Counselling Young People

Ms Ellen Noonan, Ellen Noonan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134944613
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Based on the author's experience as psychotherapist and counsellor, this book provides an approachable introduction to the field of counselling young people for anyone undertaking counselling within organisations such as schools, universities, the social services or industry

1
Adolescent to adult: the transition period

We are accustomed to think about adolescents as storming and stressing, rebelling, being difficult or the hope of the future, indiscriminately consuming the latest fad, causing anxiety by unpredictable or incomprehensible behaviour, or being over-sensitive and morose or callous and boisterous in their relationships. While understanding that they are ‘going through a crisis’ which they will no doubt ‘out-grow’, we still feel impatient and irritated with the awkwardness they create around them, and with their apparent refusal to settle down to a ‘reasonable’, even-keeled existence. The myth that this is the best time of life – generated in large part by wistful envy from elders tarnished by life, or by youngsters still unschooled in life – dies hard, and we can’t quite understand why they aren’t a happier lot of young people, excited by their current privilege and anticipating what lies ahead. Indeed, we rather think adolescents should celebrate their state as we traditionally celebrate New Year: a noisy night of elation proceeding with clockwork certainty to the midnight hour. At this time we look for omens of the future in our horoscopes or in local customs, hoping that next year will be better, or at least not worse than this year. Incited by the magic-borne possibilities, and knowing that we needn’t work tomorrow, we give ourselves up to irresponsible. carousing, and for a brief moment we put our arms around each other to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as if it were a time of well-being and bonhomie.

While some of us are out celebrating, however, others of us are sitting at home feeling depressed and uncomfortably out of line with the ‘normal’ celebrants. We are suffering regret for what has truly gone, for ambitions unfulfilled, for errors unamended, for what might have been, and we are apprehensive about our ability to manage life any differently next year. Slim consolation comes from the recollection of achievements and pleasures and from the sense of having learned something from our experience.

It is right that we should mark the New Year, of course, and it is perhaps no accident that we have such an exuberant ritual to help us through this night of uncertainty, to help us put out of our mind two very uncomfortable facts of life: our romantic, domestic, work and financial future are not determined by magic but by our own resources for making what we can of the world we live in; and the year gone by is lost for ever and can never be replace. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is a song of mourning, so we may well hold on to what is present and sing it boisterously in order not to know that, with the striking of the clock, we have just lost something and are faced with a future which we cannot predict with any certainty.

The sense of hopefulness and sadness exists in all of us, of course, although each of us may tip the balance in his own particular way, experiencing one more than the other. Similarly, the young person in that maturadonal space between childhood and adulthood cannot divide himself, but must hold within himself both the regretful and anticipatory aspects of transition. Adolescence is a period of transition, and it is characterized by acute feelings of anxiety and uncertainty alongside excitement. Habitual ways of relating to others and accustomed ideas about the self and the world are becoming outdated and must be relinquished, but no sure substitutes are readily to hand. Attempts to hold on to old patterns result in disconcerting and frustrating experiences because the world is changing and a conservative stance puts the individual out of step. It is equally impossible to be single-mindedly excited by the future – the material gains of learning and earning, sexual possibilities, legal privileges, and autonomous strength – because the adolescent does not yet know how he will use these things nor how he will be used by them. Such anxiety and uncertainty promote precipitate actions, withdrawal, anger, inconsistency, depression and euphoria.

Because of these mood-swings and the force behind them, it may be as discomforting to be in the presence of an adolescent as it is to be with someone who is grief-stricken – it is, in this society, neither sightly nor seemly to mourn publicly. Even the thought of personal mourning tends to make most people feel uncomfortable and helpless, so mourning Has been forced underground. (In recognition of the work of people like Colin Parkes (1972), however, it should be said that death now begins to exert a fascination, and we are becoming more able to tolerate feelings about the reality of death.) Similarly, adolescence is often considered a subversive, underground activity, usually viewed obliquely, its real substance concealed and revealed only by surface manifestations which sometimes appear unsightly and unseemly, both literally and metaphorically. The resemblance between grief and adolescence is more than superficial, however, since the adolescent transition is as much about loss as it is about gain.

