Our partners from the psychological service of the nonprofit organization City Clinical Children’s Hospital No. 16 have been practicing fairytale therapy for a long time. This is how they do it.
Fairytale therapy for children is an effective way to integrate personality as well as develop a child’s creative and mental abilities. Using this method, you can create favorable conditions for building balanced relations with the outside world, as well as teach behavioral strategies for coping with crisis situations.
The point is to create a special fairytale atmosphere that makes dreams a reality and allows you to interact with your own phobias and anxieties.
Fairytale therapy can help to cope with such problems as:
self rejection;
uncontrolled aggression;
feeling of loneliness;
inability to understand one’s own feelings;
conflicts with “parents” or medical personnel;
fear of pain or medical procedures.
Vlada Yevseeva, head of the psychological service, says that it is very important to offer fairytale therapy to children’s hospital patients. Through metaphor and imagination, it is possible to handle some common children’s complications, such as procedural pain, self-confidence deficit, loss of the familiar environment, and acceptance of changes.
What fairy tales can heal?
There is a certain algorithm for selecting or composing a fairy tale:
Clearly define the problem.
Decide on possible ways of coping with this problem in real life.
Embody in the personality of the fairy tale’s main character those features and fears that should be worked out.
As a result, the main character of the tale has to overcome the problem.
However, it’s important to remember that self-medication can be harmful even when the medicine is an ordinary fairy tale. So seek advice from specialists.
Photo: Vlada Yevseeva