Currently accepting new clients - Contact me or book a free 15 minute intro callCounselling for
Young People
Being a teenager can be hard. Youth mental health concerns are rising, with a lot of teenagers having a hard time. Seeing a teenager that you love having a hard time and not knowing how to help is hard, too. If you have come to this page, you are probably concerned about a young person in your life, and you are looking for support for them.
Counselling can be great way for young people to access support. Counselling gives young people the space to explore the things that are on their mind with an empathetic adult who is listening with their full attention. Knowing that there is someone that they can talk to about these things can be a great relief, for them and for you.
A counsellor has a unique role to play in a young person’s life. Unlike many of the other adults in their life, a counsellor only has one role: supporting their emotional and mental wellbeing. This clear role can be very helpful for a young person who does not know who to talk to about personal issues. Adolescents are often hesitant to talk to adults about personal issues, especially adults they see as having a position of authority. Young people are often sensitive to authority and what the adults around them expect from them. A counsellor does not have the same position of authority that many of the other adults in a young person’s life have.
In the uniqueness of therapy context, a counsellor can put forward a different way of relating that has minimal authority and expectations. This means that the counsellor can cultivate a relationship that is warm, friendly and enjoyable for the young person, but is also focused on supporting them with their emotional and mental wellbeing. With a counsellor, the young person can talk about their feelings, explore the issues that matter to them, and get support to find solutions to their challenges.
As a counsellor, I really enjoy taking on this role for young people and offering them a supportive therapeutic space. My experiences as a high school counsellor have sparked my deep passion for working with young people. They also showed me how much the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns in Melbourne affected young people, their mental health and their social development, and how these impacts continue. I am passionate about supporting youth mental health and wellbeing. I find working with young people incredibly rewarding. I can still vividly remember what being a teenager is like, which makes it easier to connect with young people and understand what is important to them. I combine this enthusiasm and empathy with my professional training in youth mental health, providing evidence-based mental health support.
Issues Young People Bring to Counselling
Young people face a lot of different issues that they may need support with. Some of the issues that are relevant for my young clients are:
General anxiety
Social anxiety
Depression
Friendship issues
Struggling to feel like they belong
Social isolation
Bullying
Academic stress
Low self-esteem
Anxiety about school
School avoidance/refusal
Intense emotional distress
Panic attacks
Body image and eating concerns
Gender identity and/or sexuality
Neurodivergence
ADHD
Autism
Impulsive and/or reckless behaviours
Anger that feels uncontrollable
Self-harm
Thoughts of suicide
How therapy can help
Counselling can help a young person to:
Work through their challenging emotions
Get better at identifying their feelings
Discover emotional regulation strategies that work for them
Develop healthy coping mechanisms for stress
Reduce behaviours that they find distressing or harmful (including self-destructive and impulsive behaviours)
Reduce anxiety about school
Understand themselves better
Increase self-confidence and self-worth
Explore who they are safely
Develop positive self-identity
Communicate more effectively with others
Learn how to ask for help to meet their needs rather than self-isolating
Improve their relationships with family members
Follow their own values and resist peer pressure
Find supportive social connections
Feel more hopeful about the future
How I work with young people
My approach
My approach is rooted in PACE, which is a trauma-informed approach to supporting children and young people. PACE stands for Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy. I have found that these qualities are very valuable for young people. By approaching them in this way, I am able to foster a deeply supportive space for young clients based in trust, emotional connection, containment and a sense of security.
I am person-centered and strengths-based, taking the time to listen and understand the young client deeply before jumping to solutions, and supporting them to identify and use their unique strengths and positive qualities when exploring possible solutions.
My approach also involves being honest and authentic with my young clients, while maintaining appropriate boundaries. Teenagers are often perceptive and sensitive to insincerity. When they perceive inauthenticity, they are likely to pull away. They generally don’t appreciate feeling lied to, and they lose trust very quickly when they do not feel respected or listened to. When working with teenagers, building and maintaining trust is very important.
Building a therapeutic relationship
Counselling generally works best when the young client wants to be doing counselling and feels hopeful that counselling will be helpful. So, in the early stages of counselling, my focus is forming a connection in which they feel comfortable and curious about counselling. I often use their interests to connect, encouraging them to talk about the things they like. Every young person is different, so I try to match their energy and pay attention to how they like to relate. With some young clients, this could mean making lots of jokes and references that they understand. With other young clients, this could mean listening without interrupting and validating their perspectives.
