Guerilla Counselling 101 The Foundation of Developmental Readiness

Many people have heard of Jean Piaget... but unfortunately his theoretical significance in education and counselling gets lost in his ideas being 30+ years old. Although his ideas are a few decades old, the significance on cognitive development is irrefutable. Piaget discovered that children think and reason differently at different periods in their lives. He believed that everyone passed through an invariant sequence of distinct stages. Invariant means that a person cannot skip stages or reorder them. Although every normal child passes through the stages in exactly the same order, there is some variability in the ages at which children attain each stage, particularly when impacted by trauma or biochemical impacts such as drug use. Others have aligned with this concept (Montessori et al's), but have mostly applied these concepts to early childhood and elementary education models. Supported by the newest neuroscience and adolescent brain development research, one of the key foundations to my Guerilla Counselling methods is that when working with adolescence, the same concept applies...you must be aware of the youth developmental readiness to teach and counsel youth, particular those considered at-risk.  Unfortunately, if a youth's readiness for learning or counselling is not taken into consideration damage may be done... you may inadvertently reinforce a child's negative self concepts of their learning capacity and/or mental health. On the contrary, if timed correctly, any learning or counselling will become much more efficiently integrated within a youth's developing identity... and therefore, significantly increase the likelihood of long term success.

Guerilla Counselling 101

Over the years I've worked with many youth considered "at-risk"... of which many of them have been referred to "counselling".  Sending a youth to a counsellor to "get help" is like sending a child to a dentist without anaesthetic.  Youth between the ages of 12 to 19 are developing into their identity, which as part of the natural set of processes, dissonance with others is a part of it.  They are forming who they want to be and need to resist the influence of others... therefore sitting in an office with a "traditional" modelled counsellor is a set up and doomed to failure.   Then my favourite system response... "the youth needs to be ready for counselling to be successful."   It's very rare that any child or youth is "ready" for counselling.  I believe that there are many effective strategies that can accomplish a therapeutic change that are not face to face, but a product of a strong, integrated therapeutic support system.  Over the next year I will be adding posts to not only support my perspective, but give practical examples of it's application.  Thank-you for reading my blog and trusting that it's not meant to be critical of the amazing work that counsellors and therapists are doing, but to show how larger systems, like education, can support and enhance the opportunities for one-on-one work to be much more effective.