Mourning: A Model for Transition

The active and emotionally energetic process of mourning provides a model for the adolescent transition, since both are attempts to achieve a sense of personal continuity out of the confusion of drastic disruption. By extension, of course, it also becomes a model for therapeutic change. It is easiest to see and describe the mourning process when the loss is stark, when someone actually dies and cannot be retrieved in any physical way. The survivor is faced with a dilemma: of letting the dead person go while still giving him space in life as a living if not palpable being; of accepting the discontinuity in life while striving to maintain continuity into the future. Keeping himself firmly in the present, the mourner has to look backwards and forward simultaneously.

In the ordinary and healthy process of mourning, the griever withdraws, seeking time and space to concentrate on his loss and on the lost person. This is a time of intense struggle with the conflicting claims of the past and future, conflicts which are resolved by consolidating what is meaningful and significant from the past and finding some meaning for the future in this new depleted state. Personal history is reviewed, events and feelings once shared with the deceased are revived and relived. This is a bitter-sweet experience because there is now no chance of repeating those pleasures and no opportunity to make good the flaws and failures. It is tempting, then, to jettison the past and look to the possibilities of the future, but the very thought of this brings guilt-laden feelings of betrayal and desertion toward the absent one, so the griever is dragged back to contemplation of the past. The dead person is recalled with all the feelings felt before, he may even be perceived as actually present, definitely here and separate, still a partner in the business of sorting out the problems of living; but this illusion offers only a temporary respite from the reality of death.

During this emotional involvement with the past, however, time goes on inexorably. Although apparently meaningless without the lost person and the lost relationship, life has to go on, decisions need to be made, relationships have to be continued, albeit in an altered form. Awareness of the real emptiness in the past helps the survivor to face the anxieties and uncertainties of the present and future. At the time of a death, the threat comes as much from feeling that part of the self has been lost as from the actual loss of the other person. It is no mere cliché to say ‘I feel as if part of myself has gone’ because we do invest parts of ourselves in others, and we do define ourselves to some extent by the relationships we have.

In a traditional marriage, for instance, the husband may take on the responsibility for dealing with the external world of taxes, bills and arranging for services, and therefore expresses the aggressive and demanding feelings for the couple, while the wife has responsibility for care and comfort within the house, expressing the nurturing feelings. The more intimately involved the two are, and the more mutually exclusive the ‘division of labour’ of roles and feelings is, the more the survivor is likely to feel that part of himself disappeared with the death of the partner and to feel anxious about doing and being what the partner has up until now expressed on his behalf. The feeling of helplessness which often accompanies a bereavement arises partly from this sense of no longer being able to function in an established identity and having to extend the self to include those ‘delegated’ aspects which are certainly out of practice and probably were not wanted anyway.

Gradually the survivor finds within himself some attributes and attitudes of the dead person and no longer needs to relive and maintain the past in concrete ways because that person is ‘alive’ inside as a set of memories, ideas and feelings. As this happens, it becomes possible to let go of the physical images and the compulsion to fidelity. This internalization alleviates anxieties about betrayal and reorganizes internal patterns; new meanings and attachments develop in the new context. A revised identity and an altered view of the world preserves the thread of meaning.

In mourning, flight into activity directed toward the future and retreat into broodiness about the past are neither, in themselves, satisfactory, but the to-ing and froing in response to relentless nudges in both directions – and the attendant feelings of sadness, anger, guilt, happiness, love and hope – is the process though which loss is acknowledged and conflict is reconciled. Death or loss is a major environmental event which severely disrupts the flow of life, and continuity has to be restored by this internal activity in the survivor. By incorporating this experience and the feelings about it in himself, the survivor ensures a continuing sense of himself in the world; he accommodates an experience which originally seemed to threaten his very existence; he manages to make sense of something ‘senseless’; he finds new meaning for the future through the phase of disorientation; through loss he is enriched.

