“It started with feeling frustrated by how hard life had suddenly become. I needed to find my way and make my way and earn my way with no good idea of where I wanted to go. I felt aimless and pointless and I got really down. That’s when the anxiety set in, and the partying didn’t help. I felt scared all the time, scared of not getting anywhere. And I felt so alone. All these hard feelings were closing in. Then I started holing up in my room, not going out, not going to class, not answering the phone, all the time watching TV, too tired to sleep. It got pretty unhappy. That’s when my parents paid a visit, saw how much of a funk I was in, [and] told me to come home and get some counseling to work my way back out. Part of feeling so bad was feeling that there was no way to feel any better.”
Trial independence is a very emotionally vulnerable time. Separating from home, moving off on one’s own, finding one’s footing, managing self-governance, performing one’s work, and setting a direction in life are all difficult, and fraught with expectations. Parents expect older adolescents to handle this transition, and young people expect it of themselves. And when they don’t or feel they can’t, all kinds of negative feelings come into play. Disappointment and frustration with oneself are often the gateway emotions to more painful ones: discouragement, anxiety, anger, despondency, loneliness, and, at worst, despair.
When a young person comes home in need of recovery from such emotional duress, it’s normal for parents not to know exactly how to act—should they act as if everything is okay and be casual as usual, or should they act as if everything is not okay and be careful to tiptoe around? Actually, parents need to balance two kinds of responses. They need to maintain normal expectations, to encourage normal functioning. But they also need to practice sensitivity in response to their child’s troubled feelings. This is hard to do. At this juncture, there are three kinds of parental support that can really make a difference:
From what I’ve seen in counseling, young men and women frequently manage emotions quite differently. Women appear more accustomed to talking about their emotions (more practiced in being intimate) than men, who are more accustomed to suppressing theirs emotions (more practiced in appearing independent). In addition, to the degree that men are socialized to believe that asking for help shows a lack of self-sufficiency and is a sign of weakness, they can be resistant to seeking help on that score too (wanting to appear “manly” and “strong”).
So when it comes to seeking psychological help for emotional distress, young women may be more open to counseling than young men. This may mean that parents will need to give more encouragement to a son to get counseling than to a daughter, who may be more receptive. But male or female, young people who are open to counseling—and to improving emotional access and communication along the way—not only gain help during crisis but also develop skills to deal with periods of emotional upheaval later in life. I am reminded of the young woman who returned home in a state of depression, sought psychological help, and in the exit interview came up with this summary statement at the end: “Periods of emotional pain are one opportunity to live deeply within myself. So long as I am in pain, I know that I have much to learn about myself. So long as I keep learning about myself, my pain will make me stronger. As I grow stronger, I will be better able to withstand the hard times in my life.”
In general, when young people come home after independence has failed to take hold, there is a lot of sorting out to do, mostly through self-reflection. There are also talks with parents, who are skilled at mentoring and able to safely, supportively, and specifically suggest choices for finding one’s way. And then counseling can provide additional assistance. This help can be very productive at this juncture, because young people are usually motivated to bring clarity to what feels like confusion, order to what feels like chaos, direction to what feels like aimlessness, peace to what feel like irresolvable conflicts, and to gain relief from what feels like inescapable suffering.
What sorts of issues might lead you and your child to consider counseling? Consider some common emotional hard times that young people encounter during trial independence:
If your child is experiencing any of these, how can you know whether it’s a serious issue or just a normal part of growing up? It comes down to whether it’s a spell or a condition. The distinction to make here is that a spell is of short duration and is over, but a condition is ongoing, without an end in sight. Duration makes a difference.
And that is what parents need to help the young person understand. Being unhappy or emotionally troubled some of the time is normal during the last stage of adolescence; being so most of the time is not and needs attention. When negative emotion becomes too intensive (too deeply painful, like panic attacks) or too extensive (too lasting, like chronic anxiety), parents and young people should seek some psychological assessment, because in either case, the condition is debilitating.
