The Teenager Who Does
Not Want To Be Here
What to do when a young person was sent rather than referred, and gives you nothing.
There is probably one young person you thought of when you read that title.
The one who was sent. Or the one who is charming and entirely unreachable. The one who has made you quietly suspect that you are fine with children, fine with adults, and no good with teenagers.
You aren’t. In forty-five minutes we’ll show you what the refusal is actually for.
FREE SESSION - Save your place
Wednesday 9 December 2026 · 7:00pm AEDT · 45 min
Free. The recording comes to you either way.
Can’t make the time? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.
We don’t pathologise a two-year-old for saying no. We call it individuation and reassure the parents. We don’t pathologise a fifteen-year-old for arguing about a curfew. We call it separation and say it’s on track.
And then, the moment the same refusal is pointed at us, we quietly reclassify it. It stops being development and becomes a trait: unmotivated, oppositional, not ready.
Adolescence is the developmental business of deciding for yourself. We then put a young person in a room they didn’t choose, with an adult they didn’t pick, about a problem someone else named, and we’re surprised when they exercise the one decision available to them.
That isn’t a resistant teenager. It’s a young person doing exactly what their age asks of them, in the one place we’d rather they didn’t. Read properly, the refusal tells you where to start.
Four young people. One word.
We open with four young people who are all described with the same word in the referral notes. That word is wrong about every one of them, because each refusal is doing a different job.
Protecting autonomy
In a room they didn’t choose, saying no is the one decision still theirs to make.
Protecting identity
Being someone who needs a psychologist doesn’t fit who they’re working hard to become.
Managing genuine risk
Silence that keeps something unsafe from being said, or from going anywhere once it is.
Protecting belonging
Engaging with you would cost them something with the people they actually answer to.
All four file notes say the same thing.
“Unmotivated.”
Except “unmotivated” is not a formulation. It’s what we write when we don’t have one. Each of those four needs a different response, and telling them apart takes three moves, no confrontation and no new training.
What you’ll leave with
Not a topic overview. A working method you can use in your next session.
Who this is for
This will suit you if…
- You work with adolescents as a psychologist, counsellor, social worker, mental health OT or school psychologist.
- You have a young person on your books right now who gives you nothing, and you’ve started to wonder whether that’s about you.
- You see young people who were sent by a school, a parent or a court rather than coming of their own accord.
- You’d rather understand a method than be handed a worksheet.
- You’re at any stage, but it’s written for clinicians who are already competent and have one case that makes them doubt it.
It isn’t
- An introduction to adolescent development for clinicians new to the population.
- Risk assessment training. Risk and self-harm are discussed at the level of principle only.
- A sales presentation with a lesson attached. The teaching is the whole forty-five minutes.
Two supervisors, thinking out loud
You’ll hear from both of us throughout and if we disagree in front of you, that’s not a mishap. It’s how we actually work.
Dr Anna Cohen
Area of Practice Endorsement in Clinical Psychology and board-approved clinical supervisor, with three decades of clinical practice with children and families, and author of five parenting books. Co-founder of Kids & Co Clinical Psychology, Heads & Tails Psychology and Counselling, and the Clinical Psychology Resource Centre.
Isabel Fraser
Board-approved clinical supervisor and co-founder of the Clinical Psychology Resource Centre, where she co-designs and co-presents the lectures, masterclasses and certification pathway. Much of her working week is spent supervising clinicians who work with children, adolescents and families - which means she sees, over and over, the cases that leave capable people stuck.
There’s no catch worth warning you about.
It’s free, and the teaching is the whole forty-five minutes. Nothing is held back for a paid version. We’ll mention what else we run at the end, once, and you’re welcome to ignore it.
Information isn’t scarce any more. Everything we teach has been written down somewhere, and you could go and find most of it this evening if you had a spare six months. What’s scarce is having somebody experienced look at your case and tell you where the young person is stuck. So we give the information away because the information was never the valuable part.
Save your place
Wednesday 9 December 2026 · 7:00pm AEDT · 45 minutes
Free. Two minutes. The recording comes to you either way.
Save my place - it’s freeYou’ll also start receiving The Monthly Vignette: one de-identified case a month, free, unsubscribe in one click.
Good to know
Yes, with no payment details taken at any point. We run it because we’d rather you saw how we teach than took our word for it.
Yes. Everyone who registers gets the recording and the slides the morning after, whether they attend or not. We chose 7pm so you don’t have to give up a client hour for it, in a December that is already full.
No certificate is issued and no CPD hours are claimed for this free session. Requirements differ between professions, so please confirm anything you intend to log with your own registration body or association.
Yes. The questions box is open from the start and we set aside time at the end. We’d rather answer two questions properly than six badly, so bring the one you’re most stuck on.
At the level of principle only. Every young person we describe is a de-identified composite. Risk, safety planning and the disclosure that has to go somewhere are covered properly in the full-length Integrative Adolescent Therapy session.
You’ll get the session details and the recording, and The Monthly Vignette, which is one de-identified case a month. One click unsubscribes you from everything. We don’t share your details with anyone.
No. It assumes you work with adolescents but not that you’ve trained in any particular modality, and one of the questions we always answer is specifically for early-career clinicians who find this a lot to take in at once.
