

1. Value your child’s uniqueness.
Reinforcing self-esteem isn’t about what parents say, notes Greenspan, but in the way that parents listen, empathize, and relate to their children.

2. Value your children for qualities that they value in themselves.
A child must be successful in his own eyes in order to feel good about himself. “Self-esteem is an inner feeling,” writes Greenspan. “Helping a child foster a sense of self-worth means having respect for the child’s inner world. What does he value? What’s important to him?”

3. Foster initiative and assertiveness.
Initiative and assertiveness come from having a connection to the “deep, inner core sense of who they are,” says Greenspan. Parents can encourage and support their children’s interests and values.

From a Black-and-White World to a World of Gray

As your children move through elementary school (grades 1-5) and middle school (grades 6-8), their viewpoint becomes more sophisticated.

• In kindergarten and first grade, children “tend to have a stark, all-or-nothing outlook,” notes Greenspan.
• In later grades, children gain flexibility and the ability to reason, which allow them to “gather and process information more accurately.” How do your children grow a more sophisticated view of the world? It happens as they continue to learn and to socialize in their daily lives.

Role Models and Mixed Feelings

As children begin to mature sexually, they may develop an increased interest in role models and (for a while, at least) a closer relationship with the same-sex parent.

During this stage, says Greenspan, parents can focus on building strong relationships. A father can nurture his relationship with his son, and a mother can nurture her relationship with her daughter.

What about friends, relatives, peers, teachers, and other parents? Greenspan notes that children need to learn to be confident in their ability to like, and be liked, by other people.

This involves balancing the pleasure of relationships with the inevitable loss, disappointment, and frustration that relationships bring.

By learning that relationships can be warm, fun, and intimate but also involve power struggles, sharing, and fights, children can realize that mixed feelings toward a friend or a parent are okay. In other words, children learn that having more than one emotion at the same time is perfectly normal.

Together Down the Road

By guiding your child through this period in his or her life, when sense of self becomes more developed and viewpoints become more sophisticated, you can continue nurturing your child in a healthy, positive life.

By listening to your child about how he or she is feeling, you can help your child deal with emotions and reactions that may be unfamiliar or confusing. When you do this—as we mentioned in an earlier blog—you help your child to learn how to “self-soothe.”

And by learning how to deal with his or her emotions, your child is less likely to turn to drugs or other external helpmates that can get them in trouble.

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The staff at West Valley Counseling Center provides therapy and family counseling to dozens of clients every day. In this blog series our therapists will explore how to create “valuing relationships” throughout your child’s life. We will go step by step through a child’s emotional development, giving clear descriptions with real-world examples of how to foster strong emotional relationships and help our children deal with the ups and downs of life. Look for our next blog coming soon.

Bookmark this blog, and visit us soon for our next blog post.

For more information or to speak to one of our staff at the West Valley Counseling Center, please contact us at (818) 758-9450 or email us at info@westvalleycounseling.org

West Valley Counseling Center is located at 19634 Ventura Blvd. Suite 212 Tarzana, CA 91356

While many of the same dynamics and issues are present in both same sex and opposite sex couples, some factors, such as social acceptance and dominant heterosexual culture, can have a toll on relationships. Nontraditional couples may also experience discrimination and lack of social support that may lead to issues in coping, communication, and healthy decision-making.

Couples therapy, for same sex and nontraditional couples can help address deep-rooted issues and find ways to help bolster the relationship in a safe and understanding environment. Devising couples therapy helps with normative issues in partner communication and compromise as well. Some common issues that encourage couples to seek therapy include:

– To change relationship perspectives
– To identify dysfunctional behaviors
– To modify dysfunctional behaviors
– To decrease emotional avoidance
– To improve communication

For more information on the benefits of couples counseling, click HERE to read more.

As with any couple, seeking therapy in the beginning stages of conflict may help to solve issues before they worsen and, thus, more difficult to treat. Couples therapy can be a huge benefit to participants feeling stagnant or depressed about current or past relationships, and can also help address uncomfortable issues such as:
– Effects of internal and external homophobia
– Sexual identity as an individual and as a couple
– Adoption or insemination
– Blended families
– Raising children
– Lack of social support
– Coming out
– Family Issues
– Cultural Differences
– Sexual Dysfunction
– Gender and sex roles

Family counseling for same sex or non-traditional couples may also help improve family issues and create a safe base that will support the couple.

