Today's teens don't trust the adults to keep them safe: A Therapist's Perspective on Why Teen Anxiety is on the Rise
As a mother of three teens, and therapist to dozens, I am so concerned by the tremendous uptick in anxiety disorders among this demographic. Our practice is in a family neighborhood of Boulder. Our population is less affected by financial instability and internal family distress. Most of the teen clients I work with have pretty positive relationships with their parents and are open with adults.
However, teens no longer trust adults with their emotional and physical safety.
I believe that this lack of trust is part of the fall out of schools suddenly going virtual, the world shutting down in a panicked state, sexual assaults going unpunished in our school systems, violence on the political scene, climate change as an obvious disaster that our teens will inherit, and the feeling of inevitability of mass shootings.
While today’s adolescents have the conveniences and connectivity of cell phones, they also have instantaneous access to all that is wrong with our world. They must live with the consequences of the mistakes of previous generations, and also learn to hold space for each other, navigating trauma before they are emotionally ready.
Today’s teens have come of age during a time of tremendous unknown, and a feeling that adults don’t have a strong handle on what ails our nation.
It is natural for teens to differentiate (ie. develop distinct views) from their parents. Nonetheless, it is not healthy for our teens to feel so unmoored from their trust in the adults that hold the power.
My job as an Anxiety/OCD therapist is usually to help my clients lean into their fears, rather than soothe them. Nonetheless, when I hear teens speak of their worries in session, I feel the urge to rescue them from all this heaviness. I imagine my teens as babies, comforted by a tight swaddle and the reliable responsiveness of their caregivers.
On some level, these adolescent clients still long to feel protected and swaddled during their rocky adolescent journey.
Nonetheless, most teens no longer feel safe in this world, and there is little we can do to soothe them. The best we can do is to try really hard to understand them. We need to drop the rhetoric of “back in my day” as a means of showing them how much harder we had it, because the truth is, this generation of teens carries a weight that we cannot even fathom.
At Kairos Wellness Collective, we would be honored to support your teen (or child or adult of any age) in anxiety treatment. Please contact us today to tread one step closer to relief.
