TEEN /YOUNG ADULT
Parents sometimes become enmeshed in power struggles with their teens/young adults: they desperately try to convince, cajole and compel their kids into behaving in certain ways. I have found this to be an understandable but ultimately futile path. When kids get invested in winning the war with their parents at all costs, they lose sight of what the world is trying to teach them. In fact, they sometimes become willing to suffer dearly in order to “win” the point: they don’t have to do what their parents want them to do. Experience has taught me to employ a developmental approach in my work with teens and young adults; I strive to engage their own, natural curiosity about their minds and the choices they make. Ultimately, they are the ones who have live their lives.
To this end, I help teens and young adults develop their own gauge for the consequences of their choices. I ask questions such as, “If this issue (whatever it may be) is not a problem for you now, how would you tell if becomes one?” and “What might the world be trying to teach you through these frustrating and repetitive experiences?” This approach sidesteps the right/wrong paradigm and becomes a launching point for their own ability to pay attention to their minds. They then more reliably can decide what is good and bad in so many contexts: drugs, alcohol, sex, school, relationships, etc.
Often, these issues boil down to the distinction between feeling good versus doing good. All of us can fall prey to the assumption that if we can just find a way to stuff our lives with enough things that feel good then we will be happy; taken to extreme this belief system is dangerous to long term emotional health. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the tantalizing effects of “feeling good” at the expense of developing constancy and grit. Working to refine the sense of what feels good as well as to cultivate a longer term awareness for what actually makes us happy is a life long endeavor that can begin in earnest in adolescence.
"It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always,
she had to admit, interesting."
– Kierkegard
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"There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing."
– Maya Angelou
"If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves."
– Carl Jung