Adolescent Therapy.
“When I Was Your Age”
—Every parent, ever
Time for a quick poll :)
How do you feel about sentences that start with, “When I Was Your Age”?
“When I was your age, I had to walk 10 miles to school!”
“When I was your age, we didn’t even have cell phones.”
“When I was your age, I never acted that way.”
My guess is that most of you tune people out when they start a sentence like that. Okay, so they had to walk 10 miles. They didn’t have cell phones. And they supposedly never acted “that” way.
But they also never knew what it’s like to be bullied online. When they were your age, they had to literally pass PAPER NOTES to start rumors and it might’ve gotten to 30 people by the end of the day. But today, all it takes is one click of a button and BAM. The whole school knows.
They never knew what it’s like to live through a pandemic and have to do online learning. They don’t know what it’s like to be monitored CONSTANTLY. They can track where you are, what assignment you haven’t handed in (yet!), who you’re talking to, even how fast you accelerate when you drive (yes, there’s an app for that). If you feel like you live under a microscope, you’re not alone.
Anxiety
Maybe it’s not anxiety—maybe it feels like this…weird, yucky feeling that you just can’t shake off. Sometimes it can feel so overwhelming that all you want to do is crawl into a hole. It’s hard to talk about it with your friends because you don’t even know why you’re feeling this way. You put things off and procrastinate but then you get stressed BECAUSE you’re procrastinating and it’s this vicious cycle that you get stuck in
Depression
Depression is real. It can be caused by all kinds of things. It can be caused by traumatic things that happened to you. It can be caused by being bullied, betrayal, and feeling left out. It can come from feeling lonely and isolated. It can come from feeling like you’ll never be good enough and really affect your self-esteem to the point where you ask yourself, “why bother?”
Anger
The pressure of expectations is REAL. Maybe people always compare you to your siblings or your friends (and not in a good way). Or they say things like, “you are capable of so much! you’re going to go do GREAT things someday!” (yeah, no pressure…) The stress of trying to keep up can make you irritable, moody, shut down, scared, you name it, and it doesn’t help that some of us were born with extra fire in us. This fire leads us to do and say impulsive things that we regret later on
Now for the good news.
If you found yourself nodding yes to any of the above things, the good news is that you’ve come to the right place! Before we “officially” meet for the first time, I’d be happy to have a quick chat with you. You can ask me questions you might have. I’ve gotten all kinds of questions from “are you gonna tell my parents everything I say?” (the answer is no) to “what if we don’t vibe after the first appointment?” to even “Julie, have you ever smoked pot?” I will answer you honestly and I won’t pretend to be perfect, because I’m not. And if we decide to work together, I will treat you as an equal. I won’t judge you. I won’t tell you what to do. You can be the captain and I’ll be your co-pilot.