Thedy Veliz, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
Providing a relational developmental neurogenomics approach for emotional well-being, personal growth, education, and leadership development
Clinical Journey
Early in my clinical training, I started to notice that regardless of their age, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, my clients presented with very similar qualities. They were smart, creative, artistic, empathic, and exhibited a deep understanding and concern for the human condition. However, they were not functioning well in most areas of their life (e.g., school, social, home). Some of them were showing risky behaviors in their early teens such as violence, cannabis use, promiscuous sex, petty theft, and more serious criminal activity. Some even exhibited behaviors that could be considered antisocial, and at times their charts mentioned possible hallucinations. At the agencies where I worked, it was not uncommon for me to inherit cases of 15-year-olds that had been receiving therapy since they were five. They had been given all of the diagnoses that could be assigned to a child, yet none of them helped in either improving their symptoms or being understood by the clinical practitioner.
When I spoke with their parents, teachers, social workers, probation officers, pediatricians, occupational therapist, psychiatrists, and past therapists to get their insights pertaining to my clients, they shared their frustrations with the child’s negative behavior and inability to change. When I asked them about the child’s strengths, about what it was like to be in the presence of the child, and about what might be going on inside the child’s internal world; their responses did not reflect an intersubjective understanding or curiosity for what could be going on with these children aside from the standard judgment of the child being “treatment resistant.”
Somewhere around 2013 I started to realize that something was not right with the traditional psychotherapeutic approach that was being used to treat children. What was causing these very smart, creative, empathic, intuitive, personable, and sophisticated youth to have so many social, behavioral, emotional, and learning challenges which at times resulted in self-destruction? Why were they being criticized, judged, threatened, punished, and at times bullied by the adults that were supposed to provide the support and care that they needed? What were we missing? Why could we not understand them? Were they an abomination or were they special in some way that was foreign to us? Were the traditional counseling and psychiatry assumptions getting in the way of these children receiving the developmental support they needed?
Being with the child instead of attempting to fix them
During my time at Santa Clara University, I met a professor whose approach to conceptualizing children significantly influenced the type of therapist that I have become. Instead of trying to figure out their pathologies, my professor encouraged us to play, engage and connect with the child. Eventually I realized that the message that our professor was attempting to communicate was that there was nothing wrong with the child, and that there was nothing to “diagnose” – nothing for us to “do.” Instead of fixing the child, our job was to wonder (and feel) what it was like to be the child; that is, to have lived their experiences and to carry their memories and the unexpressed and unprocessed emotions associated with those memories.
This approach was simple. Instead of “doing,” my professor was directing us towards the art of “being” with someone else while exhibiting unconditional positive regard. I quickly embraced this approach, and made it the centerpiece of my therapeutic approach with children. Not having to “do” anything, took away all the power that I had as a therapist, and allowed me to be just another vulnerable and imperfect person. More powerfully, it allowed me to even forget that I was an adult (including all my fears, stress and insecurities), and instead allowed my inner child to come out as I attempted to understand my clients’ intersubjective worlds.
