title: Pastoral crisis intervention with children: recognizing and responding to the spiritual reaction of children.
abstract: Many individuals struggle to express their thoughts and feelings following a crisis situation. When these feelings include questions related to spiritual issues such as bad things happening to good people, meaning in life and its tragedies, and the very existence of a caring and loving God, people shut down even more tightly. Imagine how much greater this difficulty becomes for those who lack the ability to verbalize what they are experiencing. Many of our most widely used crisis intervention models rely on verbal techniques to elicit people's thoughts and feelings about stressful incidents they've just experienced. The main focus of this paper is to provide alternative techniques for eliciting the thoughts and feelings of children during traumatic times. The paper reviews basic principles of pastoral crisis intervention (PCI), presents typical spiritual reactions of children to trauma by age groups, presents Crisis Response Play Therapy (CRPT) as one alternative method that bypasses the need for verbalization, and proposes the use of similar experiential techniques for special needs populations, including adults, who have difficulty giving voice to their experiences.
authors.affiliation: kmcphersonphd@aol.com
authors.forename: Kenneth F
authors.initials: KF
authors.lastname: McPherson
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003419:Crisis Intervention / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D010327:Pastoral Care / Q000379:methods*; D010989:Play Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D002666:Psychology, Child