Many children refuse to see a psychologist, particularly gifted children. Always different, they fear this intrusion into their privacy, and prefer to keep their torments secret.
Multiple reasons can justify the vehement refusal of certain children to any interview with a psychologist. The parents, however, endeavored to present this interview as an opportunity both for themselves, who will benefit from valuable advice, and also for the child who will find help in the face of a situation that is bothering them. The most diverse situations can motivate this request for help by parents in need and concerned about the well-being of their child. Seeing a psychologist is always a thoughtful step from which they expect a lot.
The child experiences this encounter as an unbearable intrusion and break-in into the defense system that he is in the process of building himself: he is determined to monitor himself to avoid revealing a possible flaw. He is wary of this diabolical person, who nevertheless has the trust of his parents, she can perhaps see through the armor that he forges in a hurry and she will reveal his weaknesses, but also, sometimes, what is even more serious, the weaknesses of his parents whom he then fears of betraying.
Gifted children feel different from very early on of their classmates, their very language betrays this difference, their centers of interest seem too austere and even forbidding, they avoid certain games or are so clumsy that no one wants to take them on their team, and they read with passion while reading is still painful, even laborious and above all boring for others. A little apart, the gifted child feels very special, special and perhaps a little crazy. Seeing a psychologist will only confirm this fear, the psychologist will confirm this diagnosis, taking care not to overwhelm his parents, already worried by the school, but it is the sad truth.
Everything that the different child can say will be understood as additional proof of his abnormality; he knows that it is impossible for him, even if he tries with all his strength, to give the appearance of normality; he will betray himself by an exclamation, a gesture, a sentence that is innocuous or seems so to him. He does not want to see a psychologist, if he is forced to do so he keeps silent with the stubborn obstinacy of which he is capable: despite his fundamental kindness, he already has character and the stakes are too important for him to give up defending himself. If he stays silent, we can’t say he’s “crazy”he will not have provided any proof of his disturbance, he is silent and that is all. He is also suspicious: anything he might say risks being turned against him by a demonic psychologist.
But other situations also provoke this defensive reaction and fully justify it. So, he knows that his discomfort is caused by a situation over which he has no power and who places his parents, or only one of them, in an unbearable state of doldrums, he suffers the repercussions, he sometimes tends to rebel against this disastrous fate which has placed him in such discomfort, but he does not want this psychologist to grasp this sequence and blame it on the parent who could be considered responsible. The latter can also display a façade of serenity, demonstrating to an absent-minded interlocutor that he is in perfect control of the situation. The intuitive child grasps these hidden feelings well and he expresses both his anger in the face of his own helplessness, since he cannot soothe his parent’s discomfort nor find a solution to protect himself from the repercussions of this discomfort, and his real suffering caused by a situation he is experiencing. He strives to detect the positive aspect, as we want to demonstrate to him, but it is difficult for him to be fooled for long by this distorted version of his own existence.
The gifted child prefers to keep his torments to himself
Despite everything, it is his loyalty to his parents that wins.he does not want to overwhelm them, nor place them in an unbearable situation by asking them to change the mode of existence in which they have now settled by convincing themselves that it suits them. Their child perceives these uncertainties very well, these protective lies, this distorted version of events, but he will never take the initiative to reveal them to a stranger without knowing what use he will make of them. He prefers to keep his torments to himselfhe is at an age where the notion of a future to be built is still far too vague for him to have the impression of consenting to a very great sacrifice by refusing to come out of his defense system, even if it prevents him from progressing, from developing all the facets of his personality in the making, he then prefers to repress as far as possible the dreams of the future which were beginning to take shape so that the pain of renunciation is not too acute. This sacrifice seems essential to him, it is his duty, he will not betray it.
Sometimes it is a delicate construction that the psychologist risks demolishing with his clumsy clumsiness when it comes to detecting flaws, even microscopic, in this painfully erected scaffolding. He will notice weaknesses that the busy child did not have time to combat, since it was not the emergency in the storm he was going through. He will isolate them, surround them with Machiavellian precision, supposedly to counter them, in fact to highlight the only failing aspect of a child who, in principle, is doing very well. Apparent disturbances of attention, in fact caused by a constant preoccupation which is difficult to repress and above all which he wants to ignore, a failing cleanliness, because that would be the only way to express an impotent anger, of which he prefers nothing to be known, an aggressiveness denied since it would be scandalous to reveal the object of this aggressiveness, but it is expressed with surprising violence in explosions of anger which, in principle, nothing justifies. Detect and evoke
without detouring the causes of these symptoms could trigger a tragedy and call into question the fragile construction of a family that is more patched together than recomposed. The guilt of some displayed in broad daylight would be unbearable and the child, who revealed it despite himself, will carry the weight of it for his life.
Under these conditions, a session with a psychologist would be the equivalent of a detonator in a powder kegthen we repress, we deceive, we play comedy, we find fairly credible justifications to explain suddenly aberrant behavior and we accumulate reasons to motivate the refusal of a consultation which would be the worst thing, and too bad if the balance and the future are compromised: we have saved face or maintained a fundamentally chaotic family structure, but offering an almost credible image. The prospect of a consultation is already, in itself, a revealer of the
torments of the one who desperately refuses it.
Advice : There is no point in insisting when a child or adolescent stubbornly and vehemently refuses to see a psychologist; we look deeper into the real reasons for his refusal and we can consider with the psychologist ways to treat these causes. There are always actions to try, in-depth explanations to give, a weight to lighten. Sometimes you have to consider questioning a construction that you would have liked to be solid and durable.
