Talking to teenagers

School is a strenuous task for the introverted teenager, the noise, lights, chatter, teacher discipline, dinner que etc, introverts need to recharge periodically, they need to have some alone time. They are not shy, they are not socially anxious (although the interaction, if too much can make them feel that way) A teenage client described going to the toilet and locking herself into the cubicle at break and dinner to have some time in which she didn’t have to interact with ANYONE. This is not how any teenager should be feeling in school. Our teenagers spent 1,110 hours in school in an academic year, 139 of them could be being spent in the toilet cubicles. The school report may often say ‘ Sophie needs to be more vocal in class’ ‘ Sophie is a bright girl, she needs to believe in her ability a bit more’. At parents evening the teachers will reiterate this message ‘Sophie is a great asset to the class, we just need to hear a bit more of her’ So how do we as parents make...

This post may upset some people, or worse still ‘offend’, please understand that when I write this I am not disrespecting any of the above. What I hope to do is raise an awareness of the harm that can be created in a wish to follow something so absolute with no flexibility and a disregard for autonomy that it affects future thinking and well being as a whole. I am writing about the extreme . SOMETIMES when children have been raised by parents where anxiety is high and beliefs and rules are fixed, the expectation doesn’t come from the parents but the code that the family is surrounded by. This is about parents as individuals needing to feel certain, to cancel out any anxiety…and with it any shift in thought and feeling. When parents are extreme in their religious or militant belief or uncompromising in their non-conformist way of being, they leave little room for their children to develop their own signature. Put simply, it in life in all or nothing terms. These ...

Are you a child of Perfectionism Parenting – “this might make them happy”…How you end up frazzled and anxious! Last year I saw a client who was studying at university and was aimed for a first by the end of her second year. This was quite amazing as she had started to feel low and lonely, her mood affected her work and she stopped going to 80% of her lectures half way through the academic year, that was when she contacted me for counselling. Her goal for therapy was to regain the motivation she had felt for the course and feel passionate about her chosen subject again. After the initial session and quite a bit of exploration together, I said that in my experience I thought it would take more to feeling better than just university related motivation, her eyes filled up “ yes, I think so, I feel like part of me has always felt this low and anxious” ·        Over the weeks we went on to explore her feelings about attending lectures (she would m...