Important Topics

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.

Young Adults: How to Exercise your Willpower Muscle!

The greatest challenge many college students face doesn’t have to do with mastering course material, it has to do with managing life. Once a college student leaves home, the predictable structure of life with mom and dad disappears. The student is suddenly faced with a litany of demands, responsibilities and temptations that can seem overwhelming. This can be particularly true of young adults who have struggled with emotional issues, addictions, eating disorders or other compulsive behaviors.

Adoption and Attachment Issues in Young Adults

We now know that a child’s attachment to her mother starts in the womb, so even a child adopted at birth can experience severe attachment disruption later on in life.
An infant’s world changes radically when the biochemical connection to her birth mother is severed. While this can be mitigated by adoption into a loving family, separation from the birth mother can still have an impact. Separation can constitute an actual trauma that is significant enough to drive important developmental changes. Some experts are even entertaining a diagnostic label of “developmental PTSD” for infants or children who experience attachment issues as a result of separation from the birth family.

Your Perfectly Normal, Incredibly Argumentative Young-Adult Child

“Parents are losing credibility with their teens and young adults,” says Hinman. “The assumption that ‘my child should listen to me because I’m a parent’ won’t fly with an 18 year old! Parents have to work constantly to maintain a positive relationship with their children—especially during adolescence and young adulthood—if they hope to have influence when it counts most.”

Best Stress-Management Guru for Young Adults? The Family Dog.

Unlike the family pet, however, there usually isn’t a nap on the horizon for the beleaguered young adult…at least not for a while. It’s only after the constant flood of adrenaline and cortisone have utterly exhausted her that she’s likely to fall asleep. But her sleep will be the fitful, fearful, unproductive sleep that accompanies depression. Many stressed-out young adults are unable to sleep at night and unable to stay awake during the day. The result is often a distressing stew of agitation, irritability, restlessness, argumentativeness, withdrawal, oversleeping, drowsiness and sullenness. Yikes!

PARENTING YOUNG ADULTS: ANGER HAS IT’S PLACE

Many experts agree that the negative effects of anger can be minimized by addressing the emotion honestly. While ranting and raging tend to actually exacerbate, rather than relieve, anger (according to some studies), the healthy expression of anger can actually alleviate it. In fact, the healthy communication of your full range of emotions—including anger—can be a critical part of your difficult young adult’s healing process.

Young Adults: Learning Disabilities and Emotional Problems

Along with the primary effects that may come with learning differences, secondary effects may occur such as low self-esteem, depression, social isolation, anger, low school performance, and so forth. Sometimes these secondary effects mask the primary issue—a learning disability. For instance, an individual being treated for depression may in fact need concentrated therapeutic services focused on non-verbal learning disorder and its impact on their social abilities.

SCREEN ADDICTION AND YOUNG ADULTS

In the past decade, the use and abuse of screen-based technology—smart phones, computers, handheld electronic games, tablets, etcetera—has exploded. In my work with young people in hospitals, residential settings and transitional programs, I have seen an epidemic of screen-based emotional disorders. These disorders typically stem from excessive use leading to isolation, unhealthy relationships, and social and emotional delays, i.e. lack of maturation.

IN A FAMILY CRISIS, TAKING CARE OF YOU IS TAKING CARE OF THEM

If you’ve experienced a mental health emergency in your family and the crisis has effectively been triaged, you’re likely a bit raw, a bit confused, a bit exhausted, maybe a little scared. In word…you’re open! This openness won’t necessarily last. Soon enough the emotional wound will scab and then scar and you’ll have the dangerous luxury of returning to life as usual. Like physical scar tissue, emotional scars can freeze you up and lock you into an awkward position.

TURNING 18: TROUBLED TEEN OR TROUBLED ADULT?

But when emotional and behavioral issues are present, a young adult may not be willing to accept the kind of support that leads to gradual, supported interdependence. She may also feel the need to fight for, rather than gradually embrace, adult responsibilities. In these cases, many parents are faced with the prospect of their emotionally immature young adult’s sudden departure from the home—“when I turn 18 I’m outta here!” If the young person is in a treatment program they may, similarly, threaten to pack their bags and walk. The idea of a woefully unprepared teen being suddenly independent is, of course, terrifying to any caring parent.