Teenage Toolbox
Addressing:
Trauma/ Emotional Dysregulation/ Behaviour Disorders/ ADHD/ Anxiety/ Depression/ Self-harm Addiction/ Suicidation
Searching for mental health support for a teenager or a young adult can be a frightening place to be.
Not only do we feel conflicted watching a child suffer, but getting the right help can be equally frustrating. Often what we witness in the system doesn't resonate with what we intuitively feel is right!
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As mental health services are stretched to the limit and with waitlists at capacity, parents are becoming increasingly discouraged by an ever-increasing focus on the pathologising of their child's behaviour, and the medicating of their symptoms.
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They find little support is available that offers a more holistic response.
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We've been there - We understand!​
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With over 35 years of behaviour experience working in prisons, schools, and private practice, Sue O'Callaghan saw a desperate need to provide a more integrated and trauma-informed therapeutic service for both parents and teenagers.
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Founding Teenage Toolbox in 2013, Sue (mum of four) believes our young people are having to navigate basic survival through excessive stress and trauma, while also having to adapt to a rapidly changing, uncertain, and disconnected world. As a consequence, their nervous symptoms have become progressively dysregulated and parents are witnessing increased fear, anxiety, depression, attention deficit, dissociation, disordered eating, self-harm, insomnia, dysregulated emotions, and addiction.
Teenage Toolbox is unique in that we see these behaviours not as the problem, but as an adaptive survival response.
Our aim is not to address your child's disordered thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in isolation but to discover the root of them through a trauma-informed lens. Instead of asking, What’s wrong with your child? We gently inquire: What’s happened to your child?
Once we understand what biopsychosocial influences are dysregulating your child's nervous system, we are able to not only provide strategies for them to learn self-regulating techniques but also introduce client-centred somatic therapies that promote long-term sustainable mental health and healing.
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Over the past eleven years, Teenage Toolbox has helped thousands of teenagers through a personal struggle with mental health. We have also delivered strategies and tools for parents battling through a minefield of confusion, overwhelm, and conflict, and trained teachers in schools to become trauma-informed.
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As a result, we have the depth of experience and measured results to offer New Zealanders (and families worldwide) a unique facility that you won’t find elsewhere.
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Our most recent trauma-informed programme offers schools that have excluded or stood down students the opportunity to send them to us on a restorative six-session workshop.
Publications by Sue O'Callaghan
