Potential Problems in Adolescence and Their Impact on the Future - Essay Example

Working with Children and Adolescents Name: Institution: Abstract Individuals encounter various issues during childhood and adolescence, primarily because of situational variability of their behaviors and cognitive inabilities. As explained by various theorists, these issues may develop to haunt or to affect normal functioning of the youths in adulthood if not addressed in time. The current essay relies on issues I faced during adolescence to explore how they will possibly affect my future work as a family and adolescent counselor. The essay explores my adolescence experiences, potential challenges I will encounter as adolescent and family counselor, counseling strategies to use and possible ethical issues under such challenges. Based on life experiences, various counseling strategies I will use include narrative therapy, directed questioning, TF-CBT, and family therapy. Working with Children and Adolescents Individuals encounter various issues during childhood and adolescence, primarily because of situational variability of their behaviors and cognitive inabilities. To a larger extent, behavior in adolescence is a product of the environment, that is, behavior of adolescents is influenced by the context. Various psychological theories have associated this variability with immature cognitive abilities, which limit the ability of adolescents to make right decisions under various social encounters (Hinshaw, 1992). For instance, death of a parent or caregiver may predispose an adolescent to tantrums of anger, sadness, depression, bed-wetting behaviors, and other anti-social behaviors. Moreover, dysfunctional child-parent interactions may give rise to issues of loneliness, isolation, and fear, which may influence the children to engage in delinquent activities as a way to seek comfort and care absent in the family. As explained by various theorists, these issues may develop to haunt or to affect normal functioning of the youths in adulthood if not addressed in time. According to Kazantzis, Reinecke, and Freeman (2009), the major theories that explain development of psychological and behavioral problems over life include the behavioral, cognitive, and psychodynamic theories. Cognitive approaches suggest cognitively distorted views of experiences give rise to faulty patterns of behavior and thinking that eventually predispose people to psychological problems. Based on typology of mind (conscious, preconscious, and unconscious structures), psychodynamic theorists believe that feelings, behaviors, and thoughts that shapes experiences and interactions are the consequences of unconscious conflicts and drives. Behaviorists on the other hand, suggest that behavioral problems are the products of faulty learning during childhood and puberty. Believing that counseling should aim to address specific issues within the child’s environment, every theory put forwards different psychotherapeutic interventions and methods. The current essay relies on issues I faced during adolescence to explore how they will possibly affect my future work as a family and adolescent counselor. The essay explores my adolescence experiences, potential challenges I will encounter as adolescent and family counselor, counseling strategies to use and possible ethical issues under such challenges. Identification and Analysis of Relevant Experiences Identification As an Australian female born in 1960, my childhood and adolescence life was full of bad memories, experiences, and events. My mother passed away when I was still a child aged 6 years. I fell pregnant at the age of 15 years, giving birth to a son at 16 years, and a daughter, 2 years later. The father of my children used to drink alcohol, which made him to become abusive at many instances. Following his physical assault, I took my children and left at the age of 19 years. This prompted him to put me through child welfare, claiming that I could not care for the children effectively. This led to endless court proceedings, which have become my worst nightmares. Various theories, notably psychodynamic, behavioral, and cognitive, can explain the issues that dominated my adolescence period. Analysis From a psychodynamic perspective, the death of my mother forced me to engage in premarital sexual behavior early in life without considering the possible consequences. The theory holds that antisocial behaviors or psychological problems result from unconscious feelings associated with sadness, fear, anger, and resentment. According to Barlow and Durand (2011), if children cannot resolve this conflict, they may develop to a state where they become id (the uncontrolled, pleasure-seeking mental domain) dominated, which eventually predisposes them to antisocial behavior. Therefore, the sadness I felt following my mother’s death gave rise to unconscious feelings of isolation, depression, and a sense of loss of purpose in life. In effect, I believed that the only I could replace the motherly love was through sexual relationship. However, this did not work well as I eventually fell pregnant, complicating my situation further. Among the behavior theories, social learning