So how do you tell whether it’s a spell or a condition? Parents need to evaluate their child’s capacity to talk about what is going on, the length of time these feelings last, and the behaviors that they precipitate. Parents should seek some kind of psychological help in the following situations:
Seeking counseling when a young person returns home is usually a good investment of time, energy, and money. This is because the last-stage adolescent is in a time of life in which powerful understanding and meaningful reorganization can emerge. Coming home is not wasted time; it is a useful time to engage in supportive self-examination, to formulate future plans, and to take constructive steps to build a bridge back to independent living. In all three objectives, counseling can help.
Often these days, though, people may choose to use medication first instead of counseling. However, the use of psychoactive medication should be the last choice, not the first. And with the use of medications, psychological counseling should still be in place. Psychoactive medication is a useful palliative. However, although it can help alleviate the symptoms, it yields no self-understanding, and so it generates no capacity for personal growth or change. Just medicating can be a wasted opportunity. Why go through a period of intense, even debilitating, emotional pain during trial independence, dealing with significant mental health issues, and not profit from the experience? Counseling provides the opportunity of getting to know oneself on a deeper level and developing strategies for self-management one did not have before.
So if your child does decide to try counseling, find a counselor (one of the same sex is often best) who is experienced in working with clients or patients of this age, an experienced and trained consultant, unconnected to family, who can provide a constructive, objective, and confidential response.
Counseling is a chance to open up about what is going on, to gain self-understanding, to profit from hard experience, and to develop coping strategies to make it through a hard time. The challenge for parents of young people in counseling is to be supportive of the help without prying into what matters young people are disclosing. It is natural for parents to be curious and concerned, but it is usually best if they do not interfere. Intimacy with the helper requires privacy from parents, so it is best to respect counseling as an act of independence through which the young person is working to get his or her life together.
Giving young people psychological space at home, within limits of responsible conduct in the family, is supportive as well. When tempted to say something about “the problem,” parents might want to ask themselves three noninterference questions that I once heard in Al-Anon many years ago:
And remember this: “A laugh is the shortest distance between two people.” So parents shouldn’t get so serious with their son or daughter that they don’t take time to laugh together, to loosen up, to lighten up, to gain perspective, and to keep close. Also keep in mind that how parents emotionally respond to their returning son or daughter influences how their child emotionally responds to him- or herself.
Parents need to ponder a very simple question: “When our child is going through a hard time, even of his or her own making, which response of ours is most helpful—expressing criticism, worry, and pessimism or acceptance, confidence, and optimism?” In general, a positive parental response is more productive than a negative one, because it influences young people to view themselves in a positive way.
In addition to counseling, parents can help their child manage their unhappiness in a positive way by showing them how to separate thinking from feeling.
When a young person comes home in emotional crisis, parents need to understand the healthy function of emotions. Strange to say, but emotions are too important to act upset about.
Emotions are a powerful source of understanding. Like our capacities to see, hear, smell, touch, intuit, and think, our capacity to feel is an important tool for self-awareness. Just as being blind or deaf can be partly disabling, to be out of contact with or cut off from one’s emotions can be partly disabling, too. Knowing how one feels is very important to understanding life experience. And your child’s access to his or her feelings, and the ability to understand those feelings, are key to recovery. If anything, these crises are a function of emotional overload—painful to experience but rich in what it has to teach.
The primary value of emotions is to inform people of their reaction to a significant life experience and then focus attention on that experience and energize some manner of response. For example, in reaction to some mistreatment, the emotion of anger can empower a young person to make a number of responses:
Emotions are always worth listening and attending to, because of their informing, focusing, and energizing properties. In one form or another, emotions all say: “Be alert, something important is happening in my life right now, something that merits attending to.”
For parents, during these times of emotional upheaval for their child, it helps to affirm the honest value of emotions, accepting feelings without discounting or arguing about them.