For some young people, opening up to a counsellor is easy. For others, they might be quite skeptical about counselling and it can take a bit of time. Either way, taking the time to form this connection is important to create the foundation for counselling. In counselling, the therapeutic relationship is the most important factor for positive outcomes, and this is especially true for young people. To make meaningful progress in counselling, the young person has to feel comfortable and connected enough to be willing to share and open up. I take the time to get to know my young clients and build a relationship, so that counselling is genuinely helpful for them.
Making counselling effective and engaging for the young person
For young people to commit and stay committed to counselling, they generally need three things. First, they need to have fun in some of their sessions. Second, they need to experience genuine relief from their problems through attending sessions and putting what they learn into practice. Third, they need to feel that they have choice and agency in counselling, so that it is something they are choosing to do instead of something that is being done to them. Having these three things allows them to feel hopeful and motivated to keep engaging.
To make sure that counselling is fun, engaging and effective, I often combine evidence-based therapies with creative approaches. Some of the evidence-based therapies I draw on are Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and mindfulness. Some of the creative approaches I draw on are play therapies and expressive arts therapies, which can include creative activities like sensory play, sand play, slime-making, drawing, collage, creating with clay and colouring-in. Using a variety of creative approaches and activities means that sessions do not always look like the traditional talk-based therapy that teenagers are often suspicious of. Many teenagers benefit from experiencing counselling as a space to explore with playfulness and curiousity.
To make sure that young clients are experiencing genuine relief, I invite them to take what they learn in sessions and experiment with it in the rest of their life. When they discover that using the tools they’ve learnt genuinely helps them with the challenges that they are facing, they feel hopeful and motivated. I also take time in each session for them to reflect on and integrate what we explored in the last session.
To cultivate choice and agency, I regularly check-in in with them about how things are going, offer them opportunities to talk about the things they are liking and disliking, and give them options for what we can do going forward. If they tell me that they do not find something helpful, I am always happy to pivot and try other things that might suit them better.
What to expect
When you decide to pursue counselling for your young person, the first step we take is organising a phone call. This call gives you an opportunity to talk about your young person, discuss your concerns, and share anything that you may want me to know. This is also an opportunity to explore how counselling may be helpful for your young person. Once we have developed a shared picture of what is going on for your young person and how counselling may help, we decide together what the best way to begin is. This may be a parent/guardian and counsellor only session, a session with a parent/guardian, the young person and the counsellor, or a session with just the young person and the counsellor.
While your support and involvement in counselling as a parent/guardian is deeply appreciated, it is generally best that counselling is mostly a one-on-one process between the counsellor and the young person. This is because teenagers can often have a lot of difficulty discussing personal issues in front of their parents/guardians, and are more likely to open up one-on-one. Often, even when they have a positive relationship with their family, teenagers are very concerned about worrying or burdening their caregivers, and need a space to explore what is going on for them and make sense of it before they are ready to share with their caregivers. This privacy and confidentiality is very important to the young person’s ability to engage with and meaningfully benefit from counselling.
I recognise that this can be daunting for some parents/guardians, because you care about your young person and you want to know what is going on for them. My primary concern is your young person’s wellbeing. Throughout the counselling process, I balance their need for confidentiality with keeping you appropriately informed. As a counsellor, I have an ethical and legal responsibility to maintain confidentiality for my young client unless they disclose serious risk of harm. This means that I regularly talk to my young clients about what they consent to me sharing with you, and encourage them to share things that I believe are important for you to know. The young client’s consent is necessary for me to share anything, so the choice is theirs.
Although one-on-one counselling sessions are recommended, I am guided by the preferences of the young client.
Some young clients feel most comfortable having their parents present for full sessions. If this is the case, I am happy to offer this.
Some young clients want to have their parent/guardian present for the first or last 15 minutes of their sessions. This can be great for a young person who wants their parent/guardian to know what’s going on for them and benefits from the counsellor’s support in talking about it.
Some may wish to have me speak to their parent/guardian privately after their session. In this case, the young person may want me to communicate things for them and they are able to be very clear about what these things are