Important Topics

Self Advocacy: A Critical Life Skill for Young Women

By getting to know themselves so well on so many levels and by developing a confident voice, our students graduate better equipped to pursue the right circumstances for their own continued success. That’s true self advocacy.

Academic Success in a Treatment Setting

What is the ideal interplay between academics and treatment in a residential treatment program? Should they be treated as separate programs? Should they be integrated? Is one more important than the other?

Parent to Parent: Young Adult Treatment

We knew for certain that treatment was the right option. We were saving our daughter’s life, our family’s health…and maybe even our marriage. But in retrospect, we wish we’d had other parents to talk to prior to enrolling Rachel. Parents who were a few clicks further down the road to help normalize the process and give us some extra assurance that we were doing the right thing.

The Family System and Young Adult Treatment

By acknowledging a family’s normal systemic resistance to change and outwitting it, the family systems therapist can help revise even the most entrenched behaviors. It just takes some time, persistence, and maybe a little silly dancing.

Family Therapy: Whom to Include and Exclude

Since the family is a dynamic system comprised of deeply interdependent members, the more members who participate in treatment the better. In most cases this is true regardless of a member’s past role in the family. But there are exceptions.

College Withdrawals Don’t Have to be Permanent

Emergent adults are taking less of a straight line to adulthood than past generations did. They are more likely to take a year off or change schools once or more. Many are withdrawing from school for emotional reasons or due to adjustment difficulties. These interruptions can feel discouraging and lead to the conclusion that “I’m not meant for college.” So it’s important for parents and therapeutic staff to reframe these “failures” as “interruptions” in order to prevent discouragement and get the young person to re-engage college opportunities.

COLLEGE FOR EMOTIONALLY FRAGILE YOUNG ADULTS

College represents a major life transition for young adults and coincides with a period of profound cognitive and developmental changes. Because of this compounding of internal and external disruption, many young people who enter college encounter difficulties that they are ill-equipped to deal with and permanently withdraw prior to graduation. Currently, statistics for college failure hover at close to 50% nationally.

Life Changing Relationships: Tell us your Story!

Do you have a story of how a key relationship made a critical difference in your own journey toward healing? Whether it was a relative, a friend, a clergy, or even a pet, we’d love to hear your story.

Aunts, Uncles, and Aftercare

Research indicates that a strong, supportive extended family system may improve family members’ mental health and even reduce depression.

The Team: Understanding who does what on the Treatment Team

When you enroll your young adult in treatment, you’re suddenly part of a rather large team of people trying to help your child thrive. All the titles and roles on this treatment team can be a bit hard to navigate if you’re new to the therapeutic world. Following is a quick lexicon to help you understand who’s who and who does what on the treatment team.

Parenting: Working Through Painful Disclosures

Highly emotional reactivity to sexual disclosures can actually have the effect of re-traumatizing the young woman. Well-meaning efforts “fix” the problem can have the effect of dis-empowering the young woman, which is the opposite of the goal of treatment. The key contribution parents can make to treatment in these situations is to provide understanding and support, even as they struggle through their own painful emotions.

Rewiring Neurons in Young Women with PTSD

Therapists can help this neural “reprogramming” along by creating a safe, affirming, supportive context in which the young-adult trauma victim can explore past events but have a different emotional experience when they do this exploration. This helps the young woman re-experience previously traumatizing experiences without feeling overwhelmed emotionally.

A Parallel Process for Treating Parent/Child PTSD

It can be so difficult for a parent to process their child’s trauma that they may unwittingly minimize and deny the severity of the situation—it’s just too much to take in. When this is the case, parents may miss the forest for the trees, i.e. they may unintentionally ignore the underlying trauma in favor of a myopic, but perhaps less disturbing, focus on acting out behaviors that are merely symptomatic of the trauma. Their daughter’s distance, anger, anxiety, and situational avoidance may distract the parent from the painful cause of these symptoms.

Parenting and Family Life: Volunteering

While many teens initially view community service as an unwelcome chore, it becomes a highlight for many students over the course of treatment.

Parenting and Family Life: The Living Room

In Tajik homes, the home is designed in a circular pattern around a giant open air pillow room. This room is used for dining, entertaining, and hanging out. These homes are design such that all rooms flow into the center community space so that everyone has to regularly pass through it. But the real genius is that it’s filled with pillows! We can learn from the Tajik culture the importance of physical comfort for creating social comfort.

