Part 4: Creating thought “enemies” and “heroes” in child CBT

*Two Ryuu cards, designed by me and Rebecca Klaw*

Creating thought “enemies” and “heroes” in CBT

For a long time, people helping children with social and emotional skills have employed imaginary characters to represent various desired and undesired child behaviors. Many of these efforts are more preachy and pedantic than actually helpful, but other systems of “problem and solution” characters have the potential to be really useful in child therapy applications. This article briefly surveys a few of these, and references a character creation kit I made that enables you and a child to quickly fashion custom-designed “problem / solution” characters.

Reasons to employ problem and solution imaginary characters in CBT therapy with kids

A child with serious and persistent social and emotional problems can become demoralized by their constant struggles. The “problem child” can end up feeling so closely linked to their problems that they end up disliking themselves.

Creating problem and solution characters can enable a child to feel little more separate from their problems. Using this method can help a child to view their social or emotional challenge as a sort of adversary that can be fought against with the help of therapists, teachers and family.

Here are the therapeutic elements of creating problem and solution characters with children in therapy, from my perspective. First, this therapy activity can help restore a child’s self esteem by differentiating their essential self from the problems they experience. Second, this method can help a child to focus on central therapy issues. Third, this fantasy-based technique capitalizes on hero / anti-hero narrative systems that are well established in youth culture.

Ready-made problem & solution characters

There are many problem and solution character systems out there. Many are not very good. Here is one I recall from my youth.

*Example of a not very good or helpful problem / solution system.*

Here are some problem and solution tools that I have found can be pretty useful in CBT applications.

*One of the characters in the Psymon game.*

*Another pair of Ryuu cards (Ryuu cards are no longer in production)*

Problem and solution characters that children can create on their own with your guidance

In previous blog posts, I presented a free kit enabling children to create problem and solution characters by either drawing them or via a simple drag & drop system in which numerous images are pre-loaded to select. Here are some pictures showing typical results you might expect. I have used this kit a great deal in my CBT work.