There is no need to establish what ‘going off the rails means’ because if you’ve come across this situation you’ll relate to this. At some point in parenting you realise your teenager needs freedom and it also happens to be the prime time for picking up devastating habits.
The level to which this is an issue for families can vary between abusive behaviour, suicidal individuals or issues such as anger spikes and adopting bad habits. Most likely the family will always keep this information secret due to reputation and the problems become pretty big in the family if this is not sorted early on. Eventually you get to the point where you have a pragmatic 13-30 year old who doesn’t take on good influence.
Finding a therapist for this kind of issue is really hard, fixing a 13-30 year old is no light issue and getting the pragmatic individual to agree willingly is even harder. In most cases I came across over lockdown, the situation involves a few family members and unresolved family conflicts. Each therapist has a preferred approach to get on the phone with the problematic individual and make them agree to therapy. If a professional therapist expects you to convince the 13-30 year old to take up therapy it’s known to cause plenty of complications such as you being seen as doubtful/judgemental for recommending them to see a therapist.
Here’s what the short term structure to handling the matter looks like:
- Recurring patterns report. This will tell us the common reactions this person is showing and their style to handle being challenged.
- Parking the past to one side to establish the need for short term wins. (Clearing the past is something that happens later because achieving forgiveness will only come from a place of self satisfaction.)
- Prioritising mental health. Most commonly done through building healthy friendships.
- Future scoping. Monitoring this to make sure their excuses are not creeping back into their conversions on this topic.
Once the steps in the short term are ticked off, a relationship is established with the person and revisiting underlying issues we feel that’ll come back and then the person can be cleared.
Remember when trying to help a 13-30 year old you’ll fall into the trap of making them feel challenged. Once that happens your influence over them may fade so if you’re left feeling ‘how can I get them to appreciate me?’ at this point you follow the 5 steps or get the right help in order to make sure these are applied.
Feel free to reach out if you have further questions and I hope this helps. Many times I’ve come across cases that could have been cleared years ago but we don’t talk about solutions enough therefore families get left in long-term misery.