Don’t do as the parents who took their daughter’s complaints about financial anxiety personally did. They reacted as though she were blaming them, as though she had no right to her anxiety because they were providing her adequate support. In fact, what their daughter was describing was her struggle to fit in with her new college friends, who had more spending money than she did. Spending more money than she had to cope with the pressures of keeping up socially, she was constantly worried about living on terms she could not afford and how she would pay back what she had charged. Instead of invalidating their daughter’s worries, her parents (and she) would have done better to honor her feelings. Then they could have discussed how to best manage the latest turn of events.
Parents also need to be aware of how we tend to judge emotions. Although feelings are neither good nor bad, people tend to assign them that distinction on the basis of the experience of that emotion. Thus, comfortable, “good” emotions may include pride (focusing on accomplishment), love (focusing on devotion), joy (focusing on fulfillment), interest (focusing on attraction), and gratitude (focusing on appreciation). In general, people are happy to experience these and other positive feelings. Uncomfortable, “bad” emotions, by contrast, may include fear (focusing on danger), pain (focusing on injury), grief (focusing on loss), anger (focusing on violation), and frustration (focusing on blockage). In general, people are unhappy to experience these and other negative feelings.
Now comes the tricky part for the emotionally charged adolescent, a part in which parents have a helpful role to play. Emotions, particularly of the “bad” or unhappy kind, can create a special jeopardy for troubled young people. The reason for this risk is that, even though emotions are very good informants, they can be very bad advisers. When older adolescents allow unhappy feelings to “think” for them, what “feels” like the right way to make things better is often exactly what will make things worse. Consider just a few common examples:
In each of these instances, the emotional state is allowed to determine the cognitive choice. And because parents are not always around to help maintain perspective, it is easy for young people to fall into these emotional traps. The young person becomes emotionally driven by this self-defeating resolution: “The worse I feel, the worse I’ll let my feelings make me feel.”
The trap of letting emotion make decisions may, in fact, be a key part of what drives a young person back home. So part of recovery is getting rational judgment back in charge of decision making. Thus, parents’ message to adolescents needs to be this: “Use your feelings to become informed, but use your thinking to decide what is best to do.”
Returning home in emotional crisis is a time for the young person, in a safe place, to let one’s head, not heart, get back in charge of how best to make decisions and to conduct one’s life. So when the discouraged young person says, “I feel like giving up,” parents can respond: “I know how you feel like acting, but when you take the time to consider the consequences of that decision and what it would get you, what do really think would be in your best interests to do?”
There’s a powerful tool that you can use as a parent to help turn around and help heal a late-stage adolescent who is going through emotional distress. And it involves understanding primary interconnections that emotions have.
Emotion does not occur independently. Feeling is usually connected to what the person is thinking and what the person is doing, and this connection is internally consistent. That means that when people feel really happy, they are more often than not thinking positive thoughts and doing something pleasurable, entertaining, or fulfilling. Conversely, when people feel really unhappy, they are more often than not thinking negative thoughts and doing something unpleasant, boring, or dispiriting. In understanding this contextual relationship, parents can suggest ways to bring their child’s spirits back up when he or she is feeling down.
For example, suppose a young woman declares how unhappy she is feeling. First, parents can empathize with the unhappiness and then ask for a term that more specifically describes the feeling.
“I’m feeling depressed,” she says. Now parents can see whether they can help change her emotional context. They can ask two questions. First, “How would you be thinking differently if you were not feeling depressed?”
After reflecting a moment, she replies: “I’d think about good future possibilities, I’d think about all I’ve got going for me, I’d think well of myself.”
Then parents can ask, “What would you be doing differently if you were not feeling depressed?”
After reflecting a moment, she replies: “I’d get busy, I’d start seeing friends, and I’d get regular exercise.”
This is when parents can make a contextual suggestion: “Then why don’t you try thinking and acting those positive ways to see if you don’t start feeling better? What do you have to lose?”
In this way, they are not trying to deny her unhappiness or even to cheer her up. They are simply giving her a technique to alter the context of her emotion. It’s hard to keep feeling unhappy when your thoughts are positive and your activities are enjoyable.
PARENTING PRESCRIPTION