Group Counseling Skills: Navigating Identity and Belonging with Kids and Teens with Sam Steen

For kids, today’s landscape is increasingly dominated by social media, a growing sense of isolation, and diminishing valuation of cultural and racial differences. Young people need safe, empowering spaces where they can discuss and work through some of the challenging issues impacting their growth and development. Group counseling offers a supportive social context for engaging these impressionable, curious, and sometimes vulnerable young clients.

Clinicians who choose to work with children and teens in this powerful therapeutic modality need a keen understanding of not only the external, societal challenges they face, but the internal, developmental ones. In this rich webinar experience renowned youth therapist, Sam Steen and his co-facilitator Sherry Bauman, in conversation with Psychotherapy.net’s Travis Heath, will provide you with powerful group counseling tools for exploring the all-important themes of identity, belonging, race, and culture that confront many of today’s with children and teens.

Working meaningfully with these young clients requires that clinicians recognize, honor, and elevate their unique language, worldview, and experiences around the critical issues of race, identity, and connection. Effective counseling hinges on empowering them to co-create group experiences that will be relevant, meaningful, and immediately useful in their lives. Developed over the course of his extensive clinical career in school counseling, Steen’s insights into human development, particularly through the early years, skillful and playful style of engagement, and respect for his young clients will help guide you in structuring your own group work for optimal impact.

By watching Steen and Bauman work with young clients in actual groups, discuss their work with Heath, and field questions from a global audience, you will appreciate the importance and power of tapping into group dynamics through the use of challenging conversation and engaging developmentally relevant activities. As a result, you will be able to:

• organize and structure engaging group activities for young clients
• direct group focus to issues such as culture, identity and race
• utilize the group process and dynamics to empower young clients
• honor and capitalize upon the diversity of group members
• integrate psychoeducation and counseling into group activities

You will come away from this powerful learning experience better prepared to both apply these skills with your own young clients, and appreciate how their language, insights, and understanding of identity and belonging evolve.