Note: This article was originally published in Substack on 09 Aug. 2024
The Challenges
Working with youths has been the most challenging and the most rewarding aspect of my clinical practice.
Even though I started my career as a youth facilitator, I found that working with youths took more out of me than with adult clients.
One aspect of this is because they will call out your BS when they smell BS.
If I present as an uptight “professional” with my clipboard, delivering my evidenced-based practice to them, it often falls flat.
I’ve found that working especially with youths, the most professional thing you can do is to bring your entire person-hood to the table.
Our therapeutic role asks of us to be less divided between our profession-hood and person-hood.
In a sense, everyday, in every one of our relationships, human beings are asking a simple question. And that question is:
Is the person that I’m relating to here, more or less the same on the inside, as he or she is appears to be on the outside?1
Punch
In one of my first practicum placement in a secondary school, I nearly got punched by a student in the first session.
Back in 2004, this was the first time the school had a school counsellor. The teachers must have mistaken my role as a discipline master, as they sent me kids who were acting up.
I wrote about this in The First Kiss2:
The school principal came to me and said that she was sending Jonah to see me in the next period—which was in five minutes. Before she left, she said, “By the way, just so that you are prepared, he punched the last counsellor at the family service agency.”
“What? What happened?”
“He said he didn’t like the look on his face.”
I was left with two minutes before the school bell rang for the next period, and I was in panic mode. Before I could start to think clearly, Jonah arrived at the office. He was big for a 15-year-old.
“Hello. I am Daryl.”
“What’s this about?” he asked.
We are off to a bad start.
My “intervention?” I said, “Wanna go for a drink at the canteen?”
This was not in the treatment manual.
He looked more suspicious.
“I’m paying,” I said. We walked to the canteen.
What ensued changed everything. I said, “I know that I’m a psychologist, and I’m supposed to ask you all these questions about your problems. The truth is, I’m more interested to know what you do for fun. What sort of interests do you have?”
He sized me up and said, “You wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“Try me.”
He said, “I play the sitar.”
The rest is history. We had a shared background with our love for music. I learned he was a devoted musician to the Indian classical music tradition. Our proceeding sessions were based on music metaphors3 (rhythm, harmony, melody) and how these applied to his presenting concerns of impulse control and anger management (“Letting the notes breathe between the notes,” for emotion regulation, “paying attention to others rather than focus on the self,” for fostering prosocial behaviour).
I didn’t mention this in the book, but Jonah later admitted that he would have punched me in the face—like he did with the previous counsellor.
I asked what stopped him. He said, “You bought me a drink…you didn’t have to… and you didn’t ask BS questions about my problems at the start.”
Clearly, this doesn’t mean that we should buy each young client a drink and talk about music in the therapy room all the time.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell sums it up,
“Find a place inside where there’s joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain.”
Coming Up
In the coming weeks, I will provide insightful resources on working with young people. I will also talk about working with more than one person in the room (i.e., parents, caregivers).
P/S: A screenshot of the subtitle from my sensitive editing tool.
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