approach explains my situation with the sexual partner effectively. Disagreeing with psychodynamic theorists’ link between antisocial behavior and unconscious perceptions, the social learning theorists suggest that adolescents model their behavior depending on the reactions they receive from others (Kazantzis et al., 2009). The relationship with my partner resulted in despair, fear, and a sense of being unlovable. He abused me whenever drunk and after leaving him, he placed me on child welfare doubting my capacity to raise or take care of the children. The abuses made me believe that I was unlovable and unworthy in the world, a reason for the bad experiences and events. Placing me on child welfare reinforced my beliefs, as the court proceedings not only signified terror, but unending feeling of anger and resentment towards the people and world around me. Cognitive theory can describe the sadness, anger, depression, resentment, and fear that have been a part of my life since the death of my mother. The approach explains behavior as a consequence of events in life that predispose a person to develop cognitive schemas, representing reactions to the events. It holds that bad events or experiences during childhood and adolescence result in negative cognitive schemas, which influence behavioral problems in individuals when activated by similar events later in life (Barlow & Durand, 2011, p.235). In my case, death of my mother created a feeling of loneliness and being unlovable, exposing me to episodes of sadness, anger, resentment, and depression. The faulty relationship with the father of my children reactivated the schemas, as he abused me frequently. Moreover, the court proceedings serve to reactivate the cognitive structures of isolation and ‘nobody loves me’ because I may lose the only source of comfort and social attachment: my children. Potential Challenges Due to my life experiences in childhood and adolescence, I foresee encountering various challenges when providing counseling services to adolescents and families. The greatest challenge will include making the adolescents express their feelings or emotions freely. It is not easy for adolescents to let out their emotions (grief, sadness, and feeling of loneliness) because of developmental imperatives attached to the stage – the desire to detach from caregivers or parents and to assume responsibility about one’s life (Balk & Corr, 2009, p.332). This may call for creating a counseling environment that will encourage the adolescents to feel safe and free to let out their emotions and feelings. The fact that I fell pregnant during teenage and outside a marital relationship may also present a challenge in working with the teenagers and their families. Normally, society sees teenage mothers as promiscuous because they fell pregnant out of wedlock and divorced mothers as individuals without social morals. As a result, the society tries as much as possible to avoid interacting with them, with parents even warning their children not to associate with such girls or women. Therefore, the families may be reluctant to accept me as their counselor and the adolescents, unwilling to interact with me for fear of reprisals from their parents. To address the challenge, I may be forced to tell them about my childhood experiences that resulted in falling pregnant while unmarried. This will help the parents and the youths acknowledge that maybe by accepting me as their counselor, my experience may assist them to avoid falling victims of similar events and experiences. Counseling strategies Based on my experiences, there are various counseling strategies available to an adolescent and a family counselor to help teenager facing similar issues cope with the situation. Narrative therapy through writings presents an effective way for the counselor to provide a safe and free environment for the teenagers to express their feelings and emotions. This may involve the counselor requesting the clients to write short essays about their experiences, impacts of loss of a loved one on their lives, and nature of relationship with their sexual partners. Besides providing a way from them to maintain a feeling of connection with the dead person, the writings present a way for the counselor to identify behavioral problems and emotions in the clients. According to Prout and Brown (2007), directed questioning presents an effective strategy to strengthen a deceased teenager’s sense of continued relationship with the person who has passed away. This will aim to assist the clients to establish a cognitive bequest left to them by their loved ones who have died or separated from marital relationship. Among others, some questions to guide this strategy of counseling may include how do you resemble your mother, father, or sibling? How was your relationship with your loved one? What do you imagine telling your children about your loved one? How did you feel after losing your loved one? Another effective counseling strategy regards the Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). According to Seidler and Wagner (2006), this is a form of family therapy that aims to educate teenagers and parents aware about the nature and effects of trauma