Parenting and Family Life: Mealtime

Make family meals fun by cooking something everyone will like (or even ordering in) and try to make dinner time fit everyone’s schedule to the extent you can. This approach is more likely to leave your family wanting more, rather than less, of this healthy family habit.

Balancing Structure and Freedom with a Young Adult

Jensen-Savoie recommends that parents imitate—to the degree practicable—the structure of the program their child graduated from. This reduces the likelihood of a bumpy transition and gives parents a playbook to work from as they learn to construct their own home structure. She recommends that parents focus on a few complimentary approaches as they work toward designing their own personalized approach to parenting their young adult.

Confidentiality in Young-Adult Treatment Programs

Fishburn emphasizes, though, that the key to effectively balancing confidentiality and sharing is to respectfully involve the student. “If they’re not the ones ultimately learning to make decisions about privacy versus sharing, we’re simply not equipping them for young adulthood.”

Nurturing Success in Young Adults with Autism-Spectrum Disorder

What happens when you place a young adult with Asperger’s syndrome or a non-verbal learning disability in a diverse treatment setting with behavioral, emotional, and substance abuse diagnoses? “Good things,” say experts, as long as that environment has the right combination of structure, repetitive cuing, customization, and—most importantly—nurturance.

The Power of Thanksgiving

Expressing gratitude to and for your young adult child can do wonders for your relationship, according to researchers. But since your young adult’s sincerity radar is generally set to “suspicion,” it’s critical to cultivate sincerity prior to effusing gratitude. That’s the hard part. Life isn’t always easy. There’s pain and frustration. It can be difficult to maintain a spirit of thankfulness when things aren’t going perfectly. But if you do manage to cultivate a genuinely thankful spirit, all of this well-researched psychological benefit is yours for a couple of easy words: “thank” and “you.”

Therapeutic Recreation for Young Adults

Physical movement, so lacking in today’s screen-obsessed adolescent culture, helps promote blood flow, cognition, alertness, and even lymphatic function—all of which have a profound impact on emotional well being. In fact, proper lymph function is entirely dependent up physical movement. Mood, in turn, is powerfully connected to proper lymph function. Certain lymphatic disorders are linked directly to emotional dysfunction such as depression and anxiety. In addition, exercise helps cleans the body of toxins and releases mood-enhancing endorphins. It can also cue the body to produce melatonin (a powerful antioxidant and natural sleep aid) on a cycle that helps prevent and resolve sleep disturbances.

Lying in Young Adulthood

Lying is a normal developmental activity for adolescents and young adults as they attempt to navigate an increasingly complex social and emotional universe. Adolescents are a bit like untrained pilots. They are in the cockpit of a powerful vehicle–namely their rapidly morphing bodies and brains. The vehicle is unfamiliar, powerful, and a bit out of their control. Even into their 20′s they’re still learning what all those levers and buttons do and how to navigate, steer, and land without crashing.

Like that new pilot, their world is suddenly operating in three dimensions instead of just two. It’s a lot to manage.

Lying is, unfortunately, a pretty typical strategy that young people use to try manage all that horsepower.

Conflict, Defiance, and ODD

Arguing, according to experts, is not only normal adolescent behavior–it’s developmentally necessary. Adolescence is a time of experimenting with and forging new levels of autonomy. Part of that process is learning how to express independent opinions that run contrary to those in authority. Your job is to help guide that behavior so that it evolves into normal adult independence, rather than chronic contrariety or even a disorder like ODD. So as far as effective parenting goes, the question is not whether or not your adolescent will argue with you (they will), but how to best engage that behavior.

Trauma and PTSD in Young Women

Trauma is a normal response to frightening or emotionally disruptive events. It can range from very short term emotional discomfort to acute stress disorder to post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Acute stress disorder, though uncomfortable and persistent, can resolve on its own in a matter of weeks or months. PTSD is marked by chronic, persistent, and sometimes debilitating emotional distress related to the traumatic event.

Empty Nest? Learn How to Sleep Again!

If your young adult is away in treatment or has begun her independent life, you have an empty–or partially empty–nest. You may, however, still have sleep disruption from many years of nighttime vigilance. If so, now’s the time to reclaim your right to a good night’s sleep! You’re a better parent (and employee, and friend, and everything else) when you’re taking good care of yourself.