Hyperactivity in Children

By Julie Taylor and Martin Guay

A few years ago I had the privilege of attending a seminar with Angela Hoffman, a brilliant counsellor who practices in Europe in both French and German. Her speciality is working with children.  

Explore with me here and find one of the best solutions for hyperactivity in children stemming from the project/purpose. I will show you how to relieve hyperactivity in a completely new way; by mind-body counselling. 

This is a new form of counselling which incorporates both the physical body and the mind. And the intuitive way that the mind and body interact based on observations of various animals and nature.  The observations lead specially trained counsellors to ask particular questions as they search for certain patterns and certain behaviours. 

Angela Hoffman shows evidence that hyperactivity in children starts in what we call the project/purpose. The project/purpose is the period including the time before you were conceived, your time in the womb, delivery and infancy. In short, the project/purpose is the entire time around your birth.

In these cases the first question I would ask is: “What is this child trying to express with his or her hyperactivity? What is the message behind the need to move so much?” The project/purpose asserts that the child expresses the parent’s stress.

So, my question will be for the parents, but worded in the opposite way to the observation: What is the life-or-death stress in your family to do with immobility? Was someone perhaps found dead? Or perhaps somebody - even a child - was found dead or wasn’t moving at all? 

Hyperactivity in children is the way in which this child - the hyperactive child - is trying to show his parents that he/she is alive and well.  He or she is trying to reassure the parent/s that they can stop worrying/grieving because they are not immobile or dead. They try to prove this constantly by moving as much as they can: To prove that they are OK.

Sometimes we don’t immediately find the answers we are looking for to explain the hyperactivity. This doesn’t mean that we are wrong but merely that we have not yet asked the right questions or found the right answers. We need to keep probing. Another question that could be useful is whether a child died in its mother’s womb and was noted not to be moving. 

To illustrate what we have said so far, here’s an example: A mother carries a child for a few months and is looking forward to feeling her baby moving in her womb - a sign that this baby is healthy and alive. But there has been no movement yet, so the mother starts to worry.  The worry is: My baby is not moving yet, and I hope beyond hope that he is fine and alive.

Days go by and no movement shows itself. The mother expresses her concern to friends and family and someone remarks that she should check this out.  The baby could possibly be in need of help or worse still, dead in the womb. Someone may have added that when she carried her child he had already moved in the womb by this stage.

By this time the mother is very distressed and terrified that her child could be dead in her womb. All this information is present in the pregnant mother and also shared by the baby who was being so still in the womb. The mother makes an appointment with the doctor and, much to her relief, she finds that the baby is healthy and very much alive: he or she is just not moving yet.

With hyperactivity in children the message is clear, the child is trying to reassure/tell the parents that he/she is alive. The way they express this is: “Look mother I am moving so you see that I am alive... And they move an exaggerated amount to ‘prove’ that they are healthy because the amount of very slight (or even absent) movement before was insufficient and caused the mother anguish and worry.

Another possibility that may cause hyperactivity in children is this: The child’s earlier sibling died either in the womb or at a very young age. Perhaps the baby was found dead following a crib death and one of the first observations by the mother was the immobility.

The child that follows - ie the next pregnancy - might try to reassure the mother by showing behaviour consistent with hyperactivity in children. Moving so much ‘should’ show the mother that he is alive and stop her worrying.

To relieve this hyperactivity, we need to see if there’s a story - perhaps ‘hidden’ or at least not publicly talked about. The solution is to relieve - debrief - that stress by working through the story and explaining it very clearly - and often multiple times - both to the parent and to the child.

Everyone is unique and their life story may be different and so hyperactivity in children may find its roots in different ways. This is why it’s important to seek help from a counsellor who is an expert in this field: Only by finding the correct scenario/story will relief be obtained. This is the best - and sometimes only - way to relieve hyperactivity in children.

E-mail me and I will be happy to help you find the invisible key to relieve the hyperactivity in children that you are experiencing. To find relief it’s important both to find the correct piece of the story and to debrief in exactly the right way for the brain/mind to be able to see clearly what has happened. To this end, an experienced mind-body counsellor is invaluable.

I look forward to hearing from you! I’m always interested to hear your story and to publish your experiences. 

Good luck!