For more information or to speak to one of our staff at the West Valley Counseling Center, please contact us at (818) 758-9450 or email us at info@westvalleycounseling.org

West Valley Counseling Center is located at 19634 Ventura Blvd. Suite 212 Tarzana, CA 91356

Listening to and understanding our children are two very different things.

Communication can be difficult for the best communicators but what about those who are just beginning the process? From an early age our children attempt to connect with us, on many levels at once, with few of the communications skills they’ll eventually possess as adults.

Deciphering Needs

The process of listening to our children begins with parents’ (and other caregivers’) careful attention to the cries that a baby makes. In doing so, the parent or caregiver learns how to determine whether the child is hungry, wet, sleepy, or otherwise distressed. But listening soon becomes more complicated. As our children grow, they experience more types of distress and increase their repertoire of verbal and non-verbal communication methods. This is an important time to let your children know that you are listening and available.

Letting Your Children Know that You are Listening:

• When your children are talking about their concerns, stop whatever you are doing and listen.
• Let them complete their point before your respond and listen to their point of view, even if it difficult to hear.
• Repeat what you heard them say to ensure that you understand them correctly.
• Express interest in what they are saying without being intrusive.

Being Available for Your Children:

• Notice times when your kids are most likely to talk – for example, at bedtime, before dinner, in the car – and be available.
• Find time each week for a one-on-one activity with your child and avoid scheduling other activities during that time.
• Learn about your children’s interests and initiate conversation by sharing what you have been thinking about.
• Start the conversation; it lets your children know that your care about them and what’s happening in their lives.

Young children communicate for various reasons. Some of these communications are, of course, for physical comfort or emotional sharing and reassurance. By contrast, communications with emotional roots can have many different meanings.

This statement is pretty obvious. The operative word is “some”. Some communications are are purely about comfort the balance are rooted in reassurance and emotional sharing which can be highly ambiguous. This ambiguity is further compounded by the fact that some children are not as straightforward in their play and talk as others.

Little Things Mean a Lot

As a kindergartner, my son went through a phase where he needed reassurance each morning before he entered the classroom. This wasn’t unusual – everyone needs extra encouragement from time to time – but one morning he flat out refused to enter the classroom.

I decided not to be insistent. Instead, we sat together quietly on the playground outside his classroom. After a long while, my son told me that he and his classmates had practiced a fire drill the day before. Then he gave me a hug and went inside.

Problem solved? Hardly.

The next day my son repeated the previous morning’s routine and refused to go into the classroom. This situation continued every day for several months, much to his mother’s and my concern. What was going on? It took a while, but we finally figured out what our son was going through.

Trauma, Reinforced

My son had spent the previous summer at camp. While he was there, he experienced a traumatic event. Several of his closest playmates were seriously injured, and all of the children were evacuated in a panic. In my son’s mind this meant that he was going to experience traumatic events on a regular basis. When his kindergarten teacher practiced fire drills with the students, it reinforced my son’s fear.

My son felt horribly unsafe in the world. He couldn’t communicate his fear, nor could he fully understand our reassurances. It took years for him to begin to feel safe at school, and to understand that his traumatic experience at summer camp was most likely a once-in-a-lifetime event.

A Tough Job for Parents

It is important, as a parent, to see and hear our children – good, bad or otherwise. Listening is difficult because of what we can’t or don’t want to hear:

• that our children are angry at us (it’s even harder when they have good reason)
• that our children are feeling afraid, sad, jealous, sexual, or vengeful (depending on what we’re uncomfortable with)
• that they feel ashamed or guilty, or make us feel guilty
• that their distress is very real and not easily relieved

Our temptation as parents is to treat things as if they are simple, to pretend we always know what to do, and to listen judgmentally – or not to listen at all.

Getting the Point Across

A child may communicate using words, actions, or some “disguised” manner whose code is difficult to decipher but might include a broad range of verbal and non-verbal cues including: stoicism, clapping, singing, tantrums, isolation and more.[example]. The communication may make the adult uncomfortable, but listening is worth the effort.

Helping a child to understand and accept his or her feelings is a crucial step in the development of emotional intelligence (being aware of your emotions and able to express them in a healthy way), promotes the child’s mental health, and is crucial to establishing solid relationships in the future.

