Abstract
For most people, adolescence is not a tumultuous time but some individuals experience difficulties which may bring them to counseling. Being a resource to adolescents is an ethical response by counselors. However, this response can also trap counselors in viewing the counseling process as a search for causes of adolescents’ behavior in order to determine how to protect them. Such searches can result in viewing adolescents as passive recipients of causal forces instead of goal-directed actors participating in their own development. This chapter, using contextual action theory as a guide, helps orient the initiation of counseling with adolescent clients through the use of two central questions: “What is this adolescent doing?” and “Who is involved and what are they doing together?” These questions guide consideration of how adolescents make meaning of their lives, alone and jointly with others. Additionally, the presentation of two case examples is used to illustrate how incongruent adolescent projects may be understood and managed from the perspective of contextual action theory.
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Marshall, S., Nelson, M., Goessling, K., Chipman, J., Charles, G. (2015). Counseling Adolescents from an Action Theory Perspective. In: Young, R., Domene, J., Valach, L. (eds) Counseling and Action. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0773-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0773-1_11
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