Notes on validation, adolescence, and the work of becoming for everyone

Sept 4, 2024 We’ve established that teenagers lie. A lot. The previous two postings have sparked juicy conversations and questions. A Part 3 was needed. Meet Wilder I started seeing Wilder when he was 7 years old and fully living up to his name. Wilder had experienced significant infant and early childhood trauma. In elementary school, Wilder was bullied to the point where he had to change schools. Once Wilder entered middle school he became the one who bullied. And then he s

Aug 21,2024- The easy answer to the question, “How do you have a real conversation with a teenager?” is: “Just talk with them and listen.” Of course, it’s much easier said than done. If you’ve been around teens in any capacity, you may have found it to be ineffective, frustrating, infuriating, or your attempts just land like a load of bricks. Crickets. Teenagers, while they can present as strange beasts residing in worlds unto themselves, are just young people going through s

Aug 7, 2024- I attempt to tie a few threads together in this posting as succinctly as possible. Each thread holds enough weight to warrant its own separate book. To begin, take a moment to reflect on these questions. What do they bring up for you about your relationships, your lived life, and your unlived life? What gets me up in the morning? What is of value that I must show up for? Do I have a sense of purpose in my life? Where do I belong and how do I contribute to the gre

Jul 24, 2024- If there is anything that will crack the foundations of a relationship, it is being lied to, being deceived. That loss of trust is hard to repair, yet lying is a way to keep a secret, to maintain an intimate interior world. There is no other age group, in my experience, that requires a secret life than adolescence. The need for peers, the ongoing attachment with families, and the burgeoning need for connection with the larger world does not mitigate the teen’s o

Jul 10, 2024- Teenagers lie. In fact, they lie frequently. Research suggests that we tell more lies during adolescence than at any other time in life. Studies show that many of us lie about once a day, and we lie most often to our family and friends rather than strangers. These numbers don’t include how often we self-deceive. We lie, and adolescents as a group lie the most. Whether it’s normal or not, nothing can cause a rupture between teenagers and adults quite like a lie.

Jun 26, 2024- One of my favorite and, I feel, one of the most important concepts to teach to teenagers is integrity. It’s a word we hear often, and if you ask a teenager what it means to them, they know they know the word and the sense of the word, but they don’t really know what it means. Often, the opportunity to talk with them about integrity is when they tell us of a situation when they were either in their integrity or they were out of integrity. Then we get to talk abou

Jun 12, 2024- We are often proud of our kids, love them, worry and fret over them. But do we delight in them? This delight creates potent and sometimes lifelong shifts in our relationships with the young people in our lives and in the young people’s sense of belonging. I still maintain that parents are the best therapists for their teenagers but only when the parents are able to emotionally regulate in the face of teenager-hood. And that’s hard. Enter the village, those of us

May 29, 2024- I have more than a few clients like Arin, older teenagers and young adults who carry the beliefs that time and money spent on a particular path or project is wasted when things don’t go according to plan or others don’t approve. Arin was 19 years old and had just finished her 3rd semester in college. She had chosen to major in accounting because it was practical and made the most sense for the future. Her parents gave their hearty stamp of approval. However, thi

May 15, 2024- I will begin by simply inviting you to see every point of disruption in your relationships with teenagers as an opportunity to bring in courage and fierce love. The developmental stage of Adolescence** is, in essence, one long process of transformation and also one of conflict, given that transformation requires conflict and comes out of conflict. While we could despair in the face of long years of these long difficult years, bear with me as I make the argument