Teenagers and Non-Survival Behaviors
Dear L— [see ‘Eating Distresses and Parenting’ article by L—],
I am a raised-in-RC female who struggled with many non-survival behaviors during my teen years, including some of the ones your daughter has mentioned to you. They started when I was thirteen.
It is good that your daughter is talking to you. Many, many girls do things like these but never talk about them. It’s great that you are discharging, thinking, and planning to do special time with her.
Here are some of my thoughts and a bit about my experience:
During their teenage years, many young people face harsher forms of oppression than what they have encountered before. At age thirteen I had intense, daily exposure to racism, classism, sexism, young people’s oppression, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and “mental health” oppression. All were more overt than the versions I had seen before. Nothing in my life had prepared me for that, and I didn’t know how to talk about it, since most people around me were acting like it was “normal.”
Your daughter may benefit from two-way counseling (if she isn’t doing it already). The early teen years are a great time for young people who have done family work to transition to two-way Co-Counseling. Doing that would help her get access to more resource and perspective from more people. Two-way Co-Counseling also helps young people realize they are powerful and can be a resource for someone else, which contradicts young people’s oppression.
Some big things may need to change in your daughter’s life. Every teenager I’ve known who has behaved in non-survival ways has had a life situation that was unworkable in some way. In my case, I needed things to change at home with my family, I needed help with some big physical health issues, and I needed to go to a different school. It took a while for me to figure that out because I didn’t even know it was possible to change those things. Discharging and getting perspective from other Co-Counselors helped me figure out what I needed. Most younger teenagers don’t get to make big decisions about their lives. Young women taking charge of their lives and making them better is a contradiction to young people’s oppression, sexism, and “mental health” oppression.
Young people, including teens, need to get a full picture of what’s possible in using RC. They need to see adults fighting as hard as they can against their own distresses. Despite growing up in RC, I didn’t know what “unbearable” distress was until my late teens. I had never seen anyone counseling on it. I didn’t even know it was possible to work on. Also, RC has a big emphasis on what happened very early in our lives. That’s good. But I got the impression as a teen that all of the “real” hurts were old, that what was happening to me in the present wasn’t bad, and that I should be able to “get through” it with discharge alone; without changing anything about my life.
Your daughter probably needs to have fun and do attention-out activities every day. Having fun every day is an important part of Janet Foner’s Five-Point Program for Getting Present and Staying That Way <www.rc.org/publication/journals/recovery_and_re-emergence/rr7/rr7_003_jf>. The early teen years are a time when young people sometimes feel they are “too old” to play in the ways they used to, but they haven’t figured out what to do instead. That was true for me.
I needed to have many close relationships with many people (inside and outside of RC). Relationships often get hard in the early teen years because of internalized young people’s oppression, which includes the message that young people’s relationships are not important and won’t last. Relationships are difficult to figure out. But having more relationships means having more connection, more people to have fun with, more perspective outside of our distress, and more resource.
For many years it wasn’t useful for me to counsel directly on any of the behaviors. Most people didn’t have much attention for them, and it was hard for me to get my attention out after the sessions I had on them. It worked much better for me to focus on having a lot of sessions, improving my life, and counseling with attention off distress (another part of the five-point program). Coming at it from an angle of holistically improving my life and my access to RC resource worked much better than discharging with the goal of stopping the behaviors. Once my life was better, and once I had enough resource to look at my unbearable-feeling distress, there was much less of a pull toward any of those behaviors.
I have great confidence in you—and in your daughter’s strength, resilience, and ability to fight for herself and her mind.
USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of women
(Present Time 204, July 2021)