Listening Ear’s Butterflies Service

About

Listening Ear is an ambitious and growing social enterprise and its adult service is accredited by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. Specialising in providing age appropriate therapeutic support for mild to moderate mental health issues, the children’s service, ‘Butterflies’, offers 1:1 and group therapy service for children and young people disadvantaged through poor mental health and emotional well-being and commonly presenting with anxiety, anger, rebellion, grief and depression issues as a result. of:

• pre-bereavement (parent/family member diagnosed with a life limiting illness)
• bereavement (including sudden death, murder, manslaughter, suicide)
• family breakdown (including fostering and adoption breakdown)
• loss (including divorce, separation and domestic abuse)

Services

Butterflies offers GROUP counselling for children and young people affected by bereavement or other forms of loss (such as divorce and family separation). The majority of our appointments are only available to Knowsley residents. We do have some limited provision however for children from surrounding areas (including St Helens) who are able to attend sessions in Whiston. These appointments are currently funded by Children in Need.

When we accept a referral, a telephone assessment will be offered initially with the parent/ carer. This assessment is used to understand a child’s issues in more depth and clinically, we assess whether the person referred is suitable for group support. This decision is made by a clinical expert.

Listening Ear has some limited capacity for one-to-one appointments each week. Examples of when we might offer one-to-one rather than group are, if a child has an ASC diagnosis or presents with multiple, complex issues, in addition to bereavement and loss. Most people however are offered group counselling, attending with children of a similar age who have similar experiences of bereavement and loss to their own.