How To Help Anyone In Your Life Who’s Struggling - Fantastic Strategies From A Yale-Educated Psychologist
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Head to your nord stream rack store to score great brands, great Prices, the greatest gifts of all time. Hey, each friend, male, and welcome to the male Robin's podcast. okay.

So today you're going to meet an expert that I picked up the phone and called and beg to come on the show because i've been getting email after email after comment, asking for advice on a very specific topic. Now, how do I help people in my life who are struggling? I'm sure it's on your mind.

I know it's on my mind. We all know someone who is having a really hard time right now in their lives, or maybe even in life in general. IT might be your spouse. IT could be a friend, maybe it's a family member, or perhaps it's one of your kids.

So I track down the very best resource, somebody that was a life fine for me for years as I was navigating all kinds of issues with our kids as they were growing up. And her advice has even been life changing when my husband, Chris, was struggling with depression, and I just wasn't sure what to do. You may know her from her extraordinary popular article in the new york times motherlode, or you might know from her three new york times best selling books.

Who am I talking about? I'm talking about doctor lisa demo. She's a clinical psychologist and new york times is best selling author.

SHE is A P. H. D. From the university of michigan and an undergraduate degree from yale. SHE is one of the world's leading experts in parenting education, childhood development stress and anxiety. And SHE has been a real lifeline for me.

And this is not a conversation, by the way, it's just about teenagers that are struggling. Yes, we will talk about teenagers specifically, but this is a conversation that is going to leave you feeling hopeful, empowered. We are gonna role play different scenarios.

You're going to leave here knowing exactly what to do and what to say, and not say to the people in your life that are struggling. Her latest book, the emotional lives of teenagers, is a must read. This is a conversation i've been dying to have.

I am absolutely thrill to introduce you and me to doctor lisa demo. Welcome to the malay's forecast. Oh, 没有。

thanks so much for having me so excited.

so much I want to talk to you about um I do have a confession. You were a trope that drag me up the hill of parenting teenage daughters because I was an avid motherlode reader and discipline. So thank you for your work.

And you have no idea what a difference IT made. And when I saw that, you were releasing yet another book, your latest book, the emotional lives of teenagers, I thought, oh, wow, what was IT that made? You want to write this latest book, lisa.

there were two things that really drove me to do IT. One was, of course, what teenagers went through in the last several years. And i've been practicing without a lessons for coming on thirty years now.

I got my P. H. D. Twenty six years ago, and I was taking care of teenagers while I was in training. And i've never seen anything like a, i've never seen teenagers go through such a hard time.

The other force that got made to my computer to bang out this book was that the way we talk about mental health as a culture does not square with how we, as psychologists, understand IT. And what I mean by that is that so much of the discourse about mental health sub just that being mental healthy means feeling good or calm or relaxed or IT is. And those are all good things, but those do not actually factor into how psychologists assess mental health.

When we're looking at IT, we're looking for two things, do the feelings fit the circumstance and are they managed well? So we expect to see distress, you know, if somebody gets dumped in a roomy and we expect sad as we expect them to be really, you know, heart broken and may be bitter and a little angry, like those are all appropriate emotions. But we're really interested in is, what is the kid do next, right? Do they weed? Do they talk to their friends? Do they get their ice cream like? Do they do things, tell themselves, feel Better? Or do they trash that kid online? Do they turn IT against themselves? Do they smoke up on a weed, right? Like we only worry we're in that when we're in that second category of unhealthy coping. That's what we're most interested in.

Well, what's immediately striking to me is that this applies to people of all ages right up that what I have noticed is that people's ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions and the option dance in life have gotten way worse over time.

It's true. I think we have run into a situation where for for too many people, uncomfortable feels like unmanageable. That yeah distinction between those two and it's an important distinction because discomfort is part of life and teenagers are gonna that adults are gona feel IT and it's important.

And we want to care for people into those conditions, but we don't want to assume that discomfort means that everything must stop and IT cannot be managed. Some people find themselves there, and then we have the full force of iconic supports that we can bring to that. But those are two very different things.

I wanted break apart. The two reasons why you rote the book, one being the impact when march twenty, twenty dropped like a bab on all of us and everybody's lives got turned upside down. You're right extensively about the specific impact that I had on the lives of teenagers. And just for the sake of this conversation, when you say teenager, what age group you're talking .

about is a critically important question. So adolescence begins at eleven, and something that psychologists have done a terrible job of getting out to the public. Most people thinks teen because they hear teen at the end of that, and they think teenager.

