Wings for Justice

Educates and encourages survivors to help them protect their children's constitutional rights in the family court system.

The Healing Process for a Child

The Healing Process for a Child When They Have Experienced Pain

When a child has had painful emotional experiences, he or she is going to need someone to patiently guide them from understanding their pain into healing from their pain.  It is a process for a child, just like an adult, to learn how to work through their emotional experiences, especially the painful or traumatic ones.

How Do You Help A Child Heal From Pain?

Here are the steps for a healthy healing process for a child to work through painful experiences with a safe, trusting adult in his or her life:

  1. Understanding:  Help the child walk through the pain by helping him or her understand what happened that caused the pain (explain, talking about it, reading about it).
  2. Healthy Expression of Emotions:  Allow the child to express his/her emotions (anger, sadness, grief) in a safe place in response to what happened to him or her.
  3. Acceptance:  Come alongside the child to help him or her accept the reality of what happened (i.e. abuse, neglect, abandonment, etc.).
  4. Healing:  Help the child move from a place of acceptance to receiving healing. Healing can be a variety of things for a child in replacing pain. Some ways a child can heal is by writing it all down or coloring it out and throwing it away, getting it out of his/her heart and mind by talking about it with someone he/she trusts, letting go of the pain everyday and releasing it like a balloon into the sky, finding hope in being out of the pain and choosing a new focus on something good in his/her life.

  5. Create A New Pattern:  Then, the child has moved from understanding to healing and created a pattern of learning how to work through his/her pain into healing.  This pattern can be lifelong and set the child free from the pain they experienced as a child and into adulthood.
    Healing Is A Choice.     The key is to choose to deal with the pain, preferably when it happens, so that a child can heal through it. Establishing a healthy pattern of healing from pain in his or her life creates a lifelong pattern of health, healing and freedom from pain.

By Wendi Miller 2016