Loss and Gain in Adolescence

It may seem that adolescence is a long way from this; from an irreversible loss which occurs at a defined point in time; from an endeavour to tolerate the conflict of the pulls of the past and future while remaining still in the present. However, we can sometimes feel that our childhood has been irretrievably lost. For instance we can return to our family, home and childhood haunts and relationships, but they will never be as they were when we left them, because we and they have done things in the meantime. The meeting is between changed, different people, and it is often disappointing, almost as if the past has betrayed us by altering. It is tempting to want to put the clock back and to reinstate the old order, but that can only ever be partially successful because it is impossible to shed the effects of time and experience. Instead we tend to adapt to the disconcertingly unfamiliar familiarity, and we can do this because we have a sense of ‘this is me’ which has enabled us to assimilate a variety of experiences, accepting the change they make in us without losing touch with the old order. The return, then, becomes another new experience, not a reversion.

Personal maturation requires some things to be yielded to make way for new ones; it requires us to convert childhood into a memory which is alive, if not palpable, inside us, and this means we have to mourn aspects of our child-self so they may be internalized. Change and gain involve the same ambivalent process as loss does: space needs to be made for new experience, just as the gap created by loss needs to be bridged. In both, continuity is established by looking back longingly to how it was, and looking ahead uncertainly to life as it will be, and continually reinterpreting ourselves and the world in the light of new developments. Not to do so, not to spend time and energy on weaving this individual thread of meaning, leaves us in a falsely based, defensive existence, where the whole aim becomes simply to survive change.

For the adolescent loss and gain are cumulative and progressive. The changes vary from the acute to the creeping, from the insistent to the whispering. Each individual will have his own idiosyncratic pace and attach his own meanings to what happens; but, generally speaking, we can look at the varieties of change ordinarily experienced by everyone during this time.

Sexuality

New body shapes and physiological processes develop and have to be assimilated. This can be both exciting and disconcerting to the child, especially for those who have not been told, or have failed to ‘hear’, any information preparing them for the onset of puberty.

Kate (despite being warned) managed to remain blissfully unaware of sexuality until she was awakened one morning by her first period. She was afraid to get up because her interpretation of the event was that all her insides had come loose and would tumble out if she stood up, rather like the stuffing coming out of her teddy bear when its seams had burst.

Others are better prepared, but even so a girl may naturally be preoccupied with the unpredictability of her periods until they settle into a pattern and she learns to make sense of the signs, both physical and emotional, sent out from her body. Over time, the information gained from parents and peers and her phantasies about her body-processes are matched against her own experience, and the change can be accepted and individualized, so she knows about, and can make reasonable predictions about, her body. The necessary extra care and attention to her body, if not to the calendar, which she was free from as a pre-pubertal child, are gradually accommodated into a daily pattern. When all goes well, her self-image is extended to include developing sexuality, and she delights in dreams of love, marriage and children. Girls who have a shaky or ambivalent sense of themselves as feminine may be mostly angry and despairing about the loss of childhood asexuality and are quite unable to anticipate boyfriends, sexual relationships or motherhood with any pleasure.

Julia, at twenty-one, wanted to be a cloud with eyes. Still feeling – and preferring to remain – an asexual child, she could find nothing positive in being female, much less sexual. She used contraceptive pills to manipulate and eliminate her periods, which were none the less experienced by her as an external enemy to be vanquished. So long as she refused them as a natural part of her growing and changing self, they were painful, disruptive episodes and the attentions of men (which were frequent and persistent because she was very pretty) felt irritating and senseless.

The onset of puberty perhaps takes boys less by suprise because male genital development is more visible. However, the recognition of sexual maturity may still be abrupt, as it was for Ted. He had been swimming with a group of boys during a holiday at the seaside. At the end of the day he was dragging his feet back to the shower, when suddenly he was aware that he smelled different: he smelled like a man. Horrified and confused, he dropped away from his friends and spent the rest of the holiday in a depressed and anxious state.