We have always marked the answer of adolescence at age of eleven. And that is because adolescence begins when puberty underway. And by eleven, most kids, even if you can see IT on the outside, they're underway with puberty.

And we mark the end of our lessons. You can push IT as far as twenty four, twenty five. I you can hear the ast risk in my voice on that, by and large, their brains in great shape, very fully developed by eight hundred and thousand and twenty. But their Better reasoning is still more readily knocked off line till there are about twenty four, twenty five, so of their very very stirred up late Young adults don't always handle things as well as they will know after twenty four twenty five.

But I I always um get a little uncomfortable when people like oh their brains are not develop twenty four twenty five and like well but like look at that english paper, that kid road, look at that beautiful piece of art that kid made like that's an developed brain. But we're talking up big window here. I mean eleven to twenty four, twenty five. I mean those are very, very wide range of numbers and very different kinds of people filling in that space.

yes. Okay, good. I'm so glad we started there because I also honestly would lump in adults that are emotionally mature and has never matured in terms of their emotional processing.

But i'm glad that we're talking really the range of early middle school all the way through year through college, and we're gonna go step by step in just a minute around how the world turning upside down and going into lock down and all of the isolation and complicated feelings that happened, how IT impacted this age group specifically. But I want to talk first about the second reason why you vote the book because this applies to all of us. And what you're saying is that there's a difference between what you know clinically and what people believe is the baseline. That mental health does not mean be happy. What does that mean to be mentally? Well.

what IT means is that the emotions you have are actually in concert with what's happening in your world. And and I think that mental health is often defined by experiencing distress, and that is so that is one eighty from where the culture is right now. So often mental health concerns and distress are treated as though they are one in the same.

But i'll give you several examples, is so easy aware the presence of distress is actually evidence of medical health, right? So if the kid gets dumped, we expect distress. The absence of IT would be concerning.

If a teenager has a huge test tomorrow and they have not started studying, we want to see some anxiety. The absence of anxiety is more concerning than the presence of anxiety. If someone's really mean you, right?

If you're a teenager or an adult and someone's really mean you, we expect to see hurt, and then probably a self protective anger. Those are all unpleasant emotions. Those are all unwanted emotions. Those are evidence that we work exactly as we should. And so to pathologies, all of that means that people are spending their Normal, healthy days feeling like there's something wrong with them, when, in fact, that distresses proof that they work perfectly.

Lisa, you're genes. I just had this huge breakthrough because, you're right. We have just painted with such a broad stroke that you know, guilt, fear, shame, anger, upset, heartbreak, that somehow that that makes you weak when what you're actually saying is no, no, no. If it's occurring in reaction to the appropriate situation, that is a sign that you're mentally well.

absolutely. And it's also data. That's the other way we think about all of our feelings, negative and positive. They tell us how things are going. So if every time you have lunch with somebody, you walk away feeling kind of stepped on and diminished, that's really good data.

Don't have lunch with that person if you can help IT, right? And if you go to a job interview and IT feels just thrilling to be in the space like that's good data, emotions. Psychologists are surprisingly agnostic about them.

Like we don't really value positive ones of our negative ones. It's just all, all information. And our job is to take IT in.

Wow, I love this reframe. I absolutely love IT. Um I would love to teeth this out a little bit more because I think this applies to all of us.

IT does. And I want to hear a quick word from our sponsors because they're bringing us this incredible information at zero cost. But when we return, doctor released. So I have a question for you.

How do you know when it's just a Normal upsetting or distressing emotion versus something that you actually should be concerned about? We're going to answer that when we return. Don't go anywhere.

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Welcome back. I melt Robins, and I am here with doctor lisa demo, one of the world's leading experts in parenting, education, childhood development, stress and anxiety. And we are getting a master class in how to deal with distressing emotions, how to know when things are a real problem.

And we're about to dive into the tools, tactics and scripts that you can use to help somebody that you love who struggling. So lisa, what is a Normal emotion and what's not? I guess what I mean about that question is, how do we tell the difference between something that is just an awful situation where you got to ride the wave versus something that we should be concerned about?

So there's a few ways. I mean, part of IT is there's no real right feeling, right? You have the feelings you have. And I think that I would never wanna say, you know, we always expect to see this feeling under these circumstances because, of course, our feelings are informed by who we are, our histories, you know, what's come. So there's not always a perfect map of what we expect to see.

