How Therapy for Teens Can Help Your Family: Part One

Families are like stained-glass windows, bound by various colors, styles, shapes, and values. They are non-symmetrical, messy, yet somehow beautiful when plastered together for all to see and appreciate.  While the pieces of your family are meant to make a perfectly imperfect work of art, sometimes it just feels plain chaotic. The pieces of the glass are unique; some take up more space than others, some are brighter and call more attention, and others take up just a tiny corner. Just as every stained-glass window is not alike, neither are families. Therapy for teens and their families calls attention to all these differences by naming them, embracing them, and encouraging change within them. The goal is for all to find in each piece, worthiness and purpose to ensure a healthy and happy family.

This blog is the first segment of “How Therapy Can Help Your Family.” The first way we will unpack this complicated system of people is by addressing the members of your family that seem as though they shine brightly, burn out quickly, and perhaps feel like they might shatter at any point – your teens. 

The Chaos that is Adolescence

The miraculous part about being a teen is that we’ve all suffered through it (in therapy, we call this “universality”). The growing pains, the emotions (the wildly shifting, deeply felt EMOTIONS), fitting in, finding our people, and somehow communicating all of this without having the words to do it. Without these skills of expressing ourselves fully, our emotional expression inevitably comes out in anger, door slamming, and other behaviors that show up when our bodies are still figuring out what the hell is going on. 

It can be dizzying to step on and off the rollercoaster that is adolescence, and like addiction (we will talk about this in a later blog), it is a process that affects the entire family. Parents, siblings, and even the family dog feel the tension and pressure that emits off of teens trying to manage their emotions and behaviors while trying to figure it all out. If families do not have the right words, self-awareness, understanding, or courage to address these complex feelings with empathy, it can make for an isolating place for everyone involved.

Some of the most common things that teens are dealing with are housed in the body: developing new hormones, emotional dysregulation, and navigating feelings toward themselves sexually, socially, and intellectually. Below are some ways that teen therapy can help your family.

How Therapy for Teens Can Help

Whether it is individual or family therapy, or even parenting counseling, having a helping space, where the goal of healing and understanding is shared, can begin to repair complicated family dynamics. Many families struggle with basic modes of communication because they often recreate their own family of origin dynamics (who hasn’t swore they’d become their mother?), or they don’t have the right tools to connect with each other. Below are some ways that you can seek help for either yourself or the whole unit.

1. Teen therapy addresses whole-family communication dynamics

Therapy is a lot of talking, learning, and experiencing one another in new ways. Therapy helps families with teens by joining them together through basic ground rules. You might have your own set of explicit rules at home, such as not leaving your trash out, being respectful to one another, or not watching TV past 10 pm. But what you might miss that often gets detected in therapy are the themes and patterns of communication-based on everyone’s personal identities (e.g., introversion vs. extroversion, cultural differences, generational slang, and social media norms). A therapist can help you name these things while implementing new ways of communicating based on active listening, reflection, and deeper presence with one another.

2. Family therapy provides a safe space for teens and parents to talk more openly while suspending judgment

Because teens have difficulty finding their way through their emotions, their communication might often show frustration. Imagine being a small child and getting your feelings hurt – all you can really do is cry, scream, and stomp around, because the emotions are powerful, but aren't easily related back to thought. Therapy is a place for teens to get heard and validated while being guided towards the right words to be able to share their experiences with other family members. 

3. Teen therapy acknowledges the invisible struggles that are hidden behind fear and loneliness

The mood swings and behaviors you see on the surface are very often just mechanisms to deal with what’s underneath: fear and loneliness. One example is the confusion of one’s gender and sexual/affectional identity and orientation. This can be a fearful and tentative process for most teens, as feeling accepted is a main concern. When teens find themselves outside of “conventional” norms of heterosexism and cisgender identities, making sense of this is a tough process. Therapy can be a way that teens find support and meaning to their feelings without fear of rejection or retribution. Another example is the fear of not being socially accepted or valued based on past abandonment of a family member. If the teen perceived abandonment by a parent as a child, this teen can think that any new person that comes in their life could leave as well. This creates difficulty in teens opening up, socializing, and feeling safe and valued.

4. Therapy helps you tell the family’s story

As a family, you can tell your collective story by highlighting the best and making sense of the worst of each member’s experiences. There is power in saying, “This is who we are, this is what we have overcome, these are our values, and this is what we want to accomplish together and individually, to find purpose in our lives.” Therapy for teens (and their families) can help teens recount their stories from the point of view of strength and resilience, to find their worth, their motivation, and their purpose for the future. 

5. Teen therapy makes room for all emotion while playing for the same team

When you’re living with teens, it often feels like a game of chess. Being in therapy together can help you all get on the same team again, making for better collaboration, rule-following, and speaking each other’s language. The more you can help your teens make the transition to strong, independent people, the more they can see you (the parent) as a source of knowledge and support, and open themselves up for a loving relationship with you. A teen therapist not only can help your teen find their voice and better understand themselves but also help you (the parents) make changes as well, in order to break unhealthy patterns and create a happier and more functional family environment.

For more information on how family and individual therapy can help you and your teens, please visit us at https://www.havenfamilytherapy.com/teen-therapy-and-family-therapy