Zola Counseling prioritizes having advanced training in specialty areas to best support children, adolescents, and families in our community.  It is a priority for Zola Counseling to maintain professional development to allow for specialized focus in these areas.

Zola Counseling can help your family in navigating the difficulty of managing emotional outbursts, behavioral concerns, and developing appropriate coping strategies, communication, and developmentally appropriate emotional expression.

Primary Specialties:

Attachment: This can be addressed with biological families who struggle to connect and attach with their child.  Opposition, defiance, tantrums, communication needs, and power struggles often present themselves when there is a breakdown in the parent child relationship.  This can be healed through building and repairing attachment and healing the relationship to work toward structuring for success with effective parent responses and limit setting in the home.

Adoption: Attachment disruptions, also known as changes in caregiver can create difficulty for emotional processing or behaviors for a child.  Changes in caregiver can occur through adoption, foster care, or kinship care. This is sometimes a planned event for a family and a happy moment when a child joins the family.  This can also look like a family who unexpectedly has a family member join their home through kinship care. Attachment disruptions and difficulty can look like the caregiver struggling to connect with the child or the child struggling to connect with the caregiver.  Often times emotional and behavioral symptoms of children who have experienced a change in caregiver can mirror a variety of other emotional/social/behavioral concerns. Zola Counseling specializes in separating the concerns of your child to determine if they reflect developmental trauma or are specific to a mental health diagnosis.

Hospitalization/chronic illness or illness of family member: When a family member is hospitalized or has a chronic illness, the focus naturally gravitates toward this family member.  Siblings, children, grandchildren, etc. of family members with chronic illness often display a shift in behavior and emotional regulation through acting out or outbursts or through withdrawn behavior and internalizing problems.  This child without the illness often needs supplemental support to manage and cope with difficult feelings, as well as develop self-control/impulse control for their behaviors.

Trauma: There are many types of trauma that children experience today.  Specific types of trauma include physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, domestic violence, witnessing violence, medical trauma, developmental trauma, complex trauma, natural disaster, school violence, or whatever the child may deem as a traumatic experience for themselves.  There are a variety of ways children try to cope with the internal struggles of trauma. Some act out, have emotional or behavioral outburst. Others avoid, ignore, or appear fine on the outside. When a child experiences trauma, it is best to give this child space for unconditional positive regard and support them through giving them space to be heard, develop coping strategies for difficult feelings, and allow them to process through their trauma at the developmentally appropriate rate.

If you are unsure if you or your child’s needs fall into one of these areas, reach out for your free phone consultation.  Our team will ensure that we pair you with the best fit in our practice or provide you with an adequate referral to another specialist in the community if your concerns do not fall within our specialties.  Zola Counseling prides itself on creating partnerships with other practices in the Greater Charlotte community to best serve the needs of the families we work with.