And here again, psychologists can usually just take a much more serious, like border line anthropogenic stance towards emotion, as opposed to judging or valuing. But here's what we don't want to see. We don't want to see emotions getting in the way of people's lives.

That's where we start to be concerned. So we fully expect to see sadness under sad conditions. We don't expect to see depression, which is where mood becomes so low that IT really cast to pull over everything in a person's life. We've fully expect to see anxiety if there's something wrong, right?

If there's um you know danger around you or little little virus in the environment, right, we expect to see anxiety, but we don't expect anxiety to become paralyzing and get in the way of people's ability to do the things that really are safe or they cannon should be able to do so. For us, the index is really much more about functioning. And do emotions undermine the ability to function well in the world because they should be supporting our ability to navigate our lives and deep in our relationships they shouldn't be getting in the way.

So the real take away here for all of us, is that distressing emotion. IT is part of being mentally well. But when you start opting out of seeing friends and you stop the hydro all of taking showers and exercising and eating, or you start overmedicating your feelings with alcohol, a weed or whatever, that's the red flag.

That's right. I'm going even teach that a part a little bit more. So the emotions can either get in the way, right? So mood that actually disturb the ability to will live one's life, or in you moved in this direction, is such a critically important direction, what I would call costly coping. So people are coping with moods, but they are doing IT in ways that come at a cost.

So either abusing substances or being incredibly hard on the people around them, or turning IT against themselves, whether you are running themselves down or even engaging himself harm, those may be actually providing some relief. People only do things that actually work for them, but they come with a Price tag. So that's the other thing we look for.

So we look for a mood that gets in the way of the ability to live one's life, or coping that is a costly way to go about things, if not immediately. Certainly over time. Those are the flags that we keep an eye out for.

I got IT two flags, mood and costly coping. And I want a role play for a little bit of fat school because I love to leave our audience in action and empowered. So if you're in a situation where let's just talk about the costly coping stuff that you talked about, I can't tell you how many parents and friends we would confide in one another.

During the last three years, my kids are completely off the rose like they're not even showing up for the zone classes. My son is hitting the vb, smoking weed, playing video games for six hours a day. I don't even care anymore.

The stress levels is so high as long as they're waking up in the morning, and they are not mean to me, how do you, as a parent or a friend or a partner of somebody, you see somebody smoking too much weed, plan video games for too long. Those sort of coping, mechanical as a right let you escape. How do you even begin to approach IT? Because every time we would approach in our household, you get the big shot back. So I think .

the first step is to really recognize that IT is working for that person, that IT is serving a purpose. And you describe that, right, that substances can help no distress. They're incredibly effective at that. That's the problem with them, right, is that they work to make pain.

Go away. My second, and I just stop. I don't know that i've ever heard anybody ever hit the pause button and and tell the truth that people engage in these behaviors because they work for them, which is why they become so damn defensive when you try to take them away from them.

exactly. Wow, you know, this is where I just am so glad I got the training I did when I did because the of my whole training is that humans are rational actors. They don't do things. They don't serve a purpose. Even if those things out really and are causing so much troubled, there's always a rational. And that's the actually the best part about my job is that when people come my way clinically, my job is to figure out, you know, you're doing this thing that is just damaging your life and getting in the way we have to understand why so that you then can feel like you've .

got some choices. Wow, i'm just letting the profound nature of what you're asking us to do because I can think of several friends who had daughters, in particular, self harm, cutting very itself destructive behavior. And from the outside, you look at IT and you panic, and then you make IT wrong and you want to do anything because you love this person to stop IT.

But I think that means that we're missing this critical step in connecting, which helps us lead to the problem solving. So why is IT so important even though it's terrifying when your kid is hurting themselves or they're clearly escaping and addicted? Why is IT so important to say to yourself, this is a coping mechanism that's working for my kid, and I actually have to start there.

Here's why it's so important, because the alternative is a dead end. And what I mean by that is IT, if you come at a cute or anyone saying you need to stop and then fill in the blank, what you're going to run into is a part of them that is like you don't get why this is working for me. And now you have a conflict. If you go the route of saying your small kid, you wouldn't be doing this if IT wasn't working for you. At some level, the conflict ends up in the kid or the adult that you're trying to help between the part of them that doesn't want to be cutting or abusing substances or playing video games eight hours a day are running around .

and sleeping with the wrong people are, which is what I was doing in high school.

