3.
Therapy For Parents
Although this website is designed for teens, this may be the first page that you are checking out in an effort to connect your teen with counseling support. I am so glad that you found your way here.
The teen years are unique. Did you know that the teen-raising years are considered to be a family life cycle stage all its own?
When I say I love working with teens, I mean it. I had the opportunity to work with adolescents in many capacities before settling on the profession of family counseling. As much as I loved mentoring teens, I saw time and time again that my temporary involvement in their life paled in comparison to the power of reconnecting the teen with his or her family. For lasting change, it is crucial to pursue the transformation and healing of the teen’s relationship with his or her parents. This reconciliation sets in motion dynamics that adolescents will carry with them for the rest of their lives and into future relationships.
Why don’t we begin with the
good stuff?
If you’re a parent of a teen, there are many wonderful things about raising teens.
Here are just a few:
1. Fun. Oh, boy, the teen years are fun, full of new experiences and adventures. 2 Inspiring. As a parent, you have a front row seat to watching your teen become their own person and unique self. 3. Special. The child is transitioning into a teen with thoughts and feelings of their own. This means that as parents, you may start to become friends with your children (although you’ll still implement the parenting pieces when needed). It’s a completely different kind of relationship in which there is increased emotional reciprocity. 4. Nostalgic. Watching your teen navigate their junior high and high school years may bring up your personal feelings (for better or worse) about your teen experiences. 5. Hopeful: It is exciting to watch the teen figure out who they want to be, what they want to do, and what matters most to them.
Now, let’s get into the nitty gritty.
If you’ve found your way here, there may be some pain points and dynamics in the family that need a little extra TLC and support.
Maybe you have a hunch that your teenager is struggling, but they are refusing to tell you “what’s wrong.” Often teens will have trouble telling the adults in their lives what’s really going on. It’s not that they don’t want to tell them. It’s that they don’t know how. The areas of the brain responsible for emotional articulation and expression are not fully cooked yet.
As a therapist, my number one priority is to help the teen articulate what’s really going on so that the adults in their lives can rally around them in effective and helpful ways.
After all, it’s really unfair to you as parents. You ask the teen over and over again, “What’s wrong? What can I do?” They cross their arms, give you an ugly stare, head for their room, and slam the door. Hours later, they emerge and scream at you that you “couldn’t possibly understand.” When you are not able to read their minds, they accuse you of “not being there for them.” Am I close?
For a parent of a teen, it can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
That’s where adolescent and family counseling can be beneficial.
Let’s talk about adolescent development.
Before a parent or teen ever walks in the counseling room, I want to provide something that can be helpful today.
Check out this written and video breakdown of the “Fab Five of Adolescent Development” that informs why you’re seeing what you’re seeing in the teen years.
Adolescence is a unique developmental stage with challenges specific to the teen years. To the adults in their lives, adolescent behavior can often look dramatic, but there are a number of factors that lead to the teen’s interpretation of their experience. Below, I identify five main factors: 1. Teens have the newfound ability to think about the future. For the first time, they can see that experiences (good or bad) extend into the future. 2. Teens are going through many experiences for the first time. For example, if teens experience a great loss, they do not have past experiences of loss to inform them that “it will get better” and they’ll get through it. They evaluate their experience without a personal history to normalize the circumstances. As adults, we know we’ll get through it. They don’t know that yet. 3. Teenagers look, walk, and talk like adults. It is important to remember that teens are just beginning to identify and recognize complex emotions (which they call “the feels”). Just as a child learns to crawl and then walk, a teen will “crawl” with regard to emotional communication and expression before they are able to walk or run. 4. Teens are just beginning to discover and establish coping skills for these complex emotions and relationships. 5. Teens may feel alone and that no one could possibly understand what they are going through. This developmental belief may perpetuate a cycle of isolation. In summary, for adults, parents, youth leaders, and counselors, the teen experience may not look like a crisis. What is important to understand is that because of these factors, it may feel like a crisis for the teen.
When these new experiences hit, adolescents go into crisis mode and can express their pain in a number of different ways.
This expression often looks like problem behavior, ie., anger, anxiety, acting out, sexual promiscuity, withdrawal, alcohol and drug use, poor academic performance, and so on. Adults, parents, teachers, and counselors may be tempted to engage with the behavior, rather than the primary emotions and feelings that are underlying these behaviors. The relationship with the teen can begin to center around managing the behavior, rather than communicating at the primary level where the family explores the teen’s feelings. For example, when they slam the door in your face, what are they really trying to say?
Understanding these developmental factors changes the game when it comes to relating to your teen.
Now, let’s talk a little bit about the approach to counseling at
Teen Translation.
My specialty as a family counselor is working with the teen and family system as a whole. Specifically, I work in the area of relationships. There are many relationships in a teen’s life and I help teens explore their relationships with self, friends, the world around them, and their families during this developmental stage.
