For social workers, working with young people is something they enjoy doing. A youth worker often works with young people between the ages of 10 and 22. There are several ways this can be done. The most important thing a youth worker does is to support vulnerable youth in their development so that they have the opportunity to become an engaged, active and independent adult.
A youth worker is like a resource for all kinds of agencies. You interact with parents, schools, youth aid, neighborhood teams, sports clubs, mental health, HALT office, addiction services, labor market and the police. They can indicate where there are problems with certain young people. After which the youth worker can address the youth in their own language and inspire them to develop themselves[1].
In this way, young people can be helped to find a positive way to spend their free time and build a good social circle.
In addition, youth workers can serve as role models and inspire young people to find future prospects.
You have all kinds of youth workers. For example, you can work in community centers and organize events there so that young people have something to do. There you can connect with young people to inspire them to make the best of their lives. Those events can include performances, but also debates. A community center can also offer homework help.
Then you also have youth workers who actually seek out problem youth on the streets to connect with them and guide the youth to pathways for help, education or even finding work[2].
The goal is often to initiate a change process. So that a young person now walking with his soul under his arm can choose a direction in life and then make the most of it.
Youth worker competencies
As a youth worker, you actually take on quite a responsibility , but this doesn't mean you have to be university-educated. Depending on the young people you work with, a social mbo or college education may be enough to start with.
In addition, it is helpful if you can empathize with young people and connect with them communicatively. You speak the language of youth.
You can make the connection and are therefore socially minded.
At the same time, you are strong enough to also set boundaries with young people when you see them making unwise choices.
You have an understanding about how society works and know which agencies and/or organizations to turn to in order to help young people.
There are different levels at which a youth worker can get started.
The youth worker as coach
A youth worker may have a variety of duties depending on where they do the work. In any case, there is often a coaching role toward the youth and sometimes toward the parents who may need help in raising their adolescent or young adult.
This is also the part where knowledge of hypnosis can enhance the work for youth workers.
In fact, with knowledge of hypnosis, you can teach young people how to control their emotions. Especially with problems such as hot temper, acting impulsively and making thoughtless decisions, this knowledge can help young people tremendously.
In the process, the hypnotic state has been used for centuries, and still is, in some cultures in rituals and ceremonies. Those rituals, for example, mark the transformation from boy to man. In that sense, it is actually already a proven technique that can help young people become adults.
Child hypnosis, the therapeutic form of hypnosis for children and adolescents, actually began in 1891 with the book "Suggestion in Infancy," so it is not a technique that is just around the corner. Workshops in child hypnosis have also been taught by child psychology experts for more than 50 years now[3].
So what is hypnosis?
Now, as a youth worker, you may wonder what hypnosis is. It is another state of consciousness. You can even tell young people who use (soft) drugs that with hypnosis they don't even need more drugs to reach another state 😉 .
In any case, it is a state in which a person is fully focused and feels well connected to themselves. That state ensures that new information is absorbed well. Suggestions you give someone who is in hypnosis cause psychological and neurological functions to be changed (source 3).
These changes can even be seen with medical equipment, such as an fMRI.
Changes in the brain and psychology occur because people respond more strongly to suggestions given to them during hypnosis than when they are not in hypnosis. Those suggestions and the response to those suggestions allow people to have new ideas, associations, reinforcements, changes and re-approaches about how they view their lives, or problems they experience in life.
As a result, the response to smart suggestions can completely transform thinking about certain problems (source 3).
What can hypnosis do for young people?
Young people can sometimes get completely stuck in a particular train of thought. With hypnosis, you can shift the attention that is completely focused on a particular issue or problem in the stuck thought to something else, breaking the thought pattern.
In addition, reflexes can be changed and hypnosis can help to better postpone rewards. For example, adolescents may use substances to feel good "quickly," while doing something they can be proud of can also create this good feeling. However, that often takes a little longer (at least a workout, or a meditation) than taking a drug.
Being able to defer rewards helps young people make wiser choices.
In addition, hypnotherapy or hypnocoaching helps young people gain greater skills in problem solving, self-regulating, changing their thoughts, altering their emotions, changing their behavior and responding differently to certain stimuli (source 3).
Sometimes young people can also be incredibly pessimistic, but with hypnosis you can actually cause them to have some more positive expectations about life (source 3). In the process, they can also gain the belief that as long as the body and mind work together, it will lead to desired results.
Examples of problems young people have been helped with
Even with "simpler" problems, such as asthma , self-hypnosis can help manage symptoms. It has already helped an 11-year-old boy. Young people often do not understand "why" it works, but they do understand that it works (source 3).
In another case of a young man (10 years old) who suffered from anger in which he would stomp and slam doors, he was helped with hypnocoaching. When he expressed that he did not like being angry, it was quite an eye-opener for him to hear that it is okay to be angry, but that how you deal with it is important. It's okay to be angry, but it's not okay to then just start wrecking things.
Then they did an exercise to trace memories on which the boy was angry but did not react angrily. This reinforced the idea that he did manage his anger in a normal way, and could return himself to a more normal state after anger was triggered.
In addition, the boy was also restored to his strength by focusing precisely on things he was good at. For example, he was good at playing soccer and a fast learner.
They also worked with a visualization to get rid of anger.
Over time, the "real" problem also emerged, and that was bedwetting. Through clever suggestions about brain-bladder communication and what he could say to his brain and bladder before bedtime, bedwetting had become a much smaller problem.
Hypnosis was also used with a young woman (15 years old) who was suffering from a headache to think less about how bad the headache was, and instead shift attention to positive expectations of self-healing. It also came up that the headache was a way to connect with other people, which of course can be done in nicer ways. So she was given alternatives for that as well.
In the process, she learned self-hypnosis techniques, from her favorite place, for example, to relax properly. This helped a lot against headaches (source 3).
Learn Hypnosis
So, as a youth worker, hypnosis can be used for a variety of problems to help youth change their minds, if they currently have a train of thought that is not helping them at all.
Due to waiting times in healthcare, a youth worker with knowledge of hypnosis can already give young people with mental health problems a start to solve those problems.
Want to learn more about hypnosis and how to use it to provide hypnotherapy or hypnocoaching? Then come to the free online master class.
Or register directly for one of our training courses.
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