Teen Therapy

Growing Into Yourself: How Can Narrative Arts Therapy Help Teenagers?

Imagine a fifteen-year-old arriving home from school. Her mother asks how her day went. “Fine,” she says, dropping her bag beside the door. A few minutes later, an ordinary question about homework brings tears, anger and a slammed door.

Her mother stands in the kitchen, bewildered. Upstairs, her daughter feels bewildered too. She had wanted to explain what happened at lunchtime, how her friends went quiet when she approached, how uncomfortable she felt in her body, how exhausted she was by trying to appear as though everything was fine. Somehow, none of those words came.

Adolescence can feel like this: growing into a self you are still learning to understand.

The body changes, friendships shift, and questions of belonging become urgent. Who am I? How do other people see me? What matters to me? A teenager may want independence and the comfort of being cared for within the same afternoon.

Inside the brain, change is underway too. Networks involved in planning, weighing consequences and managing responses continue developing through adolescence and into young adulthood. Social experiences become especially significant, while stress can feel difficult to manage. These changes also bring a remarkable capacity for learning, creativity and adaptation.

Narrative Arts Therapy offers a place to explore this growing self through stories, images, movement, writing and making. A young person can begin with whatever feels possible: a colour, a character, a piece of clay, a song, or a story that catches their attention.

Let us imagine that our fifteen-year-old chooses a story about a traveller who has lost her way. Together with the therapist, she notices where the traveller hesitates, who helps her, and what she carries. Then she makes a picture of the landscape: a narrow path, a crowded forest, a small clearing.

“That’s where she can breathe,” she says, pointing to the clearing.

The therapist listens and offers questions., as the teenager continues to make meaning from her drawing by figuring out how she wants to connect it with her own life. An image offers room to approach something difficult at her own pace.

Eventually, she might say, “School feels like the this dark forest sometimes.”

Now there is somewhere to begin.

One useful narrative practice is to give a difficulty a name and explore its influence. A teenager who says, “I’m useless,” might begin to recognise the voice of “Never Good Enough.” They can ask when that voice becomes loud, what feeds it, and when they have managed to act despite it. They can get t o know htat feeling better. They can explore when that feeling is not present - memories of helping a friend, learning a skill or speaking up can become part of a fuller account of who they are.

What might be happening in the brain during this work?

Naming feelings is one possible bridge between emotional experience and reflection. In laboratory research with adults, putting emotional images into words was associated with reduced activity in the amygdala, a region involved in responding to emotionally significant information, and increased activity in a prefrontal region involved in regulation. This offers a clue about how language can help us handle feelings; it does not establish what happens in every teenager’s therapy session.

Making art also provides opportunities to practise attention, explore feelings, make choices and try different responses. Within a supportive therapeutic relationship, these experiences may help a teenager develop ways of understanding and managing distress. Research on art therapy with children and adolescents suggests benefits for some emotional and behavioural difficulties, although findings vary and the mechanisms remain under investigation. Evidence for art therapy broadly should not be treated as proof of specific brain changes caused by Narrative Arts Therapy.

For mothers, this approach invites curiosity. “Would you like me to listen, help you think, or give you some space?” can open a conversation. A teenager’s picture or journal deserves privacy; they choose what to share. Clear boundaries can sit alongside warmth, and a conversation can resume when everyone has had time to settle.

For teenagers, the invitation is equally simple: you can begin before you have all the words. You can explore what hurts, what delights you, what you value and what kind of person you hope to become.

Perhaps, some weeks later, our imagined teenager comes home and says, “Never Good Enough was very loud today.”

Her mother puts down what she is doing.

“Tell me,” she says.

And this time, there is a little more room for the story.