Child/Family Therapy

Child Family Therapy

Ideally children grow up in an environment where loving parents meet their physical and emotional needs on a consistent basis. When your child learns to expect this care to be kind and predictable, then they learn that the world is a safe place where people can be trusted. This is what secure attachment looks like. 

Even when you do your best as a parent, environmental factors, such as traumatic events and significant life stressors that impact either you or your child, can affect the way you interact with each other. While these challenges might manifest at any time from toddlers to teens, it’s important to keep in mind that a healthy relationship with your child is how you are best able to influence them in a positive way. 

Arizona Connection Counseling we are here to help. Whether by helping you to directly strengthen your parent-child relationship, or to help you or your child overcome trauma and/or adjust to life’s stressors. Our therapists are trained using a variety of methods specifically designed for children and their families.

These include but are not limited to:

  • Play therapy
  • Sand tray 
  • EMDR trauma therapy for children
  • Family/Parent-Child therapy
  • Impulse control for ADD/ADHD & Autism

Therapists that specialize in child/family therapy:

Eating Disorders - It's Not About the Food

By Kelly Lopez

If it’s not about the food, what is it really about?

The eating disorder serves a function, it does a job. Despite the problems an eating disorder creates, it is an effort to cope, shield against, communicate, and solve problems. Behaviors may be a way to establish a sense of power or control, self-worth, strength, and containment. Bringing may be used to numb pain. Purging may be a way to release emotions. When one cannot cope in healthy ways, adaptive functions (behaviors) are created to ensure a sense of safety, security, and control.
According to Carolyn Costin*, some of the “adaptive functions that eating disorder behaviors commonly serve are”:
It’s not about the food, it’s a way of coping with low self-esteem, negative emotions, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, unstable home, difficulty resolving conflict and much more.
*Costin, Carolyn. The Eating Disorder Sourcebook: A Comprehensive Guide to the Causes, Treatments and Prevention of Eating Disorders. 3rd. edition, McGraw Hill, 2007.
Fuller, Kristen. “Eating Disorders: It’s Not All about Food.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 22 Mar. 2017