related to loss as well as coping strategies. The first step involves asking the clients directed questions regarding the nature and effects of their experiences. For instance, in respect to my situation, some questions may include how did your mother pass away? How did you feel at and shortly after her death? The next step involves training the clients on relaxation strategies, including meditation and focused breathing. These intend to help the clients to lessen the anxiety associated with losing a loved one through death, separation, or divorce. After this, as a counselor, I will engage the clients on the construction of the events that usually reactivates negative cognitive schemas. This will assist the clients to reconstruct what occurred, using information they can recall. In effect, this will help them to correct cognitive misperceptions that usually lead them to inapt feelings of anger, sadness, loneliness, and unloved. In other situations, group therapy may present an alternative strategy to work with adolescents unwilling to let out their emotions and feelings. This will involve counseling them in groups of about five clients who have experienced events and situations similar to mine. This will rely on the development premise that adolescents feel free and secure to share their experiences with peers. As a result, they will be able to share information about life encounters, effects of the encounters on their lives, and their emotions and feelings that normally accompanies such experiences (F. Hanna, C. Hanna, & Keys, 1999). Potential Ethical Issues According to Hogue, Liddle, Becker, and Johnson-Leckrone (2002), possible ethical issues in counseling adolescents and their families revolve around the aspects of conflict of loyalties brought about by the developmental stage of the teenagers. In such circumstances, the counselor has a responsibility to provide a therapy that will help the children to live normally in accordance with socially acceptable behaviors. However, due to the age of the clients, the counselor has to involve parents because it is believed that adolescents are not mature enough to make informed decisions about what is wrong and right. This has a potential to give rise to ethical issue of confidentiality, as ethical principles of counseling require the counselor to respect the client-counselor privilege by not divulging information given by clients to third parties. The issue is further complicated by the fact that the counselor will have to pass through the parent in order to get an informed consent for participation from the clients. Issue of conflicted loyalties arises since the counseling takes place in a family setting most of the times. As a result, the counselors find themselves in a situation where they have to serve interests of various members of the family. This results in conflicted loyalties in establishing the best way to address the needs of every member of the family without compromising the situation of the other members. Conclusion From a psychodynamic perspective, the death of my mother forced me to engage in premarital sexual behavior early in life without considering the possible consequences. According to social learning theory, the abuses from my sexual partner made me believe that I was unlovable and unworthy in the world, a reason for the bad experiences and events. From a cognitive theorist’s perspective, death of my mother created a feeling of loneliness and being unlovable, exposing me to episodes of sadness, anger, resentment, and depression. Based on my experiences, various counseling strategies I will use as an adolescent and a family counselor include narrative therapy, directed questioning, TF-CBT, and family therapy. References Balk, D.E., & Corr, C.A. (2009). Adolescent encounters with death, bereavement, and coping. New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company. Barlow, D.H., & Durand, V.M. (2011). Abnormal psychology: An integrative approach. (6th ed.). Florence, KY: Cengage Learning. Hanna, F.J., Hanna, C.A., & Keys, S.G. (1999). Fifty strategies for counseling defiant, aggressive adolescents: Reaching, accepting, and relating. Journal of Counseling & Development, 77 (4), 395-404. Hinshaw, S.P. (1992). Externalizing behavior problems and academic underachievement in childhood and adolescence: Causal relationships and underlying mechanisms. Psychological Bulletin, 111 (1), 127-155. Hogue, A., Liddle, H.A., Becker, D., & Johnson-Leckrone, J. (2002). Family-based prevention counseling for high-risk young adolescents: Immediate outcomes. Journal of Community Pyschology, 30 (1), 1-22. Kazantzis, N., Reinecke, M.A., & Freeman, A. (2009). Cognitive and behavioral theories in clinical practice. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Prout, H.T., & Brown, D.T. (2007). Counseling and psychotherapy with children and adolescents: Theory and practice for school and clinical settings. (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Seidler, G.H. & Wagner, F.E. (2006). Comparing the efficacy of EMDR and trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy in the treatment of PTSD: A metal-analytic study. Psychological Medicine 36 (11), 1515-1522. Read More