On the average, children who learn how to establish meaningful relationships as toddlers, small children, and adolescents are unlikely to get involved in substance abuse, violence, unprotected sex, or other maladaptive behaviors.

Genuinely hearing and seeing our children is one of the best gifts we can give them.

The staff at West Valley Counseling Center provides therapy and family counseling to dozens of clients every day. In this blog series our therapists will explore how to create “valuing relationships” throughout your child’s life. We will go step by step through a child’s emotional development, giving clear descriptions with real-world examples of how to foster strong emotional relationships and help our children deal with the ups and downs of life. Look for our next blog coming soon.

For more information or to speak to one of our staff, please contact us at (818) 758-9450 or email us at info@westvalleycounseling.org

Traditional spring cleaning brings to mind scrubbing floors, throwing away useless or broken items, and maybe a new coat of paint on the house. However, life usually finds a way to evolve into something that’s anything but traditional, giving us no choice but to respond accordingly.

Spring cleaning can be a great opportunity to purge more than just dust and broken food processors. Spring is a signifier of new beginnings and a perfect time for self-reflection and goal setting. Here are just a few aspects of life that may benefit from a little spring cleaning:

Consider Relationships
Evaluating current relationships and friendships can have a huge impact on happiness, time, and personal growth. Take the time to figure out who is a true friend, and who could use some distancing from. Friends who constantly judge or ridicule decisions, who are not trustworthy, or who flake repeatedly may be adding another element of stress to life.

How to deal with toxic relationships or friendships that have fallen by the way side is up to the individual, but consistency and firmness are crucial.

Clear Important Spaces
Cleaning your entire life can seem like an incredibly daunting task, but entirely doable by tackling projects in steps. A great starting point is the spaces that are frequently used. It could be an office, kitchen, car, or even bedroom. Go as slowly as needed, but really focus on doing at least one thing every day until the space is cleared of clutter.

Focus on Yourself
Winter is not always kind to waistlines. Spring brings warm weather and sunshine, and is perfect for taking strolls around the neighborhood after dinner or going on bike rides with loved ones during the weekend. These healthier choices fuel a happier you while helping to lose weight or maintain your figure. Use spring cleaning as a chance to buy healthier groceries, plan meals at home, and focus on creating a healthy and happy you! A new haircut or pair of shoes can also be a well-deserved treat.

Tackle that ‘To-do List’
To-do lists are inevitable facts of life. While a to-do list will always have things on it, try and cross off a few of the peskier items that have been haunting your day planner for a while. This may seem counter-intuitive to spring cleaning—aren’t we supposed to be tying up loose ends instead of starting new projects?—but getting tasks out of the way will help you to focus more on current projects. It is also important to reflect on to-do lists. Is redecorating the sitting room worth the stress and time commitment? If not, take it off the list and revisit it later. We can’t do everything, but we can do the important things.

Overall, there are many ways to spring clean and improve quality of life. Spring cleaning can often seem like another stressful chore, but its potential could help reduce daily stress and fatigue, and lead to a happier and more balanced life.

For more information or to speak to one of our staff, please contact us at (818) 758-9450 or email us at info@westvalleycounseling.org

West Valley Counseling Center is located at 19634 Ventura Blvd. Suite 212 Tarzana, CA 91356

Hobbies are one of the greatest pleasures in life, but hobbies can often be overlooked in adolescence. As a parent, mentor, or guardian, one of the most positive things you can do for an adolescent is encourage extracurricular activities and hobbies.

Hobbies and Extracurricular activities help to:

1.) Avoid Bullying

Involvement in after-school sports, clubs, or band gives adolescents a healthy way to interact with peers and develop a high level of social support. If your child has a consistent network of friends, their social skills may be ‘exercised’. Hobbies provide youth an opportunity to work diplomatically with peers instead of using violence or verbal attacks.

2.) Detect and Prevent Early Warning Signs of Delinquent Behavior

Adult supervision, increased access to trusted adults, and friends are great ways for adolescents to reach out when they need help. Trying to provide support that still respects privacy and an adolescent’s sense of autonomy encourages individuals to stay away from delinquent behavior, such as substance abuse. Additionally, the extra involvement can make parents aware of an adolescent’s friends, activities, and behavior.

3.) Increase Self-esteem

It is no secret that self-esteem is very important for adolescents. Hobbies and extracurricular activities prove very beneficial in highlighting strengths while providing a warm environment where teens feel safe and valued. Children with high levels of self-esteem oftentimes perform better in school, have closer family relationships, and are less likely to turn to drugs or alcohol when they have problems.

