Brief Therapy with Adolescents

In ""Brief Therapy With Adolescents"", John Littrell, EdD, demonstrates his approach to working with teenage clients. This approach seeks to shorten the length of therapy by looking at the client's patterns of behavior and helping to change the patterns that do not fit the client's goals. In this session, Dr. Littrell works with a 17-year-old boy who is having problems with grades and getting into trouble in school. Dr. Littrell helps the client increase his sense of agency and see that he has more choices than he is currently aware of, which helps the client develop a concrete set of goals for change. Brief counseling has nine defining characteristics (Littrell & Zinck, 2004). These are not mutually exclusive from characteristics of other counseling approaches, but taken together they give brief counseling its uniqueness. The nine characteristics are: relationship-based; humor-eliciting; time-limited; solution-focused; action-based; socially interactive; detail-oriented; developmentally attentive; and, culturally responsive.