Talking to teenagers

Unhealthy control is insidious, it’s under the radar. The feeling it creates is that you are on the back foot, you are either unaware of the nature of it or you just desperately want to make the situation right. It confuses you and makes you angry, sad and sorry all in one go. It does the above things in adult life, but when we are children and we have no separate sense of self, that is where the blue print is created. One element of control in parenting is a parent who restricts their child emotionally, the child ultimately feels smothered. You may now as an adult look back and realise that what you felt as a child was scrutinized and inspected.   As an adult it is confusing, because parents who do this seem incredibly caring and bracket themselves into the ‘worry and fuss too much parents’. Parents who control by any different means do not trust and experience high anxiety themselves. When you have experienced this type of control as a child you may still feel a...

“I want to be unhappy, I want to be controlled to the point of exhaustion. I want to give up on doing things that fulfil me. I want to remain constantly confused, I want to have to check out every decision with my parents or partner. I want to be diminished to the point of hopelessness. I want to feel deeply sad for me and also deeply sad and sorry for the other person. I want to hope every day that this is going to change through me having courage or my parents, partner, boss, friend gaining awareness through some incident or event that forces the realisation on them.” NOBODY sets out in life to feel like this! Why a blog series on control and boundaries? Probably because boundaries are the single most important change you can make today to improve your family relationships, your friendships, your working life and your parenting. You could work on boundaries without learning about controlling behaviour, but people that have been controlled in childhood and adulthoo...

Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash Teenagers toxic love…Parents can feel distressed and frustrated at the addictive nature of their teens relationship. What's the best way to manage it? Every teenage relationship has an element of infatuation, they can be on the phone for hours on end, spending every free minute together at school, walking home together etc. This is how all the relationships start off, some remain healthy and happy but some become unhealthy in a short time. Boundaries become blurred, identities become enmeshed and the teenager can quickly lose a sense of self. This can become a huge breeding ground for jealousy. Jealousy is toxic in a relationship that has lost all perspective and the young person has no reference point to hold onto. It starts with probing questions that cause a little unsettling disagreement and progresses to checking phones and logging into each other’s social media. Both boys and girls talk about being ‘located’ on snapchat by th...