Counseling for Teens, Children & Families

Today’s youth face many challenges. Sometimes children have to cope with difficult transitions. Sometimes teens struggle with forming their identity and making healthy decisions. Sometimes parent don’t know what else they can do to help. Shine a Light can help your family get the support they need in the way that makes the most sense. The options include individual therapy for a teen or child, family therapy for both parents and children, or some combination of the two. Your counselor can help you figure out how to proceed.

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Counseling for Teens

The teenage years can be the hardest period of life. You are starting to make your own decisions, but you don’t have much experience to draw from. Do you listen to your parents, or your friends, or yourself? How can you start understanding yourself in a way that will allow you to become the master of your own life?

Therapy offers teens a place to reflect on their life, their decisions, and their relationships. The safety of being able to speak to someone confidentialy allows teens to sort through conflicting emotions and difficult choices. Counselors are not like other adults in a teen’s life. Friends and family members all have needs of their own, and usually some agenda for the teen. Family and friend support is vital to teens. But talking with someone outside the family and friend group provides something different, a place to go deeper into understanding yourself.

Imagine what it would be like to meet someone who did not judge you, who was deeply curious about what you think and how you feel. Someone who would not tell you what to do, but would support you to make your own decision, and trust you will learn from it whatever the outcome.

There doesn’t have to be something wrong with you to benefit from therapy. In fact, teens who have discovered more about themselves through therapy are often more aware and better communicators that those who think therapy is just for the metall ill. If you think it might be useful to you to have someone really listen to you, in a way that allows you to better hear yourself, then you may find therapy very satisfying.

Counseling for Children

It is sometimes hard for parents to know how to help their children cope with difficult circumstances. We can’t all be expected to know how to guide children through the many emotions and behavioral issues that arise. Child therapy can help provide your child a way to deal with the stresses they face. Support for children should not have to always come from the parents.

Often children work through their emotions through indirect activities. They may not want to talk directly about what is stressing them. Instead, they may express themselves and explore their options through play, art and stories. Play Therapy and Art Therapy are processes wherein a therapist engages a child in a game or art activity. When the child’s underlying emotions emerge in the course of play or artwork, the therapist responds to the child in ways that help build the child’s understanding of human emotion and appropriate behavior.

As the therapist responds to the child with validation, respect and clear limit setting, the child builds their emotional intelligence. The child learns to better accept their own feelings, regulate the intensity of their emotions, and better understand the impact of their behavior on other people.

Family Counseling

Sometimes it is clear that more than one person in a family could use some support. Communication problems usually involve two or more people. Rather than try to find out who is to blame, families can come to therapy together to learn to communicate better, resolve conflict and restore cooperation.

Depending upon your situation, your therapist might suggest that the whole family attend one or more therapy sessions. Then, when the big picture family dynamics are more clear, the therapist may begin to work with subsets of the family. There may be an individual session for a teen or child. There may be a session for the parents to work on their parenting strategies. Or perhaps there will be some couple counseling sessions to address any underlying marital conflict that might be affecting the whole family.

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Confidentiality

Teens and children often feel safer talking to their therapist if they know that the information is not being passed to the parents. Any person 12 or over can legally insist that their communication with the therapist remains confidential. At Shine a Light we have three levels of confidentiality that we negotiate with the families we see. They are described on the right.

We ask that parents cooperate with the confidentiality level that will most benefit their child’s trust in the therapist. We know it can be hard to feel like you are not being told everything, especially when it comes to your child.

Rest assured that out therapists always have it as a goal to empower the child and teen they work with to be as open and honest as possible with their parents. We believe that healthy communication in a family is always preferable to the power struggles, distancing, disrespect, and arguments that too often plague family unity.

Level One

In Level One the therapist will not engage in dialogues with the parents. This helps teens feel safe to speak to their counselor about things they fear their parents will have a reaction to. If the teen is in serious danger, however, our counselors will always break confidentiality to help keep everyone safe.

Level Two

In Level 2 the therapist is open to receiving information from parents, but does not engage in dialogue. This allows parents to inform the therapist of things the teen or child may not bring to therapy themselves. This input can be very useful to the therapist. But the therapist does not respond with more than an acknowledgement that the message was received, so the teen knows they still have confidentiality.

Level Three

Level 3 is primarily for families bringing a younger child to therapy. Younger children sometimes do not need strict confidentiality to use therapy effectively. Thus, a therapist may meet with the parents and discuss insights about how to best support the child. These conversations are best held at the beginning or before the end of a therapy session with the child, rather than outside of scheduled therapy session times. Optionally, a session with just the parents may be scheduled.

Level Four

In Level 4 the therapist is working with the whole family. Parents agree to reflect upon their own dynamics in the family system. The therapist may facilitate communication between family members during sessions. Parent education may be included.

Counseling for Teens, Children & Families