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Supporting a young person to introduce helpful thinking instead is about helping them
look at whether their thoughts make things seem worse or harder (unhelpful thoughts), or
more manageable and less painful (helpful thoughts).
What are the thoughts that bother the young person the most, are most painful or get in
the way of them doing things? What could be an alternative?
A good way to work out what these might be is to ask a young person about the thoughts
they have when they are feeling really distressed. This could be something like “I can’t
cope. I’m terrible at dealing with situations like this.” A young person’s response to this
is a sense of hopelessness, helplessness and feeling quite incompetent. Helping them
reframe this to something like “I got myself here today and that says that I am coping ok”
can be useful and change their response.
Explore with them different ways of looking
at situations or get them to try and see ways they would support another young person
having the same thought.
This can be very difficult as often their views and beliefs are strongly ingrained however
by shining a light on these thoughts and how they are linked to their experience of trauma
can be a first step towards a young person seeing ways that things could be better.
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