My Children and Me
I feel the need to dedicate this page to my work with children, even though I have changed my professional identity so that in my practice I have been working with a significantly smaller number of children today than was the case before.
My professional life started with working with children. Actually, it was my big love. So today, Lira, my daughter, can say: "Mom, all the children really love you." In the beginning, I was volunteering, and later I worked as a special educator, applying the acquired knowledge and my intuitive powers in establishing contact, socializing, and playing with children. It was a coincidence that I have mastered the knowledge of speech therapy, though I completed my studies in the field of audiology, which certainly laid the foundation of my knowledge for working on the speech of hearing-impaired children.
My work has been further enriched by the knowledge and skills I acquired at seminars, workshops, and places where I went for my personal growth and development. I thought, and I still believe it today, that it is extremely important for a therapist not only to improve but also to dedicate time to resolve his/her internal processes so that he/she can stand in front of others as healed as possible and be stable, carefully focused and committed to working from the position of inner peace and balance. Hence, the children were provided with more and more professional help in contact with me, in addition to support and understanding and feeling someone by their side, but also with permission to be what they are during the time spent together, full of love and laughter.
I have a lot of wonderful memories of that period. Lots of hugs, laughter, acting, tears, reluctance, resistance, and openness to growth. I mostly honed my skills in respect of how to transform their resistance into the creative energy of accepting change – working on exercises that are not easy but are repetitive and often boring, all in order to develop speech in the right way. I admit that I am absolutely proud of how I managed to do that. Then we would rejoice, laugh, and tickle together, and then with new energy moved on and on.
It is a beautiful experience when before you came a child who, due to circumstances, was able to say only three words – No, Won't, and Don't, and after some time and consistent work, the child was transformed into someone who can speak fluently. In a way, it's as if we gave birth to speech together. At first, I was not afraid of such a position. It was important for me to make good contact, for the child to understand that I am not giving up and that I am ready to do anything to facilitate and support the child's hidden potential. Playing games was of great help. Once the contact was established and the child developed absolute trust, we could go through the stages when I insisted, without the child perceiving it as a constraint or coercion.
Children bring out the best in me, they are my greatest inspiration. I would stay trapped in my own thoughts on how to overcome the resistance even after the sessions. I allowed myself to enter their world, to let them lead me through it, to teach me about it, and then slowly we would together build steps towards the outside world that was something big and unknown, scary and repulsive, according to their frame of reference. I would come up with ingenious ideas on how to go on and continue further in limited circumstances. Thus, I did speech therapy exercises with N. over the phone and it was a fantastic experience for both of us, and later on, I organized my Skype treatments as well. It sounds crazy, but it worked fantastically well. Even excluding physical contact, our creative field would be filled with the warm and entertaining energy of the work that brought great results.
Today I can say that I am privileged that so many exceptional children have worked with me, the children whom I have never observed through their problems or difficulties, but through feeling their souls and needs. I am satisfied with being in touch with most of them from time to time so that I can witness, from the sidelines, their development and progress in life. My children are successful pupils and students today, they write songs, they are creative people who are to be discovered, they are treading the boards and developing into the young people who have started their life stories and experiences. Their beginnings occurred in difficult life circumstances, which enabled them to become aware that power comes within themselves, that everything is possible, that miracles do happen and that they are great miracles of God with their fantastic powers of transformation.