But okay, right? I mean, whatever IT takes to help yourself feel Better. So there's a part of them that doesn't want to be doing those things, and there's a part of them that is doing those things.

And the job of the hopeful outsider is to try to get a conflict going between those two parts of the person who is doing the thing and to stick up for the side that wants to be healthier. I'll tell you the language that I remember when I learned this as a clinical around if if a claim comes in and is talking about suicide, right, which is, of course, terrifying. And I remember the day I learned the language from a senior clinton to say to someone, listen, clearly, part of you is really thinking about hurting yourself, but part of you want help. And that's the part that's telling me that you're having those thoughts. I'm gonna stick up for the part of you that want help, and that's how you don't turn IT and into a fight.

That's incredible. And i've got a pen in my hand. So this is one of those conversations where i'm having a conversation and furiously scribing notes, which I don't know why I have to do that, given that I can must know if that there is a part of you that is really considering this or there's a part of you that is in so much pain that you're resorting to cutting to feel alive or you're in so much pain that you're smoking dope so that you can just num out and forget about IT. But there's a part of you that wants help, and that's the part of you that i'm speaking to. Did I get that right?

Yeah, you just said you wouldn't be letting you know if he didn't want help. There's a part of you that won't help.

What do you do if they didn't tell you or you don't? You know? I mean, because a lot of times, particularly with these behaviors, people hide them.

It's true. So eventually you find out or you smell the week coming out of their room, or you you know, notice that a Young person has harmed himself. So I think the first thing we wanted do is, are the helpful people up who are trying to step in is to get to a place with ourselves where we feel a bit centered, reacting strongly in those moments does not go well.

But then I think that does sometimes happen, that you have to confront a person about their behavior. And again, I think teaming up with them and teaming up with what I know all teenagers have and all adults have, which is that growth giving, health seeking side, this is the way to go. So I think, you know, this is, he is mary one as an example, and you can smell IT.

I'll be the kid. okay? Oh, I can't wait for this. I want to hear a quick word from our sponsors. I can already feel you doctor is outside the door, and i'm the kid in the bedroom rolling in up the joint. Okay, but we're going to take a quick break.

Our sponsors bring us all of this at zero costs to you, so I want to give them your time and attention. And when we come back, doctor lease is gonna be knocking on my door. Why light up a duty? Don't go anywhere.

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Welcome back. I'm with new york. He's besin author doctor lisa demo, and we're about to role play here me on the weed smoking teen sitting in my bedroom, no clue that mom standing outside and doctor lisa SHE is going to play the role of the calm centered parent and walk us through step by step how you and I are supposed to handle these kinds of stressful situations.

Here we go. Okay, so i'm sitting in my room. I'm teenage male.

I'm rolling up a big dub. I'm lightened up. I'm popping away.

I don't even know my mom's outside. I'm listening to music. I'm texting my friends. I got my head phones on. I don't know that your home because I didn't even hear the garage doors open.

So there I am. OK here I come. So not not god on the door.

No answer. So I let myself in, right? And I, oh, oh, body. You and I both know that smoking weed like this is gonna a get in the way of the kind of life you wanted lead. We got ta figure out what's getting in the way if you make in different choices.

Wow, like you just spoke to a different part of me.

That's right. That's now.

Do you leave the room? Do you just drop IT like a grenade, then let that kind of settle for them? Or do you sit down on the bed? Because I think we just don't know what to do. And then we get so emotional, lisa, that we react, yes, which makes IT worse. Well.

I think I see what I D D take from them. I mean, because you just didn't say something. I think we also have to give kids room to come to where we are, right?

I mean, think it's so hard in parenting so often and I have two teenagers myself, it's so often parenting. We have a full test steam. They like we need to talk about bone, right? And the kids like like I was gonna go get a snack, right? I was not ready for this conversation. So I think .

plus now i'm hi my and my tone feels like it's filled my mouth. I can have a conver conversion so that .

I think this will say for the sake of argument like this isn't a great time gathon conversation because the kid is not entirely available to IT. And then I think you say, you know, we're going to to have a conversation about what's happening here. And my favorite phrase, and I also remember the mom I learned this in my training, is because what we're doing isn't working.