4.) Make friends

Making friends can be difficult during the transition from childhood into adolescence; having multiple interests and hobbies can help adolescents befriend like-minded individuals and engage in constructive activities. Having friends who also enjoy similar hobbies can provide scaffolding that will help an adolescent. For example, two friends who enjoy knitting may take turns teaching each other new stitches or helpful hints. Learning from peers can be a very valuable tool that may yield better results than constant lecturing from adults.

5.) Make adolescents competitive for higher education opportunities and scholarships

Hobbies and activities for fun can often be added to resumes and are beneficial on college applications. Not only do adolescents with hobbies tend to do better in school, they may be eligible for music or sport scholarships that can lessen the financial load of universities. Hobbies, clubs, and activities provide your adolescents with immediate AND long-term benefits.

6.) Lessen chances of obesity and sedentary lifestyle

Obesity rates are climbing at an alarming rate, especially for children and adolescents. Having hobbies can reduce time spent in front of a television or computer and teach healthy habits that can follow them throughout their life.

 

For more information or to speak to one of our staff, please contact us at (818) 758-9450 or email us at info@westvalleycounseling.org

West Valley Counseling Center is located at 19634 Ventura Blvd. Suite 212 Tarzana, CA 91356

As a Super Parent, you are a natural teacher. But even Super Parents don’t have all the answers. How can you help your children avoid the abuse of drugs and alcohol? How can you encourage your children to express their natural emotions in healthy ways?

By Teresa Lalicker, MFT, Program Director, West Valley Counseling Center.

In our first blog, Dr. Burnett said that, “The key is to create resiliency in our children from their early years onward. We do this in our parent-child relationships by paying close attention to how we listen to our kids and model for them healthy emotional expression.”

How can we foster this resiliency in our children?

1.) By fostering healthy attachment in infancy.

Attentive mothering/caregiving creates a safe environment for the infant. Infants establish secure attachments when caregivers like you (mother, father, etc.) accomplish three things:

– learn to recognize your child’s verbal and nonverbal signals,
– accurately interpret those signals, and
– respond in a timely fashion and in an appropriate manner.

Let’s say that you, as a parent, have a weepy six-month-old who is in pain from teething. You respond to your child’s crying with an appropriate comment such as, “I see you are sad because your teeth are hurting you.”

What you’ve just done is called sensitive responsiveness. You responded to your child’s emotional signals in a healthy, appropriate, and positive way.

Challenge yourself to respond sensitively when your child expresses his or her emotions, and try to make sure that your responses don’t conflict with each other. Here’s an example: Hugging, kissing, and showing affection to a young child can be a sensitive response on your part, but not if it abruptly interrupts your child’s ongoing exploration and play.

Another example: If you comfort a crying child, this can also be a sensitive response from you, but not if it is accompanied with a verbal barrage criticizing the baby for being such a pain.

Securely attached infants will learn how to seek out and feel safe in healthy relationships. Then, as they grow into teens, they’ll be able to identify, express, and process their emotions in healthy ways, rather than turning to drugs and alcohol for comfort.

What’s another way that we can create emotional resiliency in our children?

2.) By teaching our children how to identify, express, and process their emotions.

We can help infants and young children identify their feelings by expressing those feelings for them. For example, you can say to your child,

“That loud noise really scared you.”
“You are angry that it’s time to go to sleep.”

If you initially “label” your children’s feelings for them, then your children will eventually learn to identify and express those feelings for themselves.

Lastly, it’s important for young children to learn how to process their own feelings and emotions. This will eventually create the ability to self-soothe.

Self-soothing occurs when your child is able to respond to his or her own emotions in a positive way. Methods of self-soothing include taking deep breaths, talking about their pain, or allowing themselves to cry.

The ability to self-soothe, in healthy ways, provides skills for our children that will make drug and alcohol use less appealing as coping mechanisms for difficult emotions.

The staff at West Valley Counseling Center provides therapy and family counseling to dozens of clients every day. In this blog series our therapists will explore how to create “valuing relationships” throughout your child’s life. We will go step by step through a child’s emotional development, giving clear descriptions with real-world examples of how to foster strong emotional relationships and help our children deal with the ups and downs of life. Look for our next blog coming soon.