Speaker: Paula Emmens
Who are you and why did you train in Magical Change?
Paula Emmens: Hello, I'm Paula, and I'm a child therapist based in Kent. I decided to train in Magical Change because I wanted to find some new tools to use with particularly my younger clients who weren't really engaging in my normal work. So Magical Change sounded interesting to me, having spoken to Trudy and hearing how successful she had been with some of her clients.
What can you say about the quality of the training that you had in the Magical Change method ?
Paula Emmens: What I really loved about the training was how passionate Trudy is about Magical Change, and that really came through. She'd managed to create a formula - her magic formula and step by step how to actually take a child through Magical Change, and that was really, really helpful. She provided lots of resources - like plenty of resources. She made it seem very simple and it was easy to follow and it really is magical in its simplicity. And the support afterwards was amazing as well. So if there were ever any questions, we could ask each other; we could ask Trudy; and she was always really helpful to support us, when we were starting out.
What experience have you had of seeing Magical Change in action with a child or young person?
Paula Emmens: One client in particular stands out as having amazing success with Magical Change. She was highly anxious at bedtimes and it was like a sudden problem that appeared, after some storms, and every night she would, after dinner time, say to her parents, `What's the weather tonight?` `What's the weather tonight?` And she'd start to feel really anxious. She was getting tummy aches. She'd have to keep going to the toilet because she thought she `needed` to go to the toilet. And it resulted in parents having to sort of stay by her side to help her settle. She was about 9 years old, 8 or 9 years old. She went through the Magical Change programme and obviously learned some strategies to help, alongside the parents supporting her, and she really had great success. It did take a little while, but after a couple of nights of success, she then sort of accelerated her progress and I think after about four weeks, she said, `Oh, I'm not scared of the weather anymore, you know - it doesn't really matter to me.` So that was amazing - like huge progress, and the stomach ache stopped and the getting up to the toilet at night stopped. Parents were back in their own beds. So it was amazing. Then after that she was still going through the programme, and she mentioned that she was a little bit shy at school. She didn't like to answer questions in class. She didn't like to put her hand up and she had had a very unpleasant experience of doing her class assembly -where she had stage fright. She couldn't get her words out and she had to pass the microphone to her friend, who was standing next to her, to read her part. So she wanted to work on that. It was amazing because the next time she had a collective worship or a class assembly, she managed to speak really clearly, with confidence. She afterwards said to me, `Oh it was amazing! I was really confident. I really enjoyed it.` So that was a huge success. So that's quite a good bit of evidence that Magical Change can be really powerful.
What changes did you see in any children or young people that you have worked with?
Paula Emmens: So I've helped quite a lot of anxious children to feel calmer and to feel less frightened of everyday things - including the sort of fear of going to school every day. They're enjoying getting up and going to school now. I've helped quite a few angry children learn better ways to deal with their anger, and I've actually helped quite a lot of neurodivergent children, because they just seem to really enjoy the taking control of their own progress and being able to sort of make it visual with the tools that we use in Magical Change. It seems to make a big, big difference to them. Some clients that I was already working with before learning Magical Change, - a couple of them were like at a stuck state, so they just weren't really making the progress. And as soon as I learned Magical Change, I introduced it to them and they seemed to kind of, really engage well with it and almost become unstuck and start to make the improvements that they they had set out to do in the first place. So that's good.
Why is Magical Change different from other services for supporting the mental health of young people?
Paula Emmens: Magical change is different to other mental health services who are supporting children mainly in that it empowers the child to take ownership and take responsibility for their problem. And it also works really cleverly on building their belief system and helping them understand why the problem exists in the first place and what they can do about it. It's also really fun for the child, and it's not like you know, the child would come to a session once a week and then nothing happens in between. The child is responsible for owning the problem and solving it for themselves, and through the programme they believe that they are able to make these changes. And I think that's why it's so powerful because they're now learning skills that can stay with them for the whole of their lives.
