What was, what is, and what (may) never be

What do you remember about being a teenager?

 My memories of adolescence are a push-pull of opposing forces. The teen years were a confusion of insider jokes and outsider status, of sweat and insecurity, of styling mousse and endless possibility. Sheer joy intermingled with instability, sadness, and trauma and the path I traveled was perilous—but often exciting. Music and fashion were paramount. Crushes were huge. Pulled by forces that felt beyond me, my moods had the strength and inevitability of the tides. The possibility of managing my emotions would have been as alien as the concept of turning 50. 

It can be easy from the vantage of age and the calming of circumstance to wonder if I ever really was fifteen, filled with the surety of pop culture truths and the power of love to save me. Now I’m the parent to a teen (albeit one with a very different temperament and life experience) and a therapist to teens. And I’ve been working on this post for a long stretch, trying to think about how to meld lived and learned knowledge into something palatable for my professional blog.

Former adolescent, parent to an adolescent, therapist to adolescents . . . my training intermingles with what was and what is. My life history and process of working through deepen my therapeutic approach. Similarly, my best writing is rooted in the personal. However, writing in this way in a more professional space feels vulnerable and, perhaps, questionable. In addition, the concepts I am most curious about don’t lend themselves to click-friendly, prescriptive writing. 

For example, I’ve been curious lately about the effects on parents of having an adolescent. Based on parents I’ve encountered and my own internal mapping, I believe your attachment and trauma history can affect how you experience a teen’s natural process of individuation. A person’s childhood relational trauma, particularly if unexamined and unprocessed, can make parenting an individuating, authority-challenging teen painful (think Ghosts in the Nursery a decade later). Old wounds tied to attachment and abandonment reopen. Parents may respond to this in various, often unconscious, ways as they try to manage their emotions, ranging from totally checking out to intruding on their child’s life.

Crossing Paths by psychologist Laurence Steinberg is one of the few broad studies on the topic of the effects of adolescents on their parents, albeit a dated and not necessarily culturally diverse one. Steinberg focuses on the rise of youth contrasted with the lessening possibilities of midlife. He also looks at the parent’s general life satisfaction. If things are bad in your job and/or marriage, if you have little outside of your children to provide verve and purpose to your life, well, chances are that their adolescence is going to hit you hard.

Steinberg sorts the potentially more challenging emotional effects of parenting a teen into five categories: jealousy, abandonment, loss, powerlessness, and regret. At the same time, he doesn’t examine the potential early life causes of those feelings. True, this focus is perhaps not absolutely necessary to spur change. Recognizing that you may be feeling less “acceptable” emotions about your child’s blossoming and sudden disrespect can help you cope. In addition, having other interests and connections apart from your kids is generally a good thing. But there are other layers beyond the immediate, beyond the here and now, that are useful to excavate and grasp. Without awareness of the effects of the past we may find ourselves replicating or avoiding it, closing ourselves off to what is vulnerable and unfed within.

The questions I am asking, the hunches I am carrying, are not easily researched or explained. My own early life, heavily examined, written and rewritten, is close to the surface. My tendency to reflect upon my fears of and reactions to parenting the boy, who will someday (soonish) leave us, keeps me—I hope—from holding him back. It keeps me—I hope—from disappearing to avoid the pulls of his long leave-taking upon my vulnerable heart. But would writing about my personal experiences potentially help parents of clients without freaking them out?

Yeah. Well. I don’t know. It’s complicated. There are no neat how-to lists, no rules for smarter parenting and better businessing for these circumstances. So I post it here, for a very limited distribution, as I work it through. I was young, lonely, and angry once. I grew up and felt much of the same. Still do sometimes, though I’ve learned how to cope with those feelings, how to ride them out. And when parenting makes me feel like an abandoned child, I remind myself that I am a grownup and will be connected to this boy one way or another as long as life flows between us.

(Maybe don't) tell the story

Things my (former) therapist told me that I wish she hadn’t:

• Details of a night in the early 1970s when her husband, on a manic binge, picked up a woman at a well-known downtown eatery, got knifed by said woman, and called my therapist to take him to the (mental) hospital

• Her regrets over an affair she had with a friend of her husband, a man who took advantage of her youth and vulnerability in the wake of the knifing

•  “Yes, go back to school now! Better to do it now, before you’re 40!” I was 41.

• The weight issues of her daughter and the daughter’s partner

These revelations, given over a friendly cup of tea as we eased into our sessions, were conversational. My appointment was the first of the day. The husband was long dead. Perhaps her border collie was not a good listener—she needed someone to talk to. Though the conversations always made me uncomfortable, it wasn’t until later that I realized their inappropriateness.

Then there was the marriage counselor (a different marriage, a different state, a different time). Intuiting the relationship’s inevitable breakup, he provided a dramatic narrative to counter our lack of spark. He described a violent scene from his childhood, a habitually abusive parent, the resultant broken arm. You say your childhood trauma affects your ability to trust—it could be worse! he seemed to be saying. I remember nothing else about the therapy except the sandwiches my then-husband and I would eat before session in a park near the office.

And so now I am a therapist. I understand the urge to say too much. A client’s story or situation can activate the churn within. Health history. Family history. Depression history. Family depression history. That sinking feeling. Self-hatred. Fear. Anger. Dread. Shame. Embarrassment. All universally human experiences, all part of me, all tugged upon in session at some point. Yes, I survived what was an objectively traumatic adolescence. I’ve watched people die. I know what it’s like to not be chosen, to feel the hollowness of rejection. I was that age and angry, so angry, too. Does this shared experience–if you accept the premise that there is something shared about it—mean that I truly understand their experience? And if I do “truly” understand, does my expression of this apparent understanding help the person in front of me?

The answer is not straightforward. Sometimes it may help to share. But the potential to cause harm when disclosing is always there. I have self-disclosed in ways that have been appreciated. I have self-disclosed in ways that were more about me than the person in front of me. It helps to take time to think about whether self-disclosure is in service to the client. Very little good comes out of giving in in the moment to an impulse to share.

I don’t remember why we ended marriage therapy. Our time in that city and in the marriage was short. I stopped seeing that individual therapist after she broke her leg, had to change the parameters of her practice, and let me know via text. Both still see clients. Perhaps both continue to be leaky containers, allowing their own pain to spill into their sessions. As for me, I become more careful over time, crafting my boundaries, allowing a little room for sharing when indicated and carefully thought through, not perfect, but human and, hopefully, healing.