My Approach to Teen Counselling

When counselling adolescents, I use a variety of approaches, depending on the teen’s age and preferences. Approaches may include counselling, Emotion Focused Therapy, Focused Psychological Strategies or sand tray. Each approach is designed to help the adolescent access deep levels of their psyche, to heal from the source of the concern.

What is Teen Counselling?

Counselling is what comes to mind for most people when they think of seeing a psychologist. The role of the psychologist, is to create a completely safe environment during therapy sessions, where the adolescent feels total acceptance and non-judgment from the therapist.

Through talking about their lives and what may be concerning them, the adolescent is able to –

• gain greater self-understanding about why they are thinking, feeling or acting the way they are
• begin to recognise unhelpful patterns in the way they think or act, and decide if they want to change them
• increase their self-insight which can lead to a resolution of complicated feelings or a greater ease with living with them

What is Emotion Focused Therapy?

Emotion Focused Therapy is founded on a relationship of deep empathy between client and therapist. Once this highly attuned and accepting relationship has been developed, different interventions are used depending on the teen’s issue. Each intervention is designed to help them go below conscious awareness, or ‘what they know’ in order to get to the source of the issue. Once this ‘source’ has been accessed, the therapist helps guide the client towards steps to heal the issue on a deep psychological and neurological level.

What’s involved in therapy that uses a sand tray?

Suzanne uses the sand tray, which is simply a container of sand with a variety of miniatures and figurings. The teen places objects of their choosing in the sand tray to illustrate their problem. This approach quickly helps teens work on their concerns by going beneath ‘what they know’ or what is in their conscious awareness, to what is unknown, or is unconscious. By accessing this level of awareness, the clinician can help the teen get to the ‘source’ of the problem and activate healing on a deep psychological and neurological level. For example, Suzanne might ask the teen to use the sand tray to show their world or an experience they have had. The teen would then be invited to use the sand figurines and objects to represent their world or experience. Suzanne and the teen would then explore the creation to aid deeper levels of understanding and healing.

What are Focused Psychological Strategies?

Focused Psychological Strategies are strategies taken from evidenced based therapies that have been shown to integrate the best research evidence in clinical effectiveness. The strategies include – psychoeducation, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, relaxation strategies, skills training and Interpersonal Therapy.