Books
Books
This is a series of surprising and candid conversations held between veteran counsellor Nick Luxmoore and professionals working with young people. Based entirely on stories from the author's experience of supervising frontline professionals, it looks at how to approach young people, the stumbling blocks faced on both sides, and offers invaluable guidance to anyone working with teenagers. Luxmoore posits ways forward for practitioners which are adaptive and allow them to respond personally, practically and theoretically. From suicide to disordered eating, watching pornography to love in therapeutic relationships, Nick Luxmoore covers a range of problems and phenomena encountered by counsellors, teachers, school social workers and youth workers.
Counsellors working with young people often find it can feel like messy, complex work. What helps when counsellors themselves are stuck? This book recalls those moments when supervision sessions have been crucial to puzzling out the complexities of counselling young people.
The assorted supervision stories in this book explore the important issues that counsellors working with young people face, and look at how supervision can help them overcome these issues. Thoughtful and engaging, each story is a snapshot from a counsellor's career. They address questions such as 'What gets talked about?', 'What issues recur with young people and how are they addressed in supervision?' and 'What helps counsellors to move on when they're stuck?'
Ellis's mother is angry because he's been watching porn. Sheron says she hates her body. Mitchell's upset because Jack doesn't want to have sex with him...
Sex affects everything. It may not be the single most important thing in a young person's life, but it's always important and a crucial means by which young people try to understand themselves, whether they're in sexual relationships, on the brink of sexual relationships or watching from afar. Yet sex and sexuality are subjects that many adults (including parents, counsellors, teachers and other professionals) are wary of talking about with young people.
This book is about helping young people feel less anxious about sex and sexuality. It's also about helping professionals feel more confident. Weaving case material with theory and discussion, Nick Luxmoore describes vividly the dilemmas faced by so many young people and suggests ways of supporting them effectively at such a crucial and sensitive time in their lives.
How do you listen effectively when you're already late for a meeting? How do you respond to a girl who's so angry that she's threatening to hit someone? Or to a boy who feels like giving up altogether? How do you listen, not only to students, but also to parents and to colleagues?
Whatever your role in school, listening will be at the heart of what you do. Your school will be measured, in part, by the quality of its daily relationships and those relationships will depend on how confidently people are able to listen to each other. This book answers all the difficult questions about how to listen, what to say, confidentiality and more. Helping with particular issues such as bullying, relationship difficulties, depression and self-harm is also covered.
What is it like to work as a counsellor in schools? What relationship might a counsellor have with staff? How can a counsellor become a positive, integral part of school life?
In this book, Nick Luxmoore shows how school counsellors can make a positive difference to the whole life of the school. Rather than being a service hidden behind closed doors, he shows how to take a whole-school approach to counselling, making it a normal part of school life. The book demonstrates how staff as well as students can benefit from counselling, and how professional boundaries and relationships can be maintained. Key therapeutic aims and how to develop the service are also covered.
A taboo subject in today's society, death is something that we do not like to talk about and especially do not like young people talking about. Yet, without opportunities to talk, young people's anxieties about death can manifest themselves in all sorts of self-destructive and socially-destructive ways. In this book, Nick Luxmoore explores the problems that arise when death is not openly discussed with young people and offers invaluable advice about how best to allay concerns without having to pretend that there are easy answers. He covers all of the key issues from the physicality of death to the fear of not existing to the way young people's morality develops and he provides expert insight into the impact these subjects have on young people's behaviour.
This book presents a wealth of information for professionals, parents and others working with young people, providing the skills needed to ask young people the difficult question, "Do you think much about death?", and to support them as they begin their answer.
Again and again, young people return to the question, "Am I the same as other people or am I different?" It's a difficult question to answer. Everyone knows that they're the same as other people in lots of ways yet they suspect that they might also be different. Or they want to be different... Or they accuse other people of being different... Or they get beaten up for being different...
This book is about young people trying to find answers, or at least trying to live more comfortably with the question. Using dozens of recognisable vignettes, Luxmoore explores young people's anxieties about ordinariness and extraordinariness, anxieties that affect everything: their behaviour, choices, relationships, happiness. He describes ways of working supportively and imaginatively with young people so that they can begin to find a better balance, enjoying their lives and achieving all sorts of things without losing sight of the fact that - underneath everything and like everyone else - they're ordinary, and there's nothing wrong with that.
This book is about boyfriends and girlfriends - getting them, keeping them and moving on from them. Young people put enormous energy into these processes: they worry, they hope, they conspire and they cry because, in a sense, having a boyfriend or girlfriend is about much more than just having a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Using dozens of recognisable vignettes, Luxmoore movingly describes his work with young people. In particular, he explores the dramatic conflict between young people's loving and hating as they move from the intimacy of relationships with parents to relationships with boyfriends and girlfriends, frantically negotiating sex and sexuality, the meaning of love, faithfulness and unfaithfulness and many other issues vital to the adults these young people will become.
The book will be essential reading for professionals and parents struggling with the ferocity of young people's feelings where 'I love you!' and 'I hate you!' are never far apart.
We use the word all the time, but what exactly is self-esteem, and how do young people develop it? Feeling Like Crap explores how a young person's self is constructed, and what might really help that self to feel more valued and confident. Through accounts of his individual and group work with young people, Nick Luxmoore demonstrates how listening to, engaging with and being respectful of young people can provide the support they need to help them repair their sense of self and offer them new possibilities and directions in life.
When Grace was three, her parents split up and she went to live with her father while her sister stayed with their mother. Allie has slipped behind with her school work since falling out with her best friend, and any positive feelings about himself that Conor may have dared to develop have been beaten out of him by his father.
Understanding the roots of anger and encouraging appropriate and acceptable ways of expressing this are essential skills for anyone working with young people. Working with Anger and Young People warns against 'quick fix' solutions to dealing with anger, and draws on the author's experiences of youth counselling and training workshops to propose helpful interventions for addressing anger effectively and moving on from it.
From attachment anxieties and feelings of powerlessness, to frustration at difficult family relations, Nick Luxmoore considers the common reasons for young people's anger during this difficult stage of their development. Through accounts of his work with a range of young people, he offers tried-and-tested exercises and talking points to help work through common counterproductive responses to anger such as antisocial behaviour and physical or verbal violence. Crucially, he also recognises the needs of those working with these young people with anger problems and provides advice on working safely, maintaining control and achieving job satisfaction.
This book is about boyfriends and girlfriends - getting them, keeping them and moving on from them. Young people put enormous energy into these processes: they worry, they hope, they conspire and they cry because, in a sense, having a boyfriend or girlfriend is about much more than just having a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Using dozens of recognisable vignettes, Luxmoore movingly describes his work with young people. In particular, he explores the dramatic conflict between young people's loving and hating as they move from the intimacy of relationships with parents to relationships with boyfriends and girlfriends, frantically negotiating sex and sexuality, the meaning of love, faithfulness and unfaithfulness and many other issues vital to the adults these young people will become.
