When Aidan* was first referred to Chance UK he was having a lot of difficulty with processing difficult emotions. He struggled with expressing how he felt and was sometimes very anxious – he would self-soothe by biting his sleeve.
When I started mentoring Aidan, I noticed that he found it hard to talk about his feelings and emotions, and he couldn’t move on if something had upset him. He was often very harsh and critical of himself, and his perfectionism was causing him a lot of anxiety.
Yet Aidan, also had a great sense of humour and was very good at picking up social cues. He had no problem with socialising with new people and was very insightful. Throughout mentoring, he was open to many different activities and especially loved meeting another mentee on the same programme as him. They enjoyed, painting, drawing and playing games together and built a real rapport during their time on the mentoring programme.
During this time, Aidan blossomed and became much more open and responsive, including being much more vocal about his likes and dislikes. We particularly connected over drawing as Aidan really improved his art skills during our time together. He was very proud of this.
While at first, Aidan was not very forthcoming about what he wanted to do in our sessions, by the end he became much more vocal. When we had a session just before Halloween, he said he wanted to carve a pumpkin because he had never done it before. We went and bought the equipment, and we pumpkin carved together. He was very pleased and from then on his confidence grew and he started to speak up about the activities he wanted us to do in our time together.
By the end of our sessions, Aidan’s teacher saw a real improvement in his behaviour at school and felt he was much less worried and fearful. His parents noticed that he was becoming much more sociable and had really enjoyed his time with Chance UK.
*Names and images have been changed
