Healing Happens Between The Sessions

Healing Happens Between the Sessions
Reflections on why we can’t support kids without engaging their families

I started my psychotherapy career a little differently than most.

Before I ever sat in a therapy room, I was a child and youth worker.
That meant working front-line in group homes, classrooms, and family homes — sitting beside children and youth in the middle of their everyday lives. We played board games. We ate dinner together. I read bedtime stories, navigated meltdowns, and walked into real family chaos.

It was messy. It was relational. It was deeply human.

And it taught me something that’s stayed with me through every stage of my work:
Children don’t exist apart from their environments.
You can’t separate their struggles from the systems they’re in — family systems, school systems, social systems.

As a child and youth worker, I didn’t offer “treatment plans.” I offered support.
Sometimes that meant driving a parent to a doctor’s appointment because they didn’t have a car.
Sometimes it meant washing a sinkful of dishes because that was what actually helped that family breathe in that moment.
Sometimes it meant sitting beside a parent who was doing the best they could — and still felt like they were failing.

When I became a psychotherapist, I didn’t leave that work behind.
I carried it with me.

I knew, in my bones, that therapy with children can’t just be about the child.
Not when the people who are holding them — feeding them, calming them, advocating for them, struggling with them — are being left out of the room.

Children’s challenges don’t develop in isolation.
And they don’t get resolved in isolation either.

It’s not enough to offer a child one hour a week of emotional processing or skill-building. If we aren’t equipping the adults in their lives to carry that work forward — to make sense of it, to respond to it, to mirror and support it — we’re doing incomplete work.

There may be rare times when a child needs therapy separate from their caregiver.
But in my opinion, that’s the exception — not the rule.

Especially when we consider the role of intergenerational trauma.
When a parent’s nervous system is shaped by their own history of neglect, fear, or shame, that history doesn’t vanish when they sit down to parent. It shows up. It gets activated. And it influences how they respond to their child — not out of a lack of love, but out of deeply patterned survival strategies.

If we want to support children, we have to recognize and hold space for what the parent is carrying too.
Not in a pathologizing way.
Not to assign blame.
But because healing happens in systems. And ignoring intergenerational trauma means we’re asking children to do the work of the family alone.

This isn’t a radical idea.
It’s just honest.

We need to stop treating parents like peripheral players in children’s therapy.
They’re the most important part of the support system. And if we’re serious about doing work that actually helps kids — not just temporarily soothes them — then we need to engage parents with the same care, curiosity, and compassion we bring to the child.

Because therapy doesn’t end after 50 minutes.
The real work happens in the 23 hours that follow.