Let’s take a look at the key components of that approach:
1. Translation. It is crucial to empower family communication. We help the teen communicate in new ways that allow the adults in their lives to rally around them in effective and helpful ways. 2. Identification. It may be helpful to think of adolescent therapists as the general practitioners of the counseling world. In the teen years, mental health issues may surface for the first time. Just as a general practitioner is taking a look at all of the physical symptoms before referring to a specialist, the adolescent therapist is usually the first person to “take a look” at these mental health symptoms, joining with the family to identify the underlying issues for the first time and connect the family with a rock star care team. 3. Psychoeducation: It can provide a great deal of comfort for the teen and family to understand what is going on. Understanding what is happening in the teen’s lives informs an effective plan of action. After all, we are not likely to take steps of change until we understand why we are taking these steps and how it will ultimately make a positive difference. 4. Refrain from Overpersonalizing: It is important to address behaviors and symptoms in a way that does not overpersonalize these challenges as core pieces of identity. Have you ever heard a teen say, “I looked it up on Tik Tok and I am a depressed person”? The teen therapist must be skilled in framing current challenges in a way that externalizes these experiences, i.e. “I am a teen who must interact with depression, learn to manage depression when it visits,” and so on. 5. Increase Family Connection: In the adolescent years, parents may feel like the teen is pushing them away. Family relationships can feel strained and distant. The primary goal of adolescent and family counseling is to reconnect the teen with their greatest resource - their family. 6. Address Underlying Issues: The initial priority in counseling care is to identify, address, and stabilize underlying issues that may be contributing to the teen’s current behavior, distress, or strain on family relationships. In other words, we strive to address the immediate crisis and regain stability, allowing the teen to draw upon this new stability as they build and implement new skills and healthy coping to manage the increasing complexity of their teen lives. 7. Emphasize Teen and Family Strengths: Many times, a teen or family may be fearful that a counselor is going to tell them everything they are doing wrong. That is not the case. Due to current distress, the teen’s and family’s strengths may be overshadowed. A primary goal is to draw upon and emphasize the teen’s and family’s strengths, utilizing these strengths to re-engage a preferred way of interacting with friends, academics, self-esteem, and the family. 8. Empower Agency, Healthy Coping, Emotional Regulation, and Self-Soothing: By equipping the teen with skills of agency, coping, emotional regulation, and self-soothing, we increase the teen’s sense of control over self, their environment, and a confidence that no matter what happens, they (with the help of their family and trusted adults) can manage the challenge or difficulty. An internalized sense of capability is crucial, not only for the current teen years but also in the ways that this leads to positive identity development in adulthood. 9. Navigate Complex Social Dynamics: A primary focus in the adolescent years is developing and fostering social relationships and friendships. As the teen begins to place increased priority on the opinions and acceptance from their peers, it is crucial that trusted adults help to frame their social experiences and implement preferred boundaries. 10. Provide a Net of Executive Functioning: Teens are just beginning to engage their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive functioning, decision-making, evaluating consequences, and so on. This part of the brain is not yet fully hooked up. As adults, we have an opportunity to bridge the gap by serving as the external executive functioning during the teen years. 11. Putting Money in the Trust Bank: When something inevitably goes sideways in the teen years, we rely upon the investment that we have made in the “trust bank.” In family seasons of calm, we strive to increase family communication and trust, doing our best to ensure that when a challenge arises, a trusted adult is the teen’s first pit stop on the road to addressing the issue. 12. Equip Parents: It is crucial that we equip parents to 1) understand what they are seeing in the teen years so that they 2) don’t overpersonalize these behaviors and can 3) hang with this behavior in a grounded and non-reactive state. Understanding is a parent’s most valuable asset when it comes to regulating reactivity when a teen inevitably pushes one’s buttons and engages in behavior that is anxiety-provoking and distressing for the parent. 13. When Their Teen Stuff Activates Your Teen Stuff: Witnessing your teen’s experiences may activate your history of adolescent experiences - for better or worse. Providing support for “memory lane” allows parents to create emotional and mental distance. This distance allows for parenting from a wise mind state, i.e. a calm and non-reactive state, rather than being dragged into the storm of emotional reactivity when your teen inevitably pushes a parent’s “soft spots” of adolescent experiences.
Check out this sneak peek of a teen in counseling.
Teens view life differently than everyone else and counseling is no exception.
Psychoeducational platform Moments of Meaning and Janelle team up to portray an example of a teen's wants and needs in counseling.
So what's the first step?
I am here to walk you through every step of the process. See below for a step-by-step guide.
Initial Phone Call
We will go over a few questions and make sure that this is the best fit for you and your teen's unique counseling goals.
Schedule Appointment
We’ll schedule an initial appointment. Absolutely no pressure here. Think of it as a “trial run” in which your teen gets a feel for the process.
Good fit?
After the initial appointment, the family will have an opportunity to think it through. It is important that the family decides whether it feels like a good fit.
I look forward to meeting
your family.
I am passionate about serving as a translator between the worlds of teens and parents, so that the parents can hear the language behind their son’s or daughter’s behavior and respond to their teen’s needs, instead of their aggression. The parent can hear “I need you” instead of “I hate you.” The teen may resist learning the language of adults, but as adults we can become bilingual, journey to their land, and interpret what they are trying to tell us so that families can move toward one another in communication, love, and trust.
After all, whether they say it or not, they really, really need you.
Janelle Ault, LMFT