Our counselors offer counseling for teens in Richmond, VA

My go-to approach for helping people in teen counseling is making sure I spend a lot of time fortifying our relationship and building trust with my teen clients. I find the best benefit in focusing on scaffolding my treatment to meet the client where they are and to focus on building a trusting, nurturing relationship with them as my primary base for treatment. I find that it leads to better therapeutic outcomes, as it enables us to more effectively co-collaborate when they believe that they have a professional adult who believes in them, validates them, and is consistently supportive of them in becoming the best and most effective version of themselves.

I teach the following tools in teen counseling:

• Mindfulness training: Mindfulness training involves the use of mindfulness and grounding skills to help clients remain in the present moment, not in the past or the future. These skills are critically important in a client's healing journey as they promote healthy emotion recognition and coping skill use and raise overall levels of resiliency and distress tolerance. Mindfulness training in teens sets a foundation for them to have a healthy, accepting relationship with themselves and their experienced emotions for a lifetime.
• Cognitive challenging/reframing: Cognitive challenging and reframing skills help clients be able to identify, recognize, and replace negative automatic thoughts about self and others that cause impairments and disruptions to their healing journey as well as daily life. Cognitive challenging skills teach clients to put their thoughts “on trial;” that is, to ask if they are rooted in evidence-based fact or in a simple worry that is not factual. If our worries are not rooted in fact, they are not rooted in reality and are therefore causing us an impairment. Then, we can reframe them to something that is more adaptive to reality. This equips teens to not second-guess themselves and provides them with rational, logical problem-solving skills that are not rooted in shame or self-criticism.
• Psychoeducation: Providing a thorough education to clients on grief, the brain, loss, and other aspects associated with the grieving process is another important component of healthy processing during times of grieving because it provides clients with a context and a “why” for their thoughts and behaviors. When we understand context, it can sometimes help us get to the root cause and prevent problems from continuing into perpetuity due to ignorance. Further, providing psychoeducation to parents is critical in helping them gain insight and understand their teen's condition and the treatment plan.
• Behavior activation: Behavior activation skills and schedules are schedules created with activities that are congruent with and revolve around a person's identified personal values. Creation of these schedules involves identification of your personal values by importance; being able to translate those values into daily, tangible activities and routines; and then looking at creating a way to incorporate these activities into your daily routines and rituals. Regular engagement in behavior activation increases self-esteem and overall life satisfaction, so equipping teens with these skills is critical.

I know a client is making meaningful progress in teen counseling when they are reporting a significant decrease in frequency and intensity of symptoms that are causing daily distress and disruption to their schedules and routines. Clients are continuing to make progress when they are visibly more comfortable identifying and healthily processing experienced emotions and have regularly incorporated healthy coping and emotion regulation skills into their daily routines and engage in them with minimal clinician prompting. I also look for increases in self-esteem and self-confidence as well as self-efficacy in teens.

Clients can supplement their time in teen counseling by making sure that they are engaging in activities that are nourishing and are not isolating themselves. Regularly engaging within your social support system is absolutely critical to human health and development, but especially for teenagers—having a strong social support system is critical. Making sure you're regularly engaging in your hobbies and other value-congruent behaviors can also significantly contribute to progress made in therapy.

To prepare for their first teen counseling session, a teen can discuss expectations with their parents, especially levels of autonomy with treatment that they'd like to have. How comfortable are they with their parents being involved in treatment, and vice versa? Discussing boundaries and expectations can be critical in avoiding conflict once you enter therapy!