We first met Claire in 2009, when our youngest daughter had just commenced in second-level school.Our daughter commenced first term apparently happy if a little anxious. She had always been a conscientious student and she mixed well, if maybe a little quiet. Within a month we were catapulted into a“school refusal” situation and, no matter how hard we tried, we could not seem to either understand the root of the problem or to get around it. Claire was recommended to us through an educational source and when we first met we were floundering and did not know exactly how Claire’s approach and CBT would work. We attended Claire some six times over a six-month period. However, from the beginning, we seemed to make immediate progress, with the instances of school-refusal falling away. Today that stressful time seems like another place. Our daughter sat her Junior Cert this summer and dealt very well with the stresses and anxiety of the exam time. She is more confident and seems to have developed the skills and mechanisms to deal with the anxieties and stresses which were such an insurmountable obstacle before and that erupted so unexpectedly in her transition into second-level school. We have no doubt that Claire played a pivotal role in this. Her calm, engaging approach with our daughter and her ability to communicate with our daughter as a young adult rather than a child had a great and lasting impact. Claire also helped us as parents to understand how to deal with and cope with this situation. Asking our daughter about Claire’s work with her, she uses adjectives – “direct, respectful, understanding, showing me other ways of looking at things”. We are extremely grateful.