What you doing isn't working, right? And that's the thing about substances. They do get to a place where they started to understand and a person's life, you know, that they're not showing up at school.

They are underfund, 是 ing academically or they are actually maintaining friendships or their you not contributing to the home or the community。 And so that becomes the thing like you can keep doing this because what you're doing isn't working. We have to come up with something else. So if you're in so much pain that you're doing this, we're going to find another way for you to address that pain. But the the goal, and you can hear this, an every approach is to not turn IT into a showdown between the person is trying to help and the person they want to help.

IT just had this visual of kind of that you ate. This is a show down, the knock on the door, the screaming, the shame that this now you're like putting your forty or fifty year old asked about this onto your sixteen year old. And I just compounds everything that they're trying to escape anyway.

If you can sign yourself and realize you're trying to get on the same page with the part of them that wants to do Better instead of pounding on the door of literally like putting your arms around them. And I like, buddy, I love that you're like k buddy know. And I love this.

I wish I had talked to you two years ago because that what you're doing isn't working. When my husband's depression came to ahead, I was the bitch on the door knocking. I was trying to say what you're doing isn't working and instead, of course, i'm like, you know, thank god you're doing yoga, all this stuff, because you're probably dead if you weren't. But you got ta start that that you feel like you've ta get in therapy you gotto take but what I what I wish I would have known, and what I hope everybody's taking away, is that phrase.

what you're doing isn't working something else. And i'll tell you milk. So when I was in training, I had a really brilliant and terrifying supervisor. And SHE said to me, you get eight words and alterations when you're listening in sitting with a client, they can say as much as they want. Na say you, you can't go past eight words.

And the reason for this is as soon as your past eight words you're into somebody y's had you've pass by, pass their heart, right? But if you can keep a tight, and if you can go to the core of IT in eight words, if you are IT lions. And so what's interesting is that discipline of needing to fine just the arrow the end in the through line. That's, however, ended up actually being able to translate over into writing and podcasting and you know all of the other forms of work I do because if you're doing a clinical work, you're just going for the the central message is cleanly and as easily understood as possible.

I love how you simplify ed this for us. You have really drawn this highlighter and highlighted the notion that distress is a really important part of being mentally well, and it's only when IT becomes destructive to your mood in your daily functioning or you start having costly coping mechanisms that we got ta sound the alarm, so to speak, because what they're doing is working for them to escape, cope, but it's not helping.

And you are like an arrow hitting the target. Lisa, like this is your genius that your job is to appeal to the greater part of them. What you're doing isn't working, and i'm here to help you figure out what could work exactly. Wow, what you you also write in your latest best seller, the emotional lives of teenagers that there is a difference with how the different genders cope with stress. Can you walk us through that?

sure. Let me say you a bunch of caveats. First, anytime we're looking at gender findings, we're looking at huge numbers.

There's tremendous overlap between the genders. And then, of course, we've only really studied conventional genders, male, female. We are into the table to study kids who do not fit into one of the traditional categories.

So everything i'm saying needs to sort of the couched in that broader understanding of how we do the research of what we've so having said that, when we look at traditional gender categories are pretty consistent. Broad finding is that when they are in distress, girls are more likely to discuss and boys are more likely to distract. And these are both acceptable forms of managing emotions. There's actually nothing wrong with either. But where we see trouble is, if you wear to the extreme or you use that strategy all the time.

can you give us an example yeah of what you mean by discuss or distracts? So we kind of have a knowing and then also what's sort of within range of of helpful coping and and what gets to be on the french?

absolutely. So discuss, you know so let's say a girl um someone's mean to her school and he goes and find her best friend and she's like you're not onna believe that so so just did he was so such a drug to me and her friends who oh me and he is such a jerk and I love you and you're fine and you're cool. Okay yeah like good outcome.

We like that. We could also have a boy where some a joke to him at school and he's upset by IT and he doesn't want to talk about IT but he goes home and he um plays basketball for a while. Those of team gets IT out of a system, gets passed at lets ago, moves on.

Those are two perfectly reasonable outcomes of those two different strategies. What we don't want to see is girls who then um they discuss IT with their friend and then they end up in a three hour conversation discussing you with their friend and then they are doing the you know like critical analysis of the text thread with the girl who was mean. And then four, the girls have been on this.

There's two problems with this. One is girls are more likely than boys to engage in Victorious distress, meaning if my friends upset now, i'm upset to, yeah, IT has this like widening swath of distress. The other thing is that IT threatens to turn into what psychologists called rumination, though what kind of growth is really helps metaphor.

