By Rich Simon As therapists, many of us practice in two different worlds. In the first, we see polite, well-behaved, articulate clients with solid values. They engage fully in therapy, talk cogently about their problems, listen attentively to our responses, make reasonably good-faith efforts to follow our suggestions, and sooner or later get better. No wonder we genuinely like these people! 
By Rich Simon A thousand years ago, during the palmy days of generous insurance reimbursement, therapists could maintain the illusion that, since therapy was paid for by an unseen hidden hand, clinical practice was somehow untouched by the tacky subject of money. Even the style of therapy reflected this disjunction: 
CE Credits: 4 • Price: $49How do you get through to these kids, much less establish a healing relationship with them? As you’ll discover in this Reading Course, you have to forego the old constraints of traditional therapy to make any impression on these easily-bored kids. Among the suggestions offered, Ron Taffel dissects the pop culture’s “tyranny of cool” and the epidemic of dissociation that keeps today’s kids alienated from their authentic selves, describing a strategy for helping these kids discover their own genuine passions. With Martha Straus, we explore 10 tips for dealing with difficult adolescent girls, and how to understand the mystifying logic of self-injury among them. Matthew Selekman offers a strategy to use when your teen clients give you the silent treatment. Victor Shklyarevsky, Kimball Magoni, and Janet Sasson Edgette discuss a bracing way of responding to teenage anger: countering kids’ intensity with your own--literally, giving it as well as taking it. Finally, Terry Hargrave describes the problem of launching “adult-child stay-at-homes”--kids in their early twenties who cling to a protracted adolescence.
Course Readings
The Divided Self: Inside the World of 21st-Century Teens by Ron Taffel
Cyberspaced: Hanging Out With the In Crowd on MySpace.com by Mary Sykes Wylie
Lost in Electronica: Today’s Media Culture Is Leaving Boys at a Loss For Words by Adam Cox
Hungry for Connection: 10 Ways To Improve Your Therapy with Adolescent Girls by Martha Straus
The Logic of Self-Injury: A Teen Symptom for Our Time by Martha Straus
Hallway Therapy: Systems Thinking Goes to the Classroom by David Seaburn
Pathologizing for Dollars: The Rise of the AD/HD Diagnosis by Lawrence Diller
Mission Possible: The Art of Engaging Tough Teens by Mathew Selekman
Measure for Measure: How to Engage an Angry Teen by Victor Shklyarevsky et al.
Failure to Launch: The Struggle To Leave Home in the 21st Century by Terry Hargrave
Learning Objectives
1. Describe the different “cut-offs” that teens experience.
2. List the risks and rewards of MySpace for today’s teens.
3. Discuss the important differences in working with teenage boys and teenage girls.
4. Discuss how to move therapy with teens from the office to the realities of life at school.
© 2013 Psychotherapy Networker