Therapeutic Conversations with Adolescents: Helping Teens in Therapy Thrive in an Ultra-Competitive, Screen-Saturated World

This book offers innovative and counter-intuitive approaches to adolescent therapy, helping therapists to enhance authenticity and hold teen clients accountable for their choices. It sheds light on the underlying dynamics of therapist-teen relationships and highlights the paradox that the less direct pressure we put on teens to change, the more they will talk with us about the things that matter in their lives.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 242 pages
Publication date: 12 October 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Challenges conventional thinking by offering up innovative, counter-intuitive approaches to everything from relationship building to starting conversations to incorporating family work to facilitating real change in teenagers who may not have been so keen on therapy in the first place.

Helps therapists to enhance authenticity in the therapeutic relationship by guiding them through the challenging task of balancing expressions of care with the need to hold teen clients accountable for their choices—historically, a trappy landscape for therapists and teens to navigate.

Sheds light on the underlying dynamics of therapist-teen relationships that, when ignored, reveal themselves unhelpfully in the form of power battles, incompatible goals, and meandering, meaningless conversations.

Sheds light on the constructs and dynamics lying below the surface of many of the exchanges between teens and their therapists that account for why, with all the education we get in preparation for our careers, we still struggle to get teenagers to talk with us.

Highlights the powerful paradox in adolescent therapy that the less direct pressure we put on teens to change, while offering ourselves up as credible, enlightened adults, the more they will talk with us about the things that really matter in their lives, and want to hear what we have to say about them. In other words, in a conversational space thats prescription-free—that is, when we're not telling teen clients to stop it, change it, apologize for it, or analyze it—these kids begin talking about, taking ownership of, and changing how they show up in their lives.

Weight: 374g
Dimension: 152 x 230 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032189376