Counselling Teenagers
I love working with teenagers. It is not something I say to sound reassuring. It is genuinely the part of this work that lights me up most.
Before I became a counsellor, I taught middle school for four years. I have also worked as a high school counsellor. So when you tell me school is stressful, I actually get it. I know what it is like to stare down a deadline that feels impossible. I know some teachers are genuinely great and some are impossible to deal with. I know homework can feel like it is eating your entire life. I know the small stuff that adds up too, figuring out your locker combination, the dread of being late to class, finding a seat in a whole school assembly.
Teenagers get talked about like you are a problem to manage, moody, difficult, hard to reach. I do not see it that way. You are more perceptive, more capable and more aware of what is going on around you than most adults give you credit for. Misunderstood is the word I keep coming back to.
My work with teens starts from that belief. I treat you as a competent, knowledgeable person who already knows a lot about your own life, not as something broken that needs fixing. That does not mean pretending everything is fine when it is not. It means showing up with real respect for what you already know about yourself and building from there together.
What This Looks Like in Practice
What we talk about stays between us. I do not share it with your parents, except in situations where confidentiality has real limits, like if your safety is at risk, or unless you tell me you want me to.
Your parents do not need to be part of our sessions. If you genuinely want their support in the room, that is completely fine too, this is your call to make.
I am not trying to be another adult in your life telling you what to do. I build trust by listening, actually listening, not waiting for my turn to talk. I validate what you are feeling instead of brushing past it. I am not here to tell you how to think, feel or be. You already know yourself. My job is to help you make sense of what you are carrying, not hand you a script for who you should become.
What Sessions Actually Look Like
Sessions run 60 minutes. I ask questions, you talk, I listen. It goes back and forth from there. Sometimes I will share my screen to show you a visual or a resource that might be useful, and I will email it to you afterward too, so you have it whenever you want it again, or never look at it again. Both are fine.
What Brings Teens to Counselling
Anxiety, family conflict, friend conflict, feeling misunderstood, big life changes, school stress. If something else brought you here that is not on this list, that is fine too, you do not need a perfect reason to reach out.
What Informs My Work
I draw mainly on solution-focused therapy and narrative therapy in my work with teens. Solution-focused therapy means we spend more time on what is already working and where you want things to go, rather than picking apart everything that is wrong. You are not a problem to diagnose and fix, you already have strengths and solutions in you, my job is to help you find them.
Narrative therapy is about the stories we tell about ourselves and where those stories come from. A lot of teens get handed a story by other people, difficult, lazy, too sensitive, and start believing it is just who they are. This work is about separating you from that story and figuring out which parts are actually true, and which parts were just something someone else decided about you.
This is your space. Let us see what we can do with it.