The teenage years are difficult ones, with many teens facing family troubles and problems at school dealing with teachers and peer pressure. Teens experience a wide variety of feelings such as anger, sadness and being overwhelmed with life around them. Therapy can help by having someone listening as teens talk about their problems and feelings and offering suggestions to help them.
Therapy can help teens in situations when:
- they feel stressed, depressed, shy, or worried
- they are dealing with changes in their family’s structure such as separation, divorce or remarriage
- they are faced with problems within their family such as addiction, abuse or alcoholism
- they are developing symptoms of an eating disorder such as dieting or overexercising
- they are dealing with the trauma or loss, or are worried about the world
- they are looking for help with becoming more outgoing, making more friends and building self-confidence
- they are inflicting self-injury
- they have a chronic illness such as asthma or diabetes
- they want to learn to deal with anger management or peer pressure
- they are dealing with a learning or attention problem, such as ADHD
- they want to change or eliminate a habit such as smoking, nail biting, overspending, or drug addiction
- they are facing the diagnosis of a serious problem like cancer, HIV or a sexually transmitted disease
Simply put, therapy offers support to teens who are experiencing difficult times in their lives. Therapy is beneficial but it’s difficult to search for help when you are going through tough times. Maybe you want to seek therapy or maybe it’s someone else’s idea. Parents and teachers sometimes suggest the idea of going to therapy after seeing a person they care about go through rough times, appear sad, depressed, upset or angry or experience weight loss or depression. When this idea is brought up, some people may feel relieved and happy with the suggestion. Some feel unsure, upset or embarrassed at the idea of seeking outside help.
Other times parents, teachers or courts order people to attend therapy due to behavior that is dangerous, unacceptable, self-destructive or illegal. Often, people resist doing something that they are made to do because it is someone else’s idea. However, learning what they can gain from therapy, and the process is like, makes it easier to accept the help.
What do you think is the most common reason why teens get therapy?