Unlike mine and my parents younger years, today we have much more efficient therapies available for people in need of emotional guidance and coaching and we really are at a new era of understanding ourselves on a deeper level, both consciously and unconsciously.

With a lot of teenagers today some of their most challenging goals can be personal identity, emotional issues, confidence, acceptance, social skills etc and when one or more of these are out of place or lacking in some way its causes a chain of events that diminishes their positive attitudes and increases negative emotions and can spiral out of control if not dealt with properly. As with all humans it is our first few years in life that really conditions the way we will think, behave and act for the rest of our lives. For example:

If a child is born into an intelligent environment then it is generally the case that that child will grow to be intelligent. Additionally, in other cases If a child is born into a less intelligent environment then that child is likely to grow up learning the limitations, any limiting beliefs and negative thinking associated to their upbringing and be ‘programmed' from an early age to having a more limited blueprint as it were for the rest off their lives.

The same goes with emotions and quality of thinking and its how we learn to deal with these emotions and control our thinking that make us who we are. The philosophies in life we learn through our parents and friends are what really create and improve our attitudes right from birth to adulthood.

A famous poem by Dorothy Nolte a writer and family counsellor was written for a US weekly family column in 1954 and was widely circulated to millions of new parents to inspire parenting values, See the poem below:

If a child is born into a hostile family, then that child will learn aggression. If a child lives with ridicule they will learn to be shy, if a child lives with encouragement they will learn to be confident. So whatever family or situation we are born into we learn the life tricks and life traits of that environment and it's these roots that really set the precedence of our existence.

There are three key stages in our growing up from birth to teen which are as follows:

0-7 Imprint Years
7-14 Modelling Years
14-21 Socialising Years

Our imprint years are by far the most important, this is where we learn a lot of key things for the first time (roots), such as our emotions, our language, our responses and all of our habits both good and bad are formed here and all of which will have a root to the very first experience. These experiences whether they are good or bad will develop our key values in life in relation to these good or bad emotions and cause new directions in behaviour to either seek or avoid such experiences again both consciously or unconsciously. This is what creates our personalities, characters, opinions, beliefs, values etc.

Our emotional experiences create our values and our values are what drive us from day to day regardless of our age, but when we're growing up and becoming teenagers our emotions are on a crash course period of extensive change! So much effects our emotions intensively at that age like Hormones, Education, Sexual Awareness, Social Acceptance, Parents and Siblings, Friends, Bullying, Sport just to name a few.

Our teenage years can be tough with so many new and changing dynamics and to maintain and improve our attitudes at this age it is important we received the right foundations from an early age to build on and cope with what teenage life throws at us. That said even the most challenged or troubled upbringing is not a lost cause. Any negative or emotional events in our past have roots and these roots have connections to our current behaviours both consciously and unconsciously and its whether these root events have been processed correctly to whether we have un-resolved issues arise from time to time.

With the right coaching/therapy we can pull out these roots, reprogram our thinking to behave differently or more appropriately in stressful situations. we can unlink these root causes to negatives in our past and literally let go of all the emotional baggage we may be holding onto. With today’s treatments available this can be done with almost immediate effect.

Treatments at Child Therapy London such as NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), TLT (Time Line Therapy) & EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) are such treatments and are very effective at achieving quick results and ones that I practice regularly with all my clients.

At Child Therapy London I have seen addictions, phobias, extensive bad habits, emotional trauma the list goes on literally disappear in matter of minutes through the processes of NLP, TLT & EFT. In addition building confidence, self esteem, personal goals and all desired ecological behaviours are again installed in the matter of minutes through easy to learn processes from NLP, TLT & EFT.

For example, in NLP we have a process called anchoring which is excellent for hard wiring positive emotions to a specific unique ritual that quite literally fires of that emotion at the ease of touching a button. This process is great for creating states within ourselves when needed, like the state of confidence for a presentation or the state of motivation to study for a forthcoming exam.

We can also change hard-wired old beliefs that maybe holding us back in life from achievement in a matter of minutes through the process of Submodalities. Here we examine the fine details in our perception of such beliefs or things we have seen and literally adjust how they make us feel about them to become a more fulfilling positive feeling.

In TLT we use our past memories in the form of a ‘Time Line' to go back in time in our minds to before specific dramatic events and their roots to reset our brains emotional status, almost as the way we was emotionally before these events occurred. Again this is done with very fast results and I find these processes some of the most swift in therapeutic treatments I have seen.

As in all cases of change this is to be done unconsciously and it’s the study of and change work of the unconscious mind in each individual that will create the biggest shift in behaviour.

Del Walsh