I feel like writing a simple statement: Smart teens

 

I see several teenage clients. Four of them are different as I’ve known them for a longer time and we keep up a text-mes­sage chat outside of sessions. That is, they’re basic­ally friend clients. They are 16, 17, 17 and 18. All are depressed but have “special­ties.” There’s the stifled super-bright one who falls into long silences fre­quently, trapped in her head. There’s the girl whose parents are both solip­sists – entirely self-seeing – and who, cut off, has come to think much too much about her inferi­ority and friend­less­ness. (She is very pretty and sweet and by that account would have lots of friends.) There’s the young man whose rare happy or humor­ous moments strike me as almost inap­prop­riate, fleeing instantly from his life­long stolid base. And there’s the hyper-gabby junior with a non-injur­ious Border­line Person­ality who speaks the most dire self-verdicts in a bright and breath­less voice.

One of my main and continual therapeutic thoughts about them is hope, hope that with my help they will move through the teen phase without crum­bling, with­out giving up.

Do teens like these become happy after oppres­sive or aban­doned child­hoods and a year or more of therapy?  Their parents never changed, despite my meet­ings with them and letters to them. I did not replace these parents, of course, so the pri­­mary healing agent was never there. Alice Miller talked about an “enlight­ened wit­ness,” one person who really looks in an alone child’s eyes, believes her story and under­stands her. Is that heavy­weight enough, though, to really sit along­side and meld with the significantly miss­ing parent? “Sometimes” or “rarely” is the best answer I can give.

I still, after twenty-two years, believe that most adoles­cents don’t grow up, and that most adults didn’t. If we were to become aware of the inside of our think­ing and feel­ing, we would recog­­nize the child always there. This points to the pri­mary flaw in the human species. With unhealed pain, we become mis­directed: acting out, hold­ing in, fall­ing out of time. Animals in the wild don’t have this problem because they don’t have a powerful neo­cortex that blocks pain from flowing out. Pic­ture all the smart vermin who’ve infested the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion to see, in the extreme to be sure, the flower of homo sapiens: thought and poison symbi­otically fused.

I enjoy being an enlightened witness, the companion that (I hope) will make a difference.