Avoiding Power Struggles with Teenagers in Individual and Family Therapy

Avoiding Power Struggles with Teenagers in Individual and Family Therapy

Friday, October 10, 2025

Registration 8:30am Program 9am to 12pm

Presented By: Janet Sasson Edgette, Psy.D., M.P.H.

Location: Online Workshop

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

***Deadline to register is October 8, 2025 at 9am***

3 CE Credits

Act 48 Available

Adolescents who don’t want therapy have no bones about showing it. Thus, the conundrum: How do you provide services to teenagers who think they don’t need them or simply don’t want them?

Therapists trying too hard to get teenagers to open up often find the conversation bogged down by power struggles and ‘going-nowhere’ conversations. This workshop teaches participants to cultivate conversations that don’t “sound” like therapy but are effective in bringing about change.

This approach emphasizes the important role of therapist credibility in therapy, as well as the therapist’s ability to compassionately yet unapologetically hold kids accountable for their choices. As a result, one’s influence comes not out of exhausting efforts to “convince,” but from the therapist’s person, perspective, wisdom, frank advice, and respect for the teen.

Outline of workshop:

• Adolescent therapy is more than ready for an update
• Issues of control and respect when working with reluctant adolescents
• Mistakes therapist often and unwittingly make when trying to engage teen clients, and what to do instead
• Generating conversations that matter
• Understanding how the therapy is in the conversation you are having with your teen client, not something separate from it.
• The paradox of avoiding conflict/disagreement with teen clients and how doing so compromises therapist credibility
• The important role of accountability in teen therapy, as a means of ascribing intention, not to necessarily challenge the teen
• Integrating individual therapy with family therapy
• Being on everyone’s side at once in family therapy

Objectives:

1. Apply two new skills for dealing with adolescents who threaten to shut down the therapy by acting up in session or refusing to talk.
2. Identify questions commonly asked of teens in therapy that often decrease therapists’ chances of building productive conversation.
3. Utilize specific strategies discussed to mobilize overwhelmed parents who, when trying to set limits, are intimidated by their teen’s implied or real threats to “make things worse.”
4. Apply two strategies effective in circumventing fractures in rapport and keeping a therapeutic conversation moving forward.

Janet Sasson Edgette, Psy.D., M.P.H. is a psychologist, author, workshop leader, and speaker, working with teenagers and consulting to their parents for over thirty-five years in her Philadelphia-based private practice. She is the author of seven books, her most recent one being Therapeutic Conversations with Adolescents: Helping Teens in Therapy Thrive in an Ultra-Competitive and Screen-Saturated World. Others include Adolescent Therapy That Really Works: Helping Kids Who Never Asked for Help in the First Place, Stop Negotiating With Your Teen: Strategies for Parenting Your Angry, Manipulative, Moody or Depressed Adolescent, and The Last Boys Picked: Helping Boys Who Don’t Play Sports Survive Bullies and Boyhood.

For much of her career, Janet has focused on offering therapy services to young people that they actually value, respect, and want to participate in, eliminating the miserable and degrading tug of war and other power struggles many clinicians endure when working with this population. She has been teaching her approach, Modern Teen Therapy for more than three decades to audiences through the US and Canada as well as to other teen therapists in her online coaching/mentorship program.

Janet received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Hahnemann University in Philadelphia, PA and a master’s in public health from the University of Oklahoma. She is a native New Yorker, the mother of three young men, an avid equestrian (show jumping), and a lover of all dogs, especially pit bulls and Bullmastiffs.

PSCP: The Psychology Network is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. PSCP: The Psychology network maintains responsibility for this program and its content.