Creating Resistance by “Dropping In” on Your Teenager’s Sessions
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A major error that I have seen parents make time and time again over the years is the mistake of showing up unannounced to a therapy session with their teenager. Parents usually do this in order to bring up an issue that they want their teen to work on in therapy or to address a conflict that happened during the week.
For example:
After meeting with a mother and her teen son during the first session, we schedule an individual session so that I have an opportunity to build rapport, define the teen’s goals, and spend time getting to know each other. When the next session arrives, the mother is waiting with her son and says, “I’d like to join you guys for the first few minutes so that we can talk about something important.” Not yet knowing what the topic is, I agree to meet with them together. The mother says, “Well, last week he said that he would agree to help out more around the house, but his job was to load the dishwasher every night, and he hasn’t done it once. So I think that you guys should talk about that this week because he isn’t following through with his promise.”
While I understand the positive intention behind coming into therapy with your child (hoping to get support from a third party to address an important issue) this situation almost always undermines the therapy and creates resistance in the teenager. The reason is this: if we begin a session with a parent bringing up a topic to work on and then leaving the session, the teenager will feel as though I am aligned with the parent and will begin to relate to me as another parent. In other words, if I take the parent’s lead and talk about the issue they brought in, the rest of the session feels as though I am acting as the parent’s agent.
A much better approach is for parents to plan ahead by calling or emailing to raise important issues. This allows the therapist time to think about how to bring up the topic in the next session with the teenager in a way that is natural, appeals to the teen’s self-interest, and does not have the appearance of acting as a disciplinarian. Sometimes it’s appropriate to tell the teen that I got an email from the parent, and sometimes it’s not, but in either case we can begin the session with just the two of us in the room, preserving the privacy and the sense of the therapy office as a “special place”. This allows me to bring up the topic that the parent is concerned about while aligning with the teen and encouraging wise decision-making, not trying to convince him or her to adopt the parent’s point of view.
Instead of engaging in direct power struggles with their teens and recruiting the therapist to bolster their position, parents can often be much more effective in changing difficult behaviors and encouraging responsibility by working behind the scenes and using timely communication.
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