How to Support Your Teenager in Counselling

You can visit our homepage to learn more about Nightingale Counselling in Vancouver.

And yet, behind the scenes, we know that parents often have questions.

What actually happens in therapy? Is it a good thing that my teenager wants counselling, or does needing therapy mean something is wrong? Are they talking about us? Are they being given a diagnosis? And, perhaps most importantly, is there something I should be doing to help—or something I should make sure I don't do?

This is a short guide for parents trying to navigate those questions.

What Are Teenagers Actually Doing in Therapy?

It can be surprisingly vulnerable, as a parent, to realize that your child needs a person outside the family to talk to. There can be something almost threatening about the privacy of the therapeutic relationship. You may wonder whether your teenager is complaining about life at home, or whether a counsellor is encouraging them to create distance from the family.

Those concerns are understandable, particularly given some of the stories that circulate about therapy and estrangement.

Our experience at Nightingale is that teen counselling is usually not explicitly about parents. Unless there is an acute problem happening at home, teenagers tend to bring the ordinary complications of being a teenager into the room: friendships, school, anxiety, identity, relationships, body changes, sexuality, sleep, devices, decisions about the future, and the strange experience of becoming an adult while still living inside many of the structures of childhood.

You can read more about what we see in Teen Therapy in Vancouver.

Parents sometimes have another concern: Are they going to get labelled?

It is true that teenagers today have access to a much larger language of mental health and diagnosis than previous generations did. ADHD, autism, gender dysphoria, trauma, anxiety, depression and other psychological concepts are everywhere, particularly on social media. That language can sometimes be useful. It can also become a way of interpreting ordinary human difficulties too quickly.

At Nightingale, we often find ourselves doing something closer to detherapizing than endlessly applying new psychological labels. We want to understand what is actually happening, and whether a diagnosis is genuinely useful, before making it central to the person's story.

Why Do Teenagers Need Therapy for Ordinary Life Problems?

One answer is that previous generations often didn't have much access to help without stigma.

Today's teenagers are, in some ways, remarkably comfortable asking for assistance. That doesn't necessarily mean they are less resilient. It may simply mean that they are more willing to use help when help is available.

And most of the time, counselling doesn't remove the difficulty of growing up. We can't do that, and neither should we try.

What we can do is make the process a little easier to navigate.

A teenager can have loving parents, good friends, supportive teachers and a successful school life and still benefit from having one private place where they can think out loud. Therapy creates a small world that isn't quite connected to their existing social web. That can be unusually useful during a period of life when so much of the self is still being worked out.

What Is Different About a Therapist?

Teenagers already have a remarkable number of adults around them.

Parents. Teachers. Coaches. Family members. School counsellors. Doctors. Sometimes tutors, mentors and other professionals.

So what is the point of adding another one?

One of the special qualities of counselling is confidentiality. It may sound like a formal or legal feature of therapy, but psychologically it is much more important than that. Privacy gives teenagers permission to explore thoughts and feelings without immediately having to manage the reactions of the people around them.

This isn't necessarily because they have something bad to say.

As teenagers move from childhood toward a more mature personhood, they are discovering the boundaries between public and private life itself. Having a place where they can experiment with that boundary is part of growing up.

The other important difference is that counselling is genuinely client-centred. A parent knows the child they've raised. A teacher knows the student in their classroom. A coach knows the athlete on their team. These perspectives can all be valuable, but they also come with history.

A counsellor gets to meet the person as they are presenting themselves now.

It's a special type of companionship.

So How Can Parents Help?

The first thing may be to let go of some of the perceived threats.

Your teenager having a private relationship with a counsellor does not mean that you have failed as a parent. It does not necessarily mean that something terrible is happening. And it certainly doesn't mean that the therapist is taking your place.

It can also be worth examining any lingering stigma you might have about counselling itself.

I can say this even as a therapist and Clinical Director: I occasionally notice those old instincts show up in my own thinking when I imagine one of my children needing help outside the family. Knowing intellectually that therapy is useful doesn't make us immune to the emotional reaction of seeing someone we love need it.

The next step is to let your natural curiosity surface when it is most free of personal protection or gain.

In other words, ask about therapy when you are genuinely interested in their experience, rather than trying to extract information about what they said.

My tip: Just get some ice cream after therapy and don't ask any questions at all, and see what emerges!

But silence is easier said than done, so you might ask:

You don't necessarily need to know what was said.

Sometimes the most supportive thing a parent can communicate is simply: I'm glad you have somewhere to go.

And if your teenager knows that you trust them to use that place well, they are much more likely to actually use it.