Your pain is real and your pain is intense. School is a place of special torture for you. You don’t feel emotionally safe among your peers. You wait for someone to make a degrading comment or not even notice you at all. You feel as though nobody would care if you simply stopped showing up at school. You wish to disappear. The deep suffering you experience because of your differences leads you to a place of hopelessness. Your spirit is at risk of breaking because you are socially rejected.
I know it’s hard, but see if this one little thing can help in even a small way:
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Help your teen combat depression and anxiety with physical touch. Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
It has been said that you need affectionate physical contact approximately ten times per day for your well-being. Does your teenager get that? If you’ve noticed your teen feeling anxious or depressed lately, you might ask yourself this question. Some teens hug their parents, siblings, and friends multiple times per day. They seek you out on the couch and sit right next to you. They are naturally very affectionate. However, these are not usually the kids who feel depressed or anxious.
It’s ironic that for the depressed or anxiety-ridden teenager, the thing that can help them to feel better is something they might hesitate to seek. Mom and Dad, this is where you come in. You can be conscious about giving your teenager affection. This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to wrap them in a big hug. It can be a pat on the back or a quick rub of the head. Just making the extra effort to have contact with your children can really help them thrive.
You now might be thinking one of two things. One possibility is that you are thinking it is inappropriate to touch your teenager. While you are probably not going to have the same sort of physical affection with your teen that you had when they were two, it is acceptable to show physical affection towards your children, irregardless of their age. Yes, now you should knock on their bedroom door before you enter and probably won’t be wandering into the bathroom while they are taking a shower. However, while they’re doing their homework it can be of tremendous benefit to their attitude and mood if you give them a quick squeeze of the shoulders. It also softens whatever you were about to say to them. For example, if you were going to say, “I’m glad to see you working hard on homework,” think about how that could be perceived sarcastically. Now think about how it’s likely to be perceived if it includes a quick affectionate touch- probably as a positive comment.
The second thing you might be thinking is, “My teenager won’t let me touch him.” You’re one of those parents who would love to hug your son or daughter, but they’ll have none of it. Just start where you can comfortably start. Maybe for a few weeks you’ll ask if you can help carry something they are holding. They will probably have incidental contact with you when they hand it to you. Perhaps you will offer to fix an out-of-place strand of hair, or help your teen into his jacket. You also might consider simply changing the rules around the house to require a hug before leaving and before going to bed. While it will be met with disgust and complaint, know that it is benefiting your teenager tremendously and that they secretly like it.
Physical affection toward your adolescent helps you too. Remember when your child was really young and sometimes screamed or threw tantrums? For a parent those moments are very frustrating. Picking your child up and holding her helped you reconnect the bond that was slightly damaged with the tantrum. Things are no different with your teen. They still throw tantrums (although they look a little different). You still need to work at reconnecting the bond. For a parent, physical affection is one of the best ways to do so.
Have fun being more affectionate to your teenager this week! It’s good for you; it’s good for them; it helps everyone’s mood.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Depression is a monster. It is a joy-sucking, energy-draining, hope-stealing beast that sits on your chest until even the effort to breathe is strenuous. Clawing your way out of depression takes a force of will equivalent to climbing the last 300ft. of Mt. Everest; one is devoid of oxygen or presence of mind. The only way to climb Mt. Everest or to come up for air when drowning in depression is one small, intentional movement at a time. Please watch this 60 second video on one of the most helpful tips for depression I’ve come across in my decade of counseling teenagers (The credit for this tip goes to Carrie Johnson, another outstanding member of the counseling team at Teen Therapy OC).
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
There is a correlation between a teen’s social media use and lower moods. Credit: freedigitalphotos.net/nenetus
An article was just published in The Economist summarizing a very large scale study correlating teen social media use with “malaise,” depressed moods and hopelessness. The study was conducted on about 500,000 American teens. It showed a strong relationship between teens who regularly view social media and those who feel low about life. This was not true for those who use social media to engage with friends, such as using it to text. This was the most true for those who use it to passively browse others’ posts.
