GTILA Presents: How to Feed and Water the Fertile Void of Adolescence

Topic: How to Feed and Water the Fertile Void of Adolescence: Working with Ages 12-24

Format: This online seminar combines presentation, first-hand creative projective experience, small group sharing, and demonstration.

Description: Often we think adulthood begins when someone turns 18 or 19, attends university, joins the military, or casts their first vote in a national election. Ever increasing neuroscience data shows the "adolescent" brain has a much longer life — approximately ages 12-24.

Therapists who work with adolescents, young adults, and/or parents can greatly benefit from a deeper understanding about "adolescence" and the important role resistance plays for successful launching into adulthood.

During this seminar we'll focus on work and play with young people from the lens of the Oaklander Model and Gestalt Therapy. In addition to the role of resistance, we'll explore Contact, Sense of Self, Emotional Identification and Expression, and how to provide much needed External Support. We'll also discuss how to help when parents' "unfinished business" from their adolescence gets activated, and they may struggle with healthy and consistent limits and boundaries, I-Thou relating, active listening, and providing solid and consistent external support that truly respects and applauds their adolescent's evolving process.

Therapy can support parents with the grief of saying good-bye to children, the worry and frustration of emotionally and practically supporting 12-24 year-olds, and eventually welcoming adult-to-adult relationships with grown children.

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GTILA is a non-profit membership organization based in Los Angeles.

Our mission is to be a gathering space for Gestalt therapists, trainees and the Gestalt curious from the Los Angeles area, the United States and internationally. By offering training scholarships, affordable/accessible educational and experimental salons, workshops, newsletters and a therapist directory, we exist to provide an inclusive home for Gestalt therapists while promoting the advancement of contemporary, relational Gestalt therapy. We embrace and respect differences recognizing that our theory and practice must be responsive to the rapidly changing social and demographic field conditions to remain vital, ethical, and relevant.

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About the presenter:
Lynn Stadler, MA, MFT, is a Gestalt psychotherapist and licensed Marriage Family Therapist working in private practice with children, adolescents, adults, and families. She received her Master of Arts (MA) in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University, where she is now adjunct faculty, teaching “Psychotherapy with Children & Adolescents” in Santa Barbara, California. She is a graduate of the Santa Barbara Gestalt Training Center and completed intensive training with the Violet Oaklander Institute.

Lynn is a founding member and current board member of the Violet Solomon Oaklander Foundation (VSOF). She provides workshops, seminars, and training for social service agencies, universities, and other teaching organizations worldwide—online and in-person—including most recently for participants in the Czech Republic, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia, and the USA. Lynn is also a member of the International Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy (IAAGT) and the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists.

License #MFC35168