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

Dec 20, 2023- If I hadn’t been a teacher of adolescents first, I’m pretty sure that my initial therapeutic encounters with teenagers would have gone sideways quickly. The young people who ask for therapy or can see that perhaps it might be of personal benefit to them come in, for the most part, ready to go. But the teens who come into therapy either court- or adult-ordered are quite often resistant at best and recalcitrant at worst. Recalcitrant – such a great word. Oxford La

Dec 6, 2023- I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Ann-Katrin Bockmann—psychologist, Internal Family Systems therapist, and researcher at the University of Hildesheim in Hildesheim, Germany—earlier this year when she hosted a focus group on IFS and children. We found common ground in our passionate belief that more focused attention is needed regarding the tenets of IFS and how they apply to working with children and adolescents. In this recorded interview/conversation we t

Nov 22, 2023- Rosa had been a counselor at a residential adolescent crisis center for almost 7 years when she scheduled a consultation with me. She explained that recent changes created a work environment that had become, in Rosa’s words, “toxic and dysfunctional.” She was almost ready to resign but was reluctant to leave her adolescent clients and felt that there must be another solution. “I love my kids but I feel like I’m doing them a disservice and really should move on.

Nov 8, 2023- A common issue I hear from adults about teenagers is their lack of accountability for their behaviors, mistakes, and fuck ups. Parents, teachers, probation officers, therapists, employers—-all want and need teenagers to be accountable. How do we do this? Let me introduce you to Madden. I worked with Madden and his family through his very rocky journey from middle school to high school graduation. When Madden was 14 years old he found himself in a lot of trouble w

Oct 25, 2023- School refusal is a complex problem. In fact, it’s been a problem going back at least as far as 1932 when researchers were writing about truancy and school attendance problems (SAP). The return to in-person school after the COVID-19 lockdown correlates with the continuance of rising numbers of school refusal in the USA, the UK, Australia, France, and Indonesia, among other places worldwide. Complex, indeed. However, there are things that schools can do. School r

Oct 11, 2024- Adolescence can be difficult under the best of circumstances. True transformative processes are not easy, and struggle is to be expected. To suffer, according to the etymology of the word, is to undergo, bear, or endure. Think of the image we always associate with transformation—the caterpillar-to-butterfly process. Like the caterpillar/butterfly, the transformation wroughts beauty, and it requires an undoing of its original form to such an extreme degree that t

Sep 27, 2023- One of my best and most favorite parts of myself is the one that still holds all the idealism that came along when I was a teenager in the early 70’s. This part of me believes that the world is worth saving, that people are worth all the blood, sweat, and tears, and that there is a definitive way forward to an equitable and sustainable world. And I’m happy to keep subscribing to that belief, even though it is born of innocence and naiveté However, this Idealisti

Sep 13, 2023- I’ve had many inquiries this summer about teenagers and their anger, how to deal, and what to do. Is this anger normal? Should I be worried? Parents, caregivers, and adults who are in the sphere of adolescent energy often feel like pulling their hair out, wondering “what is it with teenagers and their anger!?!” Anger, because it is one of our four basic emotions, is a given. It’s a thing! It’s not something that we are going to get away from unless we become a c

Aug 30, 2024 -Tom was a young man in his early 20’s when he first came to my office. His presenting issues were suicidality, intense social anxiety, difficulty generating and sustaining close relationships, and what I suspected were some dissociative episodes. During the intake, I asked him, as I do all of my new clients, if he had experienced any trauma during his life. He denied any trauma which seemed at odds given his symptoms. Over the next few years as we met week after