There is an inevitable comparing of lives that happens when looking at what other people post. What your teen doesn’t see is all the moments that a person doesn’t put on social media. There is no picture posted of your teen’s friend looking bored in math class. There is no picture posted of blurred eye make-up after sobbing because of a break-up. There is no post unveiling discord in the home. There is no post detailing the misery other teens feel when they have shameful secrets like addiction to pornography. Social media is a very, very brief snapshot of a moment in time that is doctored by premeditated attempts to make that moment sound or appear a certain way. What I mean by this is that before you take a picture, you smile. Were you actually in a smiley mood? Who knows? Before you click “post” you thought out the words you wanted to share with the world. What happened to all the other simultaneous thoughts you filtered out and didn’t write? These can range from the innocuous, ‘I feel a little hungry,’ to the embarrassing to the downright shameful. Those are rarely posted.
So what happens to your teen? After hours of counseling teens, my theory is your son or daughter is left wondering at all the ways he or she is inadequate. Your son or daughter is also spending hours reading things that are counter to the values you have taught since the day your child was born. Your child is consistently hit with a message that if his values aren’t changed to reflect what modern relativistic culture calls for, he is a racist, misogynist, anti-progressive, homophobic, xenophobic horror of a human being. It is highly conflicting for an adolescent mind. Your adolescent hasn’t yet developed the reasoning power to adequately research paradigms and come to her own conclusions. She is still extremely impressionable. She easily absorbs the unconscious psychological message that she needs to conform to the non-conformists if she is to be anything less than a complete wretch.
On the other hand, teens who spend face to face time with their friends and family appear to be happier. These same teens who work a job, play sports, and engage in “real life” are often filled with a lot more hope. This doesn’t mean every day is a happy day. However, it does mean you as a parent have a responsibility to strongly consider what technology does and doesn’t do for your burgeoning adult. It means you have to know the science behind what is happening to this generation, and teach your child to balance virtual life with real life.
Click here if you wish to read the original article from The Economist.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Self-injury is a very loud cry for help. Photo courtesy of Marin from Freedigitalphotos.net
Janelle sat on her bed. She was crying because her best friend told some girls that she thought Janelle was annoying. She also told the girls she thinks Janelle is “all drama all the time.”
At first Janelle was in shock. She couldn’t believe Sara would say those things about her. Hadn’t she been there for Sara all last year when Sara was fighting with her mom? Then Janelle turned inward. Negative thoughts started running through Janelle’s head. She began to think, ‘Nobody likes me,’ and ‘All my friends are fake.’ She also started thinking things like, ‘My own parents don’t even care that I’m hurting.’ With these negative thoughts came an even deeper surge of anxiety and hopelessness. Janelle turned to the only coping skill she knew could make her feel numb. She went into her desk drawer and took out a razor blade she had set aside specifically for this purpose. She began to cut shallow lines across her left forearm until a little bit of blood showed.
I know this is awful to read. I know it’s even worse if you are concerned your teenager is cutting. While this story is made up, it’s based off the many, many teenagers I’ve sat across from in therapy who self-harm to cope with emotional pain.
Generally parents find self-injury really difficult to understand. It’s hard to imagine how inducing physical pain can relieve emotional pain.
There are usually two reasons teenagers cut themselves. The first is a cry for attention. These teenagers are hurting inside, don’t know how to effectively express it, and so try cutting themselves for someone else to notice. If they cut on their arm they might continue to wear short sleeves. They wait and see how long it takes Mom or Dad to make a comment. This is to be taken seriously and requires help from a professional counselor and/or a psychiatrist because it means the teenager isn’t able to communicate their emotions in a healthy and productive manner.
