1.50 CE Credits Available
Counseling Adolescents: Exploring Intersections of Race and Sexuality
by Sam Steen
How can you work effectively with a young client who is no longer a child but not yet a teenager, especially when complex issues of sexuality and race arise? Learn how to build effective therapeutic alliances with your adolescent clients that will create a safe space for exploration, insight, and growth.
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When working with adolescent clients, clinicians may be tempted to utilize unnecessarily complex adult-oriented interventions. Watch child expert Sam Steen quickly and effectively engage 12-year old Kennedie by sensitively adapting core client-centered methods to her developmental level. Steen masterfully draws on this pre-teen’s strengths and resources to help her address sensitive issues related to her sexual and racial identities. Steen’s relaxed and natural interactional style will help you become more proactive, intentional, and brave when working with these clients.

Young clients are astute to when adults— therapists included—are not being genuine and are talking down to, or over them. Watching Steen’s clinical sessions and the accompanying conversations with Psychotherapy.net founder Victor Yalom will improve your ability to both engage with and empower clients at this highly challenging stage of development. You’ll learn how to create a safe space for them to address their deepest concerns so that you can better help them navigate the rapidly changing landscape of adolescence.
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Like many of our clients on the cusp of adolescence, Kennedie wrestles with challenges both great and small, some of which she has not yet verbalized to her parents and friends. By watching this video, you will learn how to supportively draw out your pre-teen clients by effectively utilizing a strengths-based approach capitalizing on authenticity, self-disclosure, psychoeducation, open-ended questions, and focusing on the here-and-now of the therapeutic relationship. As you will see, this approach helps Kennedie, as it will your own clients who may be struggling to:
  • adapt to the new post-COVID “normal” of face-to-face education after having been isolated at home and limited to interacting with peers via computer
  • verbalize and make sense of their evolving sexual orientation and gender identity in order to enter into the oftentimes confusing and fast-moving social arena
  • connect with and communicate openly with their parents around sensitive personal topics
  • reconcile external messages and pressures around racial identity with their own sense of what it means to have an integrated sense of their own raciality
  • balance academic with recreational interests in order to live in the fullest way possible
  • make sense of how their own developing beliefs converge or diverge from those of their parents and other important people in their lives

Length of video: 1:29:44

English subtitles available

Group ISBN-10 #: 1-60124-599-8

Group ISBN-13 #: 978-1-60124-599-1


Dr. Sam Steen, an Associate Professor and licensed Professional School Counselor, specializes in group work and cultivating Black students’ academic identity development. Dr. Steen was a school counselor for 10 years and these practitioner experiences shape his research agenda, approach to teaching, and service. Dr. Steen is a Fellow for the Association for Specialists in Group Work, a division of the American Counseling Association. Recently, Dr. Steen received the Al Dye Research Award and the Professional Advancement Award both from ASGW recognizing his outstanding efforts advancing the field of group work though research and development of a new and innovative strategies for schools, families, and marginalized communities.

CE credits: 1.5

Learning Objectives:

  • describe techniques for building and maintaining rapport with pre-teen clients
  • discuss how to adapt your treatment of pre-teens to their developmental level
  • be able to prepare a treatment plan for addressing intersectional issues with pre-teens

Bibliography available upon request

This course is offered for ASWB ACE credit for social workers. See complete list of CE approvals here

© 2022

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