My first job after graduate school was at a residential facility for teenagers. I watched these seasoned therapists work their craft on their teen clients, but it wasn't pretty and it wasn’t working. The kids weren't interested in talking about treatment goals for problems they didn't think they had, and when their therapists insisted, the conversation - and the relationship - evaporated.

And I was struggling too. I knew a lot about developmental theory and schools of therapy and assessment, but when it came to helping teenagers, I had no idea what to actually say to them. I was that newbie therapist sitting there, growing more and more uncomfortable with each moment of silence that passed between me and my clients.

So, I searched for a better approach, a more respectful way of expressing my interest in helping that didn’t involve muscling points across the divide or hammering my clients with a barrage of conversation-starter questions that were of no interest to either one of us.

Expanded and refined over the next three decades, my therapeutic approach, Modern Teen Therapy, has proved to be very effective in treating all kinds of disorders with which teens present in therapy. It is relaxed and unaffected, void of jargon and the kinds of "therapy homework" that some therapists prescribe that no teen on this planet has ever completed. Most important is that the teens I see like coming to therapy. Conversations come easily to us, and so does an appetite for healthy change.

For too long adolescent therapy has lumbered along wedded to old tenets and principles that don’t suit the 21st century, post-covid, screen-saturated teenager. Modern Teen Therapy is an approach that departs from conventional therapeutic dogma, incorporating a more active and engaging style on the therapist’s part with an eye toward building robust, unpretentious therapeutic relationships that are compelling to young clients and which allow for transformative conversations to take place. The best therapy, I’ve found, comes out of the conversations you generate with your clients that are informed by your understanding of their personal and interpersonal qualities - not in generic interventions that could apply as well to one kid as another nor in directives that invite resistance and power battles.