Adolescent Psychotherapy: A Radical Relational Approach

Summary

Counsellors and psychotherapists are faced with ever-increasing complexity in their work with adolescents. In this book, Bronagh Starrs offers an understanding of developmental and therapeutic process from a relational-phenomenological Gestalt perspective.

Starrs shows how the adolescent's presenting symptom issues are statements of compromised life space integrity and demonstrates therapeutic sensibility to the adolescent's first-person experience. Throughout the book, the clinician is offered extensive relational and creative strategies to support integrity repair for the adolescent. The developmental impact of various life space contexts are discussed, including parental separation, complex family configuration, grief, adoption, and emerging sexual orientation and gender experience. Therapeutic responses to common creative adjustments are explored including anxiety, school refusal, depression, self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, alcohol and drug use, and sexual trauma.

Adolescent Psychotherapy will help counsellors and psychotherapists to develop deeper levels of competency in their work as adolescent psychotherapists, as they navigate the complex and fascinating experience of therapy with teenagers. This exceptional contribution is suitable for both experienced practitioners and students of counselling and psychotherapy.