Adolescent Geography

Working day in and day out with adolescents is hard. I’d probably argue it’s one of the hardest jobs in the world. The work can be unpredictable, emotionally demanding, and sometimes heartbreakingly slow. When I’m feeling out of touch or beginning to wonder if I’m getting anywhere at all, I remind myself that the mind is a beautiful thing, multilayered, shifting, more complex than we can ever fully grasp.

When I need inspiration, I often return to the writings of Donald Meltzer. He spoke about an internal geography of the mind, an image of inner rooms, passages, and landscapes where feelings and thoughts move, collide, and hide. That idea has kept me curious and alive even when I’ve felt lost in the daily work. It reminds me that every young person carries their own landscape inside them, whether they can describe it or not.

To explore how this idea plays out in real clinical life, I spoke with several child and adolescent psychotherapists working across different services. They prefer to remain anonymous, but they were generous enough to share their thoughts about how Meltzer’s notion of internal geography finds its way into their work, especially when the adolescent in front of them is anything but abstract or dreamy. What follows are their reflections, drawn from ordinary therapy rooms and supervision conversations: moments of struggle, small discoveries, and the quiet artistry of trying to map the inner world of a young person who doesn’t yet know they have one.

Psychotherapist 1

I keep coming back to Meltzer’s idea of internal geography. It sounds poetic when you read it, but in the room it can feel heavy and awkward. Meltzer talked about the inner house, the corridors of the mind, the landscapes of psychic life. Beautiful words, but when you’re sitting with a fifteen year old who has just finished PE and says “I dunno, it’s fine,” you can feel miles away from that poetry.

The truth is that most adolescents live in a very concrete world. They are half in and half out of the capacity for symbolisation. Some days they can dream, other days everything has to be literal. So if we start talking about rooms and houses, they look at us as if we’ve lost it. I don’t think we should try to sell them the theory. We should go looking for their own language for space.

Often they give it to us without knowing. They say “I shut off,” or “I went blank,” or “I went in my room and didn’t want to come out.” That is geography. They are already describing internal movement, just in their dialect. Our job is to listen for it and gently translate.

When I hear “I shut off,” I might say “sounds like you closed a door inside for a bit.” Not to sound clever, but to let the idea of inside and outside come alive. It plants the seed that there are different parts of mind that can connect or disconnect. I think Meltzer would have approved of that kind of quiet translation.

Psychotherapist 2

I use a lot of movement and play. Not as art therapy, just as another language. Sometimes I hand them a few stones or figures and say “show me what today feels like.” They don’t have to talk. They place the pieces and suddenly there’s distance. One boy pushed a small stone to the corner and said “that’s the bit of me that gets told off.” We could then think together about how he keeps that bit far away, and what might happen if it came closer.

For a different girl I drew a circle for her and a circle for school. I asked her to put a line showing how close they felt. She drew a thick wall. The whole story was there before any words.

These are small things, but they let geography appear through action. When the adolescent can’t imagine, you lend them the tools. The geography becomes a physical fact on the table. Later, the symbols can come.

I also find body language useful. Sometimes I ask, “If the part of you that feels safe had a size, how big would it be?” or “Show me with your hands how far away that feeling sits from you.” It sounds simple, but those gestures are maps. They restore dimensionality when the inner world has flattened.

Psychotherapist 3

I start from the body because that is where the feeling lives before it becomes thought. When someone is concrete, “inside” means their stomach or their head, not the psychic space. So I move slowly from body to mind.

I might say “where do you feel that in your body when it happens?” They point to the chest or the throat. Then I ask “if that feeling had a colour or a shape, what would it be?” The imagination begins to turn. After a while I can add “what part of you feels that most often?” and we are already in Meltzer’s geography. They just don’t know it’s called that.

The trick is not to rush the ladder from concrete to symbolic. Each rung needs to feel true to them. If you skip too soon, they go blank or embarrassed. I remember a boy who said he felt “grey inside.” I asked where the grey was thickest. He said “the middle.” Then he laughed and said “like mould.” From there we could think about what kind of air the mould needed. Suddenly the geography was there, complete with atmosphere.

Psychotherapist 4

I sometimes think the theory frightens clinicians more than it helps. People hear Meltzer and imagine you have to talk in metaphors or quote Bion in every session. You don’t. Internal geography is simply a way of noticing movement inside the mind.

For the adolescent, it’s enough to wonder about where feelings live. You might say, “I get the sense that part of you went somewhere far away just then. I wonder if it feels safer there.” You are naming the geography without insisting they visualise it.

When the young person is highly concrete, I notice how they use real space. Where they sit. How close they come to the door. Whether they can look at me or need to stare at the floor. All of that is the geography enacted. Sometimes the therapy room becomes the map.

I had a girl who always sat on the very edge of the chair, facing the wall. One day I said, “I notice you always choose that spot. What’s that place like for you?” She said, “I can see the window from here. If I have to leave I know the way out.” She’d drawn her own map of psychic safety in the room. Naming it together changed something. She didn’t need to move yet, but she knew I could see her map.

Psychotherapist 5

I think it’s also about the therapist’s inner geography. Meltzer said that the analyst’s mind becomes part of the child’s internal world. If we want them to imagine rooms and corridors, we have to know our own.

With concrete adolescents, I often feel myself turning into their outer shell. They pull me into that solid, matter of fact place. I start to think in lists, solutions, practicalities. It’s easy to lose the symbolic sense. When that happens, I remind myself quietly: “something is happening underneath.” I picture a small basement or a shut drawer. That’s my way of keeping the geography alive inside me even if they can’t yet hold it.

Sometimes, after a few minutes, they’ll give me a sign that the drawer has shifted. A sigh, a doodle, a change of posture. Then I might say, “something feels a bit different in here,” and we follow it. That’s the moment when the imagination starts to return.

Psychotherapist 6

We shouldn’t be afraid of using the real world as the doorway. An adolescent’s geography might be a football pitch, a phone screen, a Minecraft world. Those are all psychic spaces. If they talk about spending time in a game, I might ask, “what part of that world feels most like you?” or “when you log off, what stays with you from there?” It isn’t trivial. It’s how they rehearse containment, attack, defence, exploration.

For another young person it was music. Each playlist was a room. She said one was for anger, one for sadness. She already had an internal geography built of sound. Once she could show me that map, we had a way to speak about movement between emotional states without using analytic jargon.

Reflections

When we put all these fragments together, a few principles stand out.

First, never start with the metaphor. Listen for the geography hidden in their everyday speech. It’s usually already there.

Second, use the body and the room. The adolescent’s spatial choices are living metaphors.

Third, remember that the geography belongs to both of you. Your capacity to imagine space gives them permission to discover their own.

Fourth, keep language rough edged and ordinary. Phrases like “shut off”, “went blank”, “far away”, “in my head”, “out of it” are the native vocabulary of psychic space.

Fifth, trust small signs of movement. If they start using any image of distance, direction, or enclosure, the symbolic function is waking up.

Meltzer gave us maps full of mountains, caves, corridors, and bridges. We don’t need to reproduce them exactly. We just need to help the young person notice that their inner world has shape and space and movement. Once that realisation begins, they are no longer trapped in a single emotional room.

Even the most concrete mind has geography. It might look like a bus route, a bedroom, a playlist, or a blank wall. Our task is to stay curious about what that landscape feels like from the inside, and to keep walking it with them until it starts to feel like their own.