Creative encounters with the Adolescent within.
The Shiftless Wanderer’s Guide to Your Inner Adolescent: A Book of Creative Journaling Encounters offers dozens of opportunities for the reader to find their way to the Adolescent parts who have been waiting for someone to remember them and to build a relationship with them.
Rather than the usual list of prompts, it offers creative journaling encounters: invitations to meet, listen to, and build a relationship with your Inner Adolescent. It is grounded in Internal Family Systems, inner parts work, and archetypal psychology, and it is written to be picked up by anyone. No IFS background required.
Inner Child work is everywhere. The Inner Adolescent is all too often overlooked. Yet the adolescent years are their own territory, and Adolescent parts are different from our Child parts. They ask for a different kind of attention. Inner Adolescent work is what carries us over the threshold into adulthood, and for many of us that crossing is still unfinished. These parts have been waiting a long time. They carry real gifts, and they need to know they belong.
Why the Inner Adolescent?
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Adults curious about their own inner world
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Anyone who felt unseen or invalidated as a teenager
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Readers drawn to inner work, journaling, and personal growth
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Therapists and helpers for their own work and their clients' (a secondary but real audience)
If you've wondered who you were during your teenage years, this is for you.
The book moves in three parts, with an introduction to open the way.
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The Approach: Gathering the Tools and Maps — the theories, concepts, and orientation that ready you for the journey.
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The Wandering: The Creative Journaling Encounters — six passages which include 27 creative journaling encounters.
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Arriving and Beginning: The Closing Passage.
You are invited to wander through the encounters, follow where your curiosity leads, and where your Inner Adolescents call. Available in both print and digital.
What's inside
A note from Robin
This book has been decades in the making, all the way back to my own Adolescence, a time of life that is still very much alive within me. The parts of me who hold the memories and experiences from Adolescence have powerfully impacted my life. I wanted to refer my clients to a book that could support them in their work with their Inner Adolescents. There wasn't one out there, so I wrote it. This is for who we were when we were navigating those teen years, for the parts within us who have been waiting for us to show up, and for the adolescents out there in the world who need us to show up to them with wisdom and courage. This work can do that.
The encounters, and the ideas beneath them, point back to the four guiding tools of The Shiftless Wanderer. Through them, you are invited to bring compassionate curiosity, love, and courage to your inner landscape and the parts you meet there. As you build relationships with your Adolescent parts, self-understanding and self-validation grow. You begin to understand the essential nature of Adolescence, and then to embody it.
Early praise
"I love your creation and know the world will receive your rich encouragement of Self-discovery equally so. This book has been gestating for a long duration, and will grow in the consciousness of writers, seekers, and creatives as they turn to acknowledge their adolescent self."
Brenda L.
FAQ
No. It's written for everyone, with no background needed.
No. It's a companion for your own reflection and inner work, not a replacement for therapy. It can sit alongside that work beautifully.
It's for adults, and it's about the Adolescent still within you. It's not a book for teens, though the work tends to ripple out to the young people in your life.
The book will be released in 2027! Join the waitlist to be the first to hear when it's available for purchase and to receive sneak peaks.
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