Setting Therapy up to be Successful
By Nekia Stewart, Senior Psychologist
Most young people in Allambi Care will have experienced therapy, internally with the Clinical Department or with external clinicians. Therapy can be hard, emotional and draining work for anyone undertaking the process of working through trauma, their experiences, and learning new strategies to navigate meaningful relationships and function adaptively in society.
Carers, family and youth workers play an integral role, alongside the clinician, in making therapy as successful as possible. Some key points to setting up the therapy session for success include the following:
- Preparation: A young person should be provided with appropriate reminders of upcoming appointments. These can be marked on calendars, put into phone calendars or mentioned verbally.
- Scheduling: Ensure schedules are free from conflicting activities and don’t schedule activities that will need to finish up early due to therapy (e.g. the young person needs to leave the beach early to get to therapy whilst their housemate remains there). Ensure that, following a therapy session, the young person can continue processing the content of the session and their individual needs are met with either i) a distracting activity, ii) a connecting activity, iii) time to process alone, iv) a self-soothing activity or v) re-engagement back into the regular schedule. Important meetings or school should be avoided following therapy where possible.
- Talking to young people about their sessions: Asking specific questions about what was talked about or what they did in their session is not always helpful and can alter their sense of confidentiality. Instead of asking detailed or probing questions, you can simply let them know “I am here for you if you want to talk about anything”. Some young people will want to discuss the content of the session with carers. If this occurs, validation and active listening should be utilised.
- Understanding the limits of confidentiality: Therapy is confidential, except for risk and safety. Overall goals may be communicated with parents, carers and staff but the content of sessions is confidential between the client and the clinician. The clinician will work with the young person to explore their personal limits of confidentiality. At times the young person may give consent for information to be told to parents, carers and staff, leading to collaboration involving team meetings and consultation, and transferable skills between home and sessions.
o Transparency: Dual roles often exist within an internal clinical setting; this is also discussed with the young person and consented to. If a dual role is not consented to, an aspect of service delivery may be re-allocated to a separate clinician.
- Communication: Maintain open timely communication between the Clinician and parents, carers and staff regarding appointment times, important events and changes in circumstances. Clinicians will be responsive to the client's needs and will be flexible where possible.
o Homework: The clinician will communicate with parents, carers, and staff if the young person has homework. Please assist them to complete the homework or communicate with the clinician if this is misplaced or the young person is unable to complete it.
It is important to acknowledge a number of young people are not ready to complete the therapeutic work that occurs within therapy, so in every case the goal of the clinician is to create a valuable experience of what therapy can be for that young person. To do so, therapy is not forced upon a young person who is not ready because this later hinders them from seeking support due to a negative experience of being told they must go to therapy.