Changing body shapes publicly announce the arrival of sexuality, causing young people to be concerned with how they look both to themselves and to others. Hours of private contemplation of their body, and the ambivalent search for signs of change in it, are evidence of the healthy mourning process: they need to explore the newness, to regret differences between then and now, to adjust their self-image to accord with the physical change, and to indulge in the anxious excitement which accompanies the realization of sexual potential. Girls’ attempts to make their breasts bigger than they are and then flatten them into non-existence, and boys’ attempts to exhibit and hide erections are both very concrete ways of catapulting between the past and future in order to find sameness, to establish continuity, to identify ‘me’ between the two phases. Adolescents also become acutely aware of dress, and expend fiuge amounts of time and money on selecting garments that will reveal or conceal precisely the amount of sexuality they can psychologically accept at that moment. Running parallel to this are day-dreams and phantasies, built around facts, folklore, speculation, hopes and fears about the possibilities of life now that sexuality is a reality.

The private reconnaissance – including masturbation – is both a self-familiarization process and a rehearsal for real encounters with others. It is important to know our own body before someone else knows it, just as we want to explore and possess a gift before letting someone else handle it. If our awareness is pre-empted, initiative is lost and the result can feel like theft and spoilage: rather than coming from within and belonging to us, our responses and feelings seem to be mere reactions provoked by someone else.

Julia consented to have ‘art photos’ taken of her by a photographer of short acquaintance. When she saw herself – psychologically for the first time – in the pictures, she felt enraged and bereft. He had appreciated her body before she had, and now it was, so to speak, a second-hand body to her, used and returned by him. Unable to use her sexual curiosity directly, she had disguised and yielded it to him, ultimately feeling exploited and deprived.

Relationships

Obviously rehearsal alone has limited usefulness: it can never take into account how others will actually behave and affect our thoughts and feelings about ourselves. Indeed, too much rehearsal leading to fixed and partial images can bring as much perplexity as too little awareness does, when it comes to the real thing. Friendships, therefore, become crucial testing grounds for developing self-images and private phantasies. Girls and boys talk with and question others of their own sex to assess and reflect their own sexual and personal development, and they grow increasingly curious about the other sex, wanting and needing to know just what sexuality is and how it will change relationships. Together they experiment with actions and feelings, shuttling between awful embarrassment and flagrant display. The intense single-sex relationships which characterize early adolescence are necessary to solidify a tenuous identity, but, if prolonged, they may be being used to deny change through an avoidance of the other sex, an inescapable reminder of difference and change and its consequences. Similarly sexual experimentation furthers the quest for knowledge, but, if premature, it becomes a denial of the uncertainty properly belonging to this phase of change and loss. The gradual and uneven progress from asexual childhood through same-sex groups, heterosexual groups, and into pairs, is the process through which the new physical, psychological and social realities gain acceptance and are comfortably integrated in their altered self-images. Information from within and without concurs, and they know where and who they are.

Increasing degrees of intimacy and commitment accompany the changes and evoke anxieties about betrayal as one group or individual is deserted for the next. The uncomfortable feelings of rejection, envy and jealousy – whether on the giving or receiving end – now seem more difficult to manage because they occur in the powerful, but vulnerable, area of sexuality among peers. The long-term future goals of marriage and parenthood, so long as these are attractive, help young people through the ups and downs, and enable them to make sense of buffeting experiences. Even so, there are times when it doesn’t feel worth all the pain and anxiety, and retreat follows. But perpetual clinging to childhood does not permit their hopes to become realities, so they yield and re-enter the struggle. Those who do not have an attractive image of adulthood, like Julia, have little emotional incentive to stay with the struggle and can feel persecuted by the inexorable physiological process and social expectations.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Adolescent to adult: the transition period
• 2 The framework: theory
• 3 The framework: diagnosis
• 4 The counselling relationship
• 5 The language of counselling
• 6 Authority and responsibility in counselling
• 7 Counselling in organizations
• 8 Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index