I recently got a request from someone wanting help with her teen who had been diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder. Duh! Let’s see, that’s like diagnosing a one year old with failure to walk perfectly disorder if they’re still falling down when attempting to walk. Teens by nature are oppositional. That is their developmental job, to separate themselves from their families to try to figure out who they will become as they grow up. Like the caterpillar who spins a cocoon to become a butterfly, teens spin an invisible web around them, and if you try to break it to regain control, they get very defiant. Is your teen the adult he will become? No! Like the caterpillar, he needs to go through a metamorphosis to become the adult (butterfly). Is this a disorder? Not in my mind. It is a human condition and it is a relationship issue. Your teen is struggling with his relationship with himself and his friends; he’s also struggling with his relationship with you and the rest of his family; you’re struggling with your relationship with him. Does this create “disorder”? Sure, because there’s so much change going on. But that doesn’t make it a “disease”.
So what’s the solution? Respect!!!! Since most of us weren’t raised with a whole lot of respect, Jane Nelsen and I wrote the book Positive Discipline for Teens to help parents figure out what the application of respect might look like with a teenager. In that book, you learn to respect yourself, your teen, and your situation, and in doing so, you can invite your teen to treat you more respectfully. The book teaches you how to move out of the pilot’s seat and become a co-pilot, helping your young adult make it through his or her struggles without damage that can’t be repaired to both the child and your relationship.
I rarely plug one of my books, which is ridiculous if you think about it. I only write when I’m trying to help folks make their lives easier. It takes a couple of years from inception to conclusion to put a book together that is truly helpful. I’m glad I wrote PD for Teens, because when I was parenting my first teen, nothing of the sort was available. I hate how many mistakes I made, but since mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow, I did a lot of that. The book is my way of giving back and making things easier for the teens and parents.
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, and it’s about time I got started. So many of my clients semi-jokingly tell me that when they get into a bind, they ask themselves, “What would Lynn say?” Or their children or spouses ask the same question. Or they email me, asking what I would say about an issue they are struggling with. I think it’s time I share some of their questions and my answers on this blog. I don’t think of this as an advice column, but rather me sharing questions and answers because you may have many of the same ones. When I write books, I use a lot of vignettes which are a compilation of many different clients, yet when my clients read the books, they are always sure I am talking about them. I’ll do the same thing in these entries so that I can guard my clients’ privacy.
Here’s the first question: My pre-teen told me he feels angry a lot and wants to annoy people. He says he can’t control it and wonders if there’s something wrong with him. What would Lynn say?
It’s easy to chalk up angry feelings in adolescents to hormones and maybe miss something else important that is going on. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying adolescents aren’t hormonal, but often they have some very good reasons for being angry coupled with some very poor methods of expressing that anger. One of the questions I ask right off the bat is about what I call family constellation, because problems often make a lot more sense when seen in a context. For instance, if a child follows a “perfect” kid or a “good” kid and believes he or she can never be as good, that’s often cause for anger. Or if in a family one kid either perceives he is always getting in trouble while the other(s) are over-looked or treated like victim(s), or that is really happening, that’s also cause for anger.
In this case, there was a clear issue of good kid/bad kid stereotyping by the parents. My suggestion was to let the angry pre-teen know that it was okay for him to be angry and that anyone would be angry with that kind of favoritism going on and there was nothing wrong with him but he was making poor choices as to how he displayed his anger. He needed to know that he was loved and important and special and that his parents needed to stop putting him in the “bad guy” seat as a knee jerk response to problems. I also suggested that his parents ask him to say what was upsetting him without any judgments or defensiveness, expressing, “I hear you,” without trying to fix or improve the situation.
It’s not unusual for kids to think that parents love the other siblings more, especially if the other siblings never get in trouble and they always do. What kids don’t understand is that when these feelings aren’t validated or heard, they build up and are released with acting out behaviors.
It’s best not to make assumptions when people around you are expressing feelings. It’s really important not to label them, i.e. “He’s an angry person.” Rather, let the person know they are having a feeling, that a feeling won’t kill anyone, that you care how they feel, that you want to know why they feel the way they do, and that you understand. Understanding isn’t the same as agreeing that you feel the same way, but if you’ve ever felt understood, you know just how powerful that can be in helping you move forward in a more postive way.
Do you ever get into that black and white thinking, certain there are only two choices to a given situation? It’s not unusual with my clients, and since they normally hate either choice, they feel trapped and stuck, unable to move forward. Normally, when I think there are only two choices, I remember there’s grey and look for more options which are almost always lurking around the corner. So it was a surprise to me to realize that I had fallen into the trap while on my road trip, and hadn’t realized that was the situation. My husband and I were laughing about how I worked so hard to either find a campsite that had an electrical outlet near the picnic table OR find a campsite where the table wasn’t so far from the outlet that I could physically maneuver the table (with great difficulty) closer to the outlet. There I was, in that old either/or, black or white thinking. My husband asked me why I didn’t simply buy an extension cord, and the suggestion caught me completely by surprise. It was so simple and so obvious and so do-able, but it had never occurred to me. I had limited my options in my mind and had forgotten that there could be a “grey” choice.
Often those “grey” choices aren’t quite as easy to find, but they do exist. If you’re stuck between a rock and a hard spot, it might help to tell someone else your thinking and ask for their help to find more options. Surely, there will be “an extension cord” just around the corner for you, too.