The second reason an adolescent might self-harm is to control their pain. If they are a teenager who becomes flooded with emotional distress, then their pain feels unmanageable. At least if they are cutting they control when they hurt, how deeply, where, how long, how much blood, whether or not the pain shows, and how much the wound scars. These are teenagers who feels as though emotional pain happens to them at random and no matter what they try to do, they are helpless to stop it. These teens are desperate to have control over something. This second group doesn’t usually want their wounds to be noticed. They do not want to be stopped from cutting because it’s their primary method of coping and they don’t trust anyone to love them through their hurt. They will often cut in locations on their body that are difficult to see such as hips, stomach, inner thigh, or arms if they always wear sleeves. In these situations professional help is a must.
If you have worried that your teenager is self-harming, please get them help right away. This is a cry for help that is loud and clear. It is also quite possibly beyond your ability to stop your child from this behavior without some guidance. It is very dangerous to just hope your teenager stops this behavior. I worked with one teenager who accidentally cut his wrist too deeply and he nearly severed an artery in his wrist, which could have killed him. He wasn’t trying to commit suicide, but he almost did so by mistake. Another problem with leaving the teenager to resolve this on their own is the risk of infection. If they don’t treat the wounds properly and/or use unsanitary objects to self-harm it could cause them to become ill. Finally, it is important to address self-injurious behavior because your child is in deep emotional pain and they are navigating it in an unhealthy manner. They need your love and support, but not your tolerance of their self-harm.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Mental illness looks like you and me. Credit: freedigitalphotos.net/photostock
I just finished reading Resilience, by Jessie Close. She is completely raw in her description of a lifelong battle with severe Bipolar Disorder. As she takes you on her journey through years of unchecked, undiagnosed mayhem caused by her mental illness and alcoholism, you will cringe and cry.
The fact is though, mental illness without help is like a prison sentence. It condemns its sufferer to broken relationships, broken dreams, continuous disruption, and continuous discomfort. I still feel I’m phrasing it lightly.
She has many objectives in writing the story of her life. Aside from the likely cathartic effects of viewing her life through a medicated, stable lens, she has things she wants from us as the readers. She wants us to understand that the stigma associated with mental illness is excruciating. She wants us to know she is not a leper. She wants us to know she still needs compassion, love and friendship. It’s our cultural norm to ignore and avoid “odd” people. She wants us to realize someone with a mental illness is still a someone. She wants us to know that that someone has a family, a history, hopes and trials just as you and I do.
During my interning years I worked at College Hospital in Costa Mesa. It is a locked psychiatric facility. During the first months I was afraid. I didn’t understand how to interact with people who were not responding to normal social cues. I didn’t know how to anticipate the next move of someone suffering from psychosis. Eventually though I came to love that job. The staff had a sincere affection for the patients that was contagious. Once I settled down, I realized these are people who are scared and overwhelmed. All they need is someone who can sit with them and treat them like they’re human.
The irony was never lost on me that the staff inside a locked mental hospital were more capable of treating the mentally ill like humans than was the outside world. I suppose it’s just like Jessie Close writes in her book where she tells us how exposure and time spent with the mentally ill breaks down our incorrect suppositions. Like any misguided prejudice we have (and like it or not, we all have some), they are stripped away when we spend time with the people we incorrectly judge.
In the outpatient counseling practice I now run, we have found we are often the first stopping point for a teenager trying to understand what is going on with him or her. There have been countless cases where a parent has called because his son or daughter is acting differently, engaging in risky behaviors, or “just doesn’t feel right.” It can be an enormous challenge to pinpoint a diagnosis quickly because as Jessie Close explains, mental illness is “like a stew.” This means many symptoms and disorders overlap.
Recognizing an underlying mental illness for misguided behavior and thoughts is one of the most important things towards healing. You almost always need a professional to help with this process. Even for the professional it can be difficult since there are no clear medical tests to diagnose.
If you suspect your teen might be facing a burgeoning mental illness, don’t wait to seek help.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Hello, I’m Lauren! If you notice your teen struggling, you might be feeling helpless, hopeless, frustrated or concerned as a parent. Try to remember, there is hope. I want to help your adolescent feel better. My hope is for them to enjoy their life again. I want them to feel confident they can handle whatever situations arise.
