Talking to teenagers

Photo by Morgan Basham on Unsplash Anxiety lesson 6 – Expression of feelings Its not uncommon for people with anxiety disorders to withhold their true feelings. There are many reasons for this, one common one is the need to be in control and a fear of losing it. When feelings have been denied over time, anxiety can start to manifest. I wrote about this briefly in Anxiety lesson 1 potential causes https://helenharveycounselling.blogspot.com/2017/10/anxiety-learning-potential-causes.html Because people with anxiety/phobic tendency tend to be emotionally reactive and have very strong feelings, the expression of them is even more important for their emotional well-being. When I did my degree in Person Centred Therapy, it was a requirement that you checked in with yourself and others in the morning, also a portion of the day was dedicated to personal development. Again, this is a discipline that requires practice, to notice and name feelings and the memories/events that a...

Yes, you can be anything you want to be, with hard work, exceptional luck, patience, persistence and natural skill…X-Factor auditions are full, how about the BAE systems apprenticeship? I went to a Christmas singing concert last week to watch my daughter and others sing 70’s and 80’s disco tracks as that was the theme of the concert. The concert was organised by the local singing school. They all did well, some as young as five braving the glaring stage lights to perform a song, I couldn’t do it. My daughter has natural singing talent, after the show she asked me for my feedback, I said she had done really well, although she could have given it a bit more oomph. She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night. The uncomfortable reality is… she practised the song at singing school for a few Saturday mornings, learning the lyrics and timing of the song but then she relied on the assumption that she would wing it, only practising for half an hour for the 3 days before the...

Anxiety lesson 5 Negative thinking and self-talk Do you feel like you are putting on a mask, when you have all this anxiety and you don’t want the world to know? Do you have constant negative chatter going on? We assume that situations and not cognitions (your judgement of threat) is responsible for your anxiety. Anxious and fearful people are much more likely to overestimate the intensity of threat, which of course then leads to avoidance of situations. We do this by reinforcing the negative all the time with negative thoughts and self-talk. Negative thoughts and self-talk is automatic, we have hundreds of negative thoughts everyday and catching them as they run through your brain and looking at them closer is a very difficult thing indeed and takes a lot of practice. YOU CAN LEARN TO SLOW DOWN AND NOTICE YOUR NEGATIVE TALK With self-talk comes a whole host of other information that is lumped together such as images, memories and associations. Identifying sel...

When was it that we agreed to buy the Adidas, and pay their mobile bill...without expecting cooperation. Appropriate for this time of year, when requests are frequent but a helping attitude is not. Back in the summer, a friend explained that they were trying to get a break down south at their parents with their two children, one 9 and one 14. The 14-year-old was refusing to go. My friend was asking ' what am I meant to do, physically man handle him into the car?' I looked over at the teenager son riding a £190 scooter with Nike trainers and Adidas tracksuit, talking on his iPhone 6 and said to myself “THIS IS ALL THE WRONG WAY AROUND” When did we start to feel so disempowered in the investment/return arrangement of our children? The teenager version of adult life looks like this. You leave for work 5 minutes before your meant to arrive there, you arrive and sit at your desk with your arms folded and your head on the desk. Every now and agai...

  Photo by 胡 卓亨 on Unsplash I’m going to say something conversional now, I will get comments and dislikes. People may question whether I know my stuff, but the simple fact is, in my opinion, mindfulness is not an effective enough therapeutic intervention for children and adolescents. The therapeutic benefit of mindfulness is hard to dispute…for adults. It is great for the people that have practised it and managed to maintain it in everyday life, but I see a lot of young people that say it’s hard to get used to and doesn’t work. It doesn’t help that mindfulness has been sold as a ‘treatment’ for anxiety, you’re going to become the non-anxious and chilled person you see on travel adverts. The truth is that you will be able to ‘manage’ your anxiety with this practice. Mindfulness is being in the present moment, paying attention with the senses to the present thing we are experiencing. It is calming and restorative, but it takes practice and feels very opposite t...

Photo by Sorasak on Unsplash Maintaining causes of anxiety Avoidance is a major player in the maintenance of anxiety, avoiding an activity or object (external stimulus) or an image, memory (internal stimulus) will ensure your anxiety remains firmly in place. Avoidance feels good because it gives us a major feeling of relief, you don’t have to tolerate the terrible anxious state. All the time we do this though we are hardwiring our anxiety. A less extreme version of avoidance is to face the anxiety provoking situation, but to employ safety behaviours, these are things we do that allow us to get through the situation (some people would describe it as endure the situation) When people suffer acute paralysing anxiety they describe living as just surviving. If you think about safety behaviours as shields that prevent new learning taking place, for example: ·        Sit on the edge of a group, not really interacting and hoping you won’t be notic...

What were the media influences we relied upon as teenagers to navigate the world of fashion, culture and friendship in the 80's? They were magazines with proper editors who made the final decision on appropriateness and topical content. It was Jeff Banks on the clothes show telling you what was “in fashion” or as they say now 'on point' It was Grange Hill showing you the valuable lessons in friendships, World in Action making you aware of the bigger injustices worldwide and John Craven delivering the news in the kindest child-friendly way on Newsround. Our media influences were funnelled and filtered to ensure the content matched the audience. How did we know Constance Carroll Heather shimmer lipstick was all the rage? j17 told us. How did you know if your friend was in to chat with, the phone was engaged, then you biked yourself round and stayed until just before crossroads finished and biked back.   The point I am trying to make is that living in th...