If I were to ask you which grade you would relive if you had the chance, I’d wager you’d pick a grade in elementary school or the end of high school. Teens have it rough. Here’s my understanding of why things become difficult and how it informs my therapeutic approach to working with teens.
Neurologically Speaking…
…teens face their adolescent years ill equipped.
As adults, we take our frontal cortex for granted. It sits above our eyes helping us do the right thing when it is most difficult to do the right thing. When we go with a healthy option over a tempting piece of candy, that’s the frontal cortex at work. Not gesturing back to someone in traffic when we very much want to: Frontal cortex. Budgeting our finances, patiently waiting for a toddler to stop a tantrum, biting our tongue at the holidays…yep yep yep. Our frontal cortex plays a major role in all of that.
Teens don’t have a version of a frontal cortex like we do. Theirs is thicker and packed with more material than ours. This makes it less efficient than the ones found in adults. As a result, teens spend more energy on seeking novel experiences than they do anticipating costs and consequences. This leads to a susceptibility to committing behavior that is mostly unique to this stage of development. As Robert Sapolsky succinctly puts it in Behave:
Think about this- adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help over throw a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved to make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.1
The neurological set up of the teenage brain gets complicated, of course, by social media platforms.
Social Media The Awful And The Not So Awful
Many social media platforms exist to exploit the teenage proclivity for impulsive and brash behaviors. Giving users the impression that things can be kept anonymous can set the stage for cruelty. Once public pressure successfully encourages a social media platform to safeguard against bullying and conflict, they have a way of going out of business (Yik-Yak and Whisper are two that come to mind).
Is social media a force for good for teens? That question may best be answered by anyone working in a school where the majority of students have cell phones. Educators and teachers regularly witness students treating each other with a special kind of sadism reserved for online behavior. This type of cruelty is both difficult to police and prevent. Even sadder, teens can be victimized by their peers randomly and chronically. Conflicts over social media can marinade for weeks. It can make a teen feel like they live in a pressure cooker without a release valve; at any minute things could burst if they don’t cool off.
Parents and caretakers are left with few options to help out when a child is victimized online. Banning a cell phone all together may give a small reprieve, but doing so can cut the child off from announcements from coaches about practices, school assignments, and what their friends are up to. Problems with social media lead you to question who your friends really are anyways. It’s not very long before the cycle starts all over again. The teen is stuck in a lonely and uncertain place.
On the plus side, social media can help students answer the fundamental questions of adolescence- who am I? where do I fit in? Communities of like minded people coalesce around games that enhance visual spatial skills or trends in esoteric topics. Teens receive feedback on their opinions and their tastes. Sometimes they learn skills like coding and animation through new networks for friends stretched out around the world. Speaking from personal experience, I was excited to find a community of composting enthusiasts in my late 20’s via Reddit.
Other Biological Changes That Play A Role
With a world wide audience afforded almost every teen through the World Wide Web, their own physical changes suddenly get measured up against everyone else’s curated view of themselves. It’s rare when any teen feels he or she is the correct shape, weight, height, or talented enough. Yet another measure to leave young people to feel isolated.
This gives an adolescent’s peers dramatic importance. “Deviance training” , the condition of maladaptive misbehavior spreading from the misbehaved to the better behaved takes off. Eating disorders, self injury, drug and alcohol experimentation, vandalism all spread in a way that things like bullet journaling or organizing a sock drawer simply does not. The class clown holds more influence over student behavior than the class president.
Changes in Family
When teens enter adolescents, the role of their parents often changes at the same time; they move into the role of caretaker of grandparents. Their physical energy decreases as the emotional needs of their teen rise. The excitement of starting a family has been replaced with keeping the trains running on time and a looming uncertainty about the type of person their child is becoming. Many parents talk of looking forward to when their child’s teenage years are behind them.
With depleted and shifted parental caregiving energy juxtaposed against a teen embracing difficult yet typical teenager characteristics, distance can develop between family members. The internal and external world of a teen is shifting dramatically and they can feel they are being left alone to sort it out. The problems they encounter may seem unsolvable. Their private logic- the things we tell ourselves privately- can supersede common sense and irrational reactions to things can seem rational. This distance gives more space for maladaptive coping mechanisms to manifest and develop.
In short, stressors increase for everyone while social supports and predictability with life in general decrease. It’s an unfairly stacked deck. Reestablishing trust, love, and accessibility of parents and care givers is an important tool to help a teen deal with this chapter of their lives.
Therapy with Teens: Attachment Based Family Therapy (ABFT)
Therapy with teens is important because it can safely and concisely help a young person answer the questions “who am I? where do I fit in?” It can be very difficult for a young person to find a warm neutral listening ear who can serve as a sounding board to what is going on during such chaotic years. Certainly peers are available, but those peers are changing themselves and often don’t keep things private. There is also a tendency among some groups of teens to co-ruminate and take on the depressive symptoms of their friends. Peers are great, but certainly not a trained professional.
The role of an “other adult” besides a teen’s parents has life long impact. Although many people wouldn’t want to return to their middle years, they DO remember coaches, mentors, teachers, neighbors, and religious leaders who took an interest in them and wanted to be helpful.
Therapists fall into the “other adult” category when therapy goes well. Individual therapy is important and in an ideal world it would be available to every teen. With that said, I have not felt that individual therapy has been sufficient to fully help the majority of teens struggling with anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. For the best therapeutic outcomes, the family systems a teen lives in needs to be incorporated into the process of therapy in a structured way.
Attachment Based Family Therapy (ABFT) allows for that listening ear while empowering the people who take care of the teen to be more available to that teen. The course of this therapy is always towards cultivating feelings of love and protection that will buffer against the teen’s emotional dysregulation that emerges during such a difficult chapter of their life.
This therapy progresses through stages. At the initial stage, rapport is built between therapist and teen and then between therapist and parents. This sets the stage to explore the nature of the relationships and dynamics between family members. These sessions are experiential and powerful. The research studies about this type of therapy report that it can mitigate symptoms of depression and suicidal ideation more effectively than no therapy at all or the normal course of treatment for depressed and suicidal teens.2
ABFT In 2022 and Beyond
In September of 2022 I will continue with training and supervision on ABFT. If you feel you know of a teen who would benefit from working on depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation through this type of therapy, visit my contact page to schedule an appointment or free 15 minute consultation. Link
If you are interested in hearing about my work with adults through individual counseling or couples/family counseling click here and here respectively.
- Sapolsky, R (2017) Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst.Penguin Books.
- Diamond, G, Diamond G, Levy, S. (2014) Attachment-Based Family Therapy for Depressed Adolescents. American Psychological Association