Failure to Launch

In countries around the world, clinicians are seeing a similar phenomenon:

Increasing numbers of young people — especially men — are struggling to navigate the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

These young people can remain fully dependent on their parents well into their thirties, failing to find adequate employment, explore and express their values, and form meaningful relationships. 

This issue, often called “failure to launch” in the U.S., has many parents worrying that their children might never leave home or lead full, independent lives.

Due to a combination of economic, cultural, and social variables, clinicians are increasingly seeing these individuals, or their parents, in therapy…

And yet the literature on this enormous clinical population and how to treat them is practically nonexistent.

This makes serving these clients a particular challenge for a clinician.

Even if a therapist immediately sees what the young adult should do differently, they often find themselves in a perpetual deadlock.

They can’t get the client to engage in behavioral activation or exposure therapy.

The young person doesn’t seem to have any real goals — other than perhaps preventing their situation from changing.

And though the doors of possibility appear to be open to them in every other way, the client seems intent on rejecting their own agency.

These failure to launch individuals represent a unique category and require a unique understanding and approach on the part of clinicians. 

While they may share features of social anxiety or depression, for example, they don’t fit neatly into existing diagnostic categories.

This could be why resources for treating this population are so rare — and it’s simultaneously why they’re so desperately needed.

Failure to Launch is a new and innovative course designed to fill gaps in skill and information that so many therapists contend with in this area of practice.

If you’re like the vast majority of clinicians who work with this population or their families, it will be an invaluable training opportunity for you.

Inside this course

Failure to Launch provides clinicians with a wide variety of tools for helping young people step into adulthood and independence, expand their comfort zones, and get into the driver’s seats of their own lives

The course is taught by Dr. Randy Paterson, a psychologist and prolific author who has looked closely at the failure to launch population and developed a suite of materials to help clinicians gain a deeper understanding of the underlying issues and treat them effectively.

In 5 live online sessions, you’ll gain a deep understanding of this problem, the fears that often prevent progress, and how taking a family systems approach can accelerate movement.

You’ll also learn strategies for:

• Building and reinforcing the therapeutic alliance when this work often begins in a conflictual space
• Identifying reasonable goals and motivating clients to take real steps forward
• Constructing lifelong skills and habits to support young people in forming relationships and pursuing the lives they want
• Implementing behavioral activation and exposure therapy successfully with this population
• Guiding parents in how to support their young person’s independence rather than hamstringing it — without cutting the young person off

Interventions in the course are drawn from cognitive therapy, behavioral activation, exposure-based work, and family systems work. 

Whether you’re working with the young adults, their parents, or both, this course offers a rich perspective and set of tools for helping the young adult develop more independence and creating a family dynamic built on mutual respect and responsibility.

Join us and Dr. Paterson inside this unique and necessary course to learn how to put young adults in the driver’s seats of therapy — and their lives — so they can create futures of more freedom and fulfillment.

This training offers 10 CE hours if attended live. We can only provide CE to those who are present via Zoom for the live sessions. However, the sessions will be recorded and available to watch later. Registrants may access these recordings at any time for up to nine months after the live training ends.

Before enrolling, please review conflict of interest disclosures and complete CE information here.