It's like picking at an emotional wound right the morning to talk about IT the worst that gets, it's not healing up Better to just leave IT alone. So we don't want to see that extreme. And if we go down the boy stereotype, but we don't want to see, is that, you know, every time this kid has something that feels bad, he just shuts down, goes place basketball or hot on his video game, and just stays in this distracted place until the feeling dies down enough that he can tolerate IT.

Because the cost to him is, number one, he's not getting the kind of social support he deserves, right? Nobody knew in pain. Number two, he's not actually developing the fluency in verbalizing emotions that we'd like to see.

The part of what happens if we go down these boy girl pads is the girls get Better and Better and Better talking about feelings, because I practice at all the time. Envoys can get worse and worse and worse of talking about feelings because they're not practicing IT with one another especially. So the ideal management is somewhere in between a little discussing, a little distracting or any variety of other strategies that help to tame or express emotions. We just don't want to see anybody leaning too hard on one strategy.

These are so relatable. And I know so many people in our family and also friends whose were going to start with the kind of rumination side. And i'm sure this goes for adults too.

You have those people in your life that can't let IT go. They're still talking about the divorce and it's been final for three years. They're still complaining about the what happened when mom died and who got what. And like, just hold onto IT. How do you approach that with somebody?

So I think that let me do the girl example version and then let's yeah go right mining road. What I encourage parents and also appears to do if they are caring for a teenager who is really spinning their wheel, spinning their wheels, is to say to them, listen, talking about feelings usually helps. But what i'm noticing is the more we're talking, the worse you feel.

So let's do this. Let's put a pin in this. Let's make a plan to talk about IT tomorrow.

What time do you have? What time do I have? Will like schedule IT.

We're coming back to IT. But between now and then, let just do something else. Let's go think about something else. Let's just take a mental vacation from this situation and and what is extraordinary is IT.

So often when you do that, when i've met with that in the next day, or talk to the person in the next day, they're like, yeah, I don't know what I was so upset about, like just the space alone, the time alone bring IT down the eyes, and they are no longer dumping stress hormones s under their bloodstream. You know, for that twenty four hours, they're not thinking about IT. So IT helps people to find their feet.

So that's a short term. You know, something that great hopped up. I think there's probably a different answer for those bigger questions around you know, people who are strugling to let go of a painful divorce are struggling to let go of how things went down in the family in the wake of her parents death. And my hunches for that. There's just a lot of meaning to what occur that has not really been examined or be assessed.

Yeah, yeah. What about with the boys? How do you approach that? You know where or or any behavior of just distraction and kind of literally losing yourself in something so you don't have to face the pain of the situation and the emotions that you're feeling.

So it's interesting. Distraction can end up. There's costly coping, right? We can go right back to that category, which is so say, your boy's had a really rough day and his strategy is to play video games for ours.

Okay, well, he may have gotten passed the rough day, but now he has a new problem because he hasn't done his home work and he needs to go to bed, right? I mean, creates its own, you know, side effects. So one way to take IT up is just from that side of saying, look, I get IT that you move had a rough day and playing some video games helps you get through IT. You can't be doing this so much that you now have a new situation to deal with is, or in other way, you can help yourself feel Better. Now they think here about boys and expression, right? Like that's really what's underneath this is getting kids, but a boys in particular to talk about feelings is that there's a lot caught up and why they don't talk about feelings and um I would say one of the hardest st things in parenting that I hear about is parents of adolescent poisoning particular who become very very things like yeah very reserved and um and I think that its own fascinating and complex universe to make sense of.

I think that this whole forty five minute conversation.

don't you it's a big one. It's a big one and it's an important one and IT can be done. But i'll just for now, i'll just say expression of emotion takes a lot of forms and it's not always in language. And what i've really become much Better at is honoring that. There are healthy ways, the boy, to express emotion, but it's not always in words, though I also wish they were more often talking about what they were feeling.

speaking of expressing themselves. One of the things that I learned in this book that was just life changing, I wish I had known this ten years ago. It's a word that explained my entire experience of raising teenage daughters, which is externalization.

And the fact that and IT still happens today. I, we joke in our family, lisa, and you may have, as you're hearing me explain this, you probably have somebody in your life. He does this. They emotionally dump on me.

