Counseling for Teens, Children & Families

Today’s youth face many challenges. Sometimes children have to cope with difficult transitions. Sometimes teens struggle with forming their identity and making healthy decisions. Sometimes parent don’t know what else they can do to help. Shine a Light can help your family get the support they need in the way that makes the most sense. The options include individual therapy for a teen or child, family therapy for both parents and children, or some combination of the two. Your counselor can help you figure out how to proceed.

Counseling for Teens

The teenage years can be the hardest period of life. You are starting to make your own decisions, but you don’t have much experience to draw from. Do you listen to your parents, or your friends, or yourself? How can you start understanding yourself in a way that will allow you to become the master of your own life?

Therapy offers teens a place to reflect on their life, their decisions, and their relationships. The safety of being able to speak to someone confidentialy allows teens to sort through conflicting emotions and difficult choices. Counselors are not like other adults in a teen’s life. Friends and family members all have needs of their own, and usually some agenda for the teen. Family and friend support is vital to teens. But talking with someone outside the family and friend group provides something different, a place to go deeper into understanding yourself.

Imagine what it would be like to meet someone who did not judge you, who was deeply curious about what you think and how you feel. Someone who would not tell you what to do, but would support you to make your own decision, and trust you will learn from it whatever the outcome.

There doesn’t have to be something wrong with you to benefit from therapy. In fact, teens who have discovered more about themselves through therapy are often more aware and better communicators that those who think therapy is just for the metall ill. If you think it might be useful to you to have someone really listen to you, in a way that allows you to better hear yourself, then you may find therapy very satisfying.

Counseling for Children

It is sometimes hard for parents to know how to help their children cope with difficult circumstances. We can’t all be expected to know how to guide children through the many emotions and behavioral issues that arise. Child therapy can help provide your child a way to deal with the stresses they face. Support for children should not have to always come from the parents.

Often children work through their emotions through indirect activities. They may not want to talk directly about what is stressing them. Instead, they may express themselves and explore their options through play, art and stories. Play Therapy and Art Therapy are processes wherein a therapist engages a child in a game or art activity. When the child’s underlying emotions emerge in the course of play or artwork, the therapist responds to the child in ways that help build the child’s understanding of human emotion and appropriate behavior.

As the therapist responds to the child with validation, respect and clear limit setting, the child builds their emotional intelligence. The child learns to better accept their own feelings, regulate the intensity of their emotions, and better understand the impact of their behavior on other people.