Teen Anxiety – why everyone else knows how to get it right

So, you know that loneliness you feel when you are with other people, but still feel alone and like you don’t belong? That feeling that few people dare to talk about for fear they might seem weak, and many people are quick to gloss over and respond with “ I shouldn’t feel that way cause others have it so much worse – what gives me the right to feel lonely when I’ve been blessed in so many ways?”   

Relax, exhale,  it’s alright, I’m not going to make you talk about it. I just need you to think about it for a few seconds so you can get into the appropriate perspective to keep reading.

At one particularly lonely moment in my life, I exasperatedly said out loud in my kitchen, with all my children present, “do you ever feel like you are living several different lives!?” It was really one of those moments where I meant to say it in my head but my mouth just didn’t get the memo, and thank goodness, because my children all responded with a huge exhale like they’d been holding their breath for days, and each with some form of “Gawd, all the time!”

I was shocked.  There was nothing leading up to that to indicate that any one of them had been struggling, yet all of them felt that way. That was an “aha” parenting moment for me.

It got me thinking that maybe the reason we are seeing record highs in teen anxiety is because no one has told them the truth about how hard it is to be your authentic self! They are living under an expectation that they should know who they are, and behave as themselves and if they don’t, there is something wrong with them.

 “Just be yourself!” they are told. “Right, if only I knew who that was!” they are thinking.

In actuality, most adults are wearing masks of their own, never truly showing their authentic selves, and never telling anyone, hence the misguided expectation!

Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed, talks about this when she went to her first AA meeting.  She explained how she felt like she was always doing life wrong, how it felt harder for her than other people and she just wanted to know what everyone else knows.  And then she sat down and stopped talking because there was nothing else to say, she just wanted to know. Someone came up to her afterward and said to her “Glennon, it’s not hard cause you are doing wrong, it’s hard because you’re finally doing it right. “

Numbing all those years with alcohol and drugs, and armoring up to protect herself from anything that could hurt her, was keeping everything out. Not just all the bad, but also all the good.

Brene Brown also talks about this in her book Daring Greatly. She explains how it takes courage to be vulnerable, in fact, there is no courage without vulnerability, and that being brave enough to allow ourselves to feel may lead us into pain, but is also the gateway to joy, peace, fulfillment and self-understanding. Makes me wonder how many opportunities I have missed because of the armor I was wearing each time I knew I just had to get it right.

One of the questions I often get asked, is “four kids! How did you do that?!” and the truth is, I didn’t do it well until #3. It wasn’t until my third baby that I began to really understand that there are several types of cries babies make:  hungry cry, tired cry, wet diaper cry, loud noise cry, just-needing-a-snuggle cry. With my first two babies (relying heavily on the trusted knowledge I had gleaned from baby books) I rushed to eliminate the options each time my baby cried (check diaper, try feeding, rock them a little, sing to them, etc.); I’m supposed to know how to soothe my baby if I’m a good Mom, right? By the third time around, I learned how to listen, and connect, and finally gained an understanding that my baby was communicating and if I was still enough to listen, I could discern exactly what he needed. But I had to get comfortable with listening to him cry.

Understanding our own types of pain and what that dashboard is pointing out to us is much the same. Brene says that learning how to feel pain is the pre-requisite for learning how to discern different types of pain. For example, recognizing the difference between “Becoming Pain” (the type we learn and grow from), versus “Self-Betrayal Pain” (the kind we berate ourselves for). We have to become intimate with our different types of pain to know what to sit in and learn from.  What would it take to be brave enough to take off our armor and sit with our pain to better understand it? And do we have the courage to take it one step further and model it for our children? If our children never see their trusted adults as anything but “strong” and “right”, what expectations are they forming about what is acceptable for them? What they learn is that showing pain is weakness, and it is not safe for them to not get it right.

As parents, what is our response to our children when they are in pain? Do we encourage them to tell us more and sit with them in their darkness with an empathetic ear, or do we rush to fix it because we can’t stand to see them suffer? How do they ever get comfortable with discerning what their pain is telling them, if we are always slapping Band-Aids on it? I can attest to several examples where I have jumped directly into fixing or solving the problem my kids have been brave enough to present to me, so that I can help them to feel better quickly.  In doing so, I have robbed them of the growth that naturally happens as they are “becoming”.  Certainly, much easier than having that awkward conversation about feelings that you don’t know how to solve for them, especially when you’re already exhausted from a full day and dealing with your own heavy emotions, right?

Recently, my husband and I were watching Reese Witherspoon’s new series Little Fires Everywhere. In it she is struggling with her 14 year old daughter and after one of their conflicts, the mom stands outside the daughter’s closed bedroom door, wondering if she has it in her to go talk to her daughter about it. The daughter sees the shadow of her Mom’s feet outside her door, and then sees her mom’s feet walk away without coming in. The look on the daughter’s face is devastating. As much as she was pushing against her Mom hours earlier, she desperately needed her Mom to care enough to come in. I turned to my husband and said “and that is why you have the awkward conversation”.  He nodded in agreement and said “so true”.

It may not be comfortable, in fact, in many cases it is quite awkward, but the message that comes with it is that they have a parent who sees all of who they are, and loves them, not despite what they are experiencing, but wholly inclusive of it.