Simple Truths: Older teens with problematic parents

 

I saw this great 16-year-old boy for therapy from March to November 2019. He suffered a deep depression based in three factors: father’s abandonment early on, single mother working all the time and not attuned to her sons’ emotional lives, a Nazi-like older brother who hated and mentally trashed the younger boy daily. The mental abuse, his entire, pervasive home atmosphere, wore him down to a soul-level depression.

But by the end of the nine months, he was in good spirits, had evaporated much of the depres­sion, and had dealt with the rest. Four sessions before we terminated, I asked him to draw Violet Oaklander’s The Cave. The therapist has the client suspend disbelief while he narrates a modestly magical story that ends with – on a lucky day – the client’s unexpected mental-feeling image or memory. My note:

Drawing of the cave seemed to have come from the sponta­ne­ous uncon­scious. There was a field, a beach, the ocean with a huge wave, and a second “secret path” (mirroring the path in the narra­tive I had given) leading to a locked gate. Within the enclosure were the “dark” parts of his life, the demons, forever locked away. We discussed what might happen in the future, his future, in regard to these “buried demons.”

Why did this young man change? He had his grades where he wanted them, a new girlfriend who was not a “neurotic man with boobs” like the previous one, his music writing and performing, his surfing, his hippie van ready to launch, and an actual career, courtesy of his uncle, as fallback money. Better than these, he had an expansive spirit with only a shadow of existential malaise.

My theory is that while his mother was largely absent, and for years knew nothing of her older son’s abusiveness and the younger’s torment, she was decent and not intrusive into his life. She didn’t hector him about chores, grades, messy room. She lightly ema­nated quiet care and a good (though clue-deficient) heart. When he finally revealed to her the years of mental abuse (the brother had left for the military), she believed every molecule of it and invited him to have therapy. I saw her a few times. I couldn’t fault her for a thing.

My other teens, and there have been a lot of them, do not have a locked gate and enclosure to bury – until, in a few years, their autonomous adult can face their parents – their demons. Their sadness and “deep pit” of depression remain surface, despite all my efforts. I suspect my main gift to them is: You are not alone.

Why is there little change? My theory is the fact that their parents are accusers, drill sergeants, loudly anxious, PTSD angry, categorically more important than their child, cruel (“you should have been a girl”), amazingly absent (fathers who don’t leave the garage), emotionally inces­tuous, crazy­making, intellec­tual nincompoops, broken-record screamers, needy of their child’s support. Parents who do not know the concept of their teen as a separate, worthy person. You would not believe how legion these parents are.

These teens go through their senior year of high school with burdens planted in the first few years of their life, which have become their dysfunctional character. One girl, still very young, had had the independence not to accept her parents’ religion. In turn, they distanced from her and never rejoined her. At 17, she had an unusual way of gesticu­lating with her arms and with a dramatic lilt of her voice. It all projected fakery as it said: I must be more than me, because it’s dreadful to feel me.

One doesn’t change these youngsters at a very deep level because they are still enmeshed in their home, tied to their umbilical bond, even if in angry rejection. I sug­gested to one 17-year-old who I hope will go to a great college, out of state, in a year, that she should return to therapy when she is around twenty-five years old. Now, it can offer support and knowledge. Then, it can deep-grieve the loss of those parents.