So i've realized that when our daughters wanna chat, they call my husband, and they have wonderful conversations about their life and what's going on in their relationships and what they need help with baba, when there is any kind of upsetting or distressing situation, I will get three face time calls in a row until I pick up. I get the tears, the venting, the frustration. The world is ending that, that, and then it's all done.

They go back to their life. And I feel like somebody has thrown a bucket of sly on top of me. And now, of course, i'm all worked up.

And your research shows that this is Normal. And IT has a name. This is Normal behavior in teenagers.

It's actually one of the very few things that is specially organized around out of lessons is the use of, we call IT, the defense of externalization. And well, like I have a story. I have such a vivid memory of being a freshman in college myself.

And I grew up in colorado and I went to college connective. And I remember doing this to my mom. Like, I remember getting around the phone.

Yeah, you did to right? And so and I remember calling her and like, I don't I don't really like I really any friends. I'm not, i'm make to then like then I seen my room and like, I got to go right of the phone.

I go out with my room and have a super good time. And I remember my mom called me the next day and she's like, are you OK and i'm like, yeah like, I don't know what you're problem is, but i'm fine. And my dad told me later, like sh'd been up all night.

I mean, he was getting ready to, like, pack the cooler and driving across the planes to retrieve me. So this is not a new maneuver teenagers have for never always done. This is not a fun maneuver for parents for sure.

Black IT is also really hard to be a teenager, and they have a lot of big, powerful emotions. And I think sometimes the way they get through their day is to conveniently dump them, treat them like emotional trash, and the people who love them and are willing to collect their trash. And having discarded the trash, what we often find those parents is the kids.

When I talk about that, there are, no, no, I don't the trash. I don't ask me about IT. I'm not going to answer your text. I'm not going to pick up your phone calls like just take the treasure, make a go away.

That's unbelievable. You're exactly right because on the receiving end of IT, I feel like they've dump ed the trash on me. I'm waited down. I'm worried about IT. I'm thinking about IT.

I just had A A sleepless night the other night because of something that one of our daughters is going through and then I spoke to her in the morning like, oh, I D, and as as if nothing happened. I excuse me, I sure to take the conversation. So you heard the death conten bomb that you dropped on me.

And I should probably apologized to my mom because I would call her every day from the payphone in my dorm hallway dermis collect to crying complaint. I don't like IT here. I don't know anybody here.

Everybody always. He has her friends here. And IT cuts so bad. After two weeks of this, my mom said, you either hang up the fucking phone and don't call me again and get out there, makes some friends, or i'm coming to pick you up the next time you call me and you will come back home and you vote to the community college and that'll be that I never called her again.

But then our daughters, both the same scenario, the first couple weeks of school, just processing the hard emotion. But it's so liberating to hear that it's Normal. And so should we just kind of let the trash fly and kind of step out of the way and not feel like we have to collect IT, just let them litter?

yes. And and I think that if you're worried in this interaction, you can say to your kid, do you want my help or do you just need event? And and that is often if they say I just need event, which is overwhelmingly what they are looking for.

What I would say is visualized yourself opening an emotional garbage bag and just let them unload all of the garbage into the bag. And then when the cause is over, dispose of IT, right? Don't Carry IT around.

Don't take IT to bet with you, right? Just be like that was a garbage collection moment and the kid needed a place to put, dump the garbage. And I am, as the loving person in their life, willing to collect their garbage, but yet you don't need to then go through the trash yourself.

You could have saved me ears and marriage counseling because I feel like a lot of the times of my but and I then are at odds about is my stress about what the kids have just externalized by handing me their emotional garbage and his ability to just either not be bothered by IT not worried about IT. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for writing about that. One final question about this, when do you know it's time to get a therapy involved? And how do you look for one the right one?

So I think we will go back to the what we're doing isn't working okay, and we're not able to find another way, you know that the things we're trying aren't helping because nobody starts at a therapy, right? They try at home to make things Better. yeah.

And so I think if you feel like we've thought of everything we can, what we're doing isn't working. Our kid is not Better enough. Archie store suffering. That one is a great time to get help. And and I think that's really critically important.

I think one thing when we talk about teenagers and therapy, one thing that I always like to remember, teenagers worry that there's something wrong with them almost univerSally. This is a worry that teenagers Carry. And it's because being a teenagers are very diregus ating and very disorganizing experience.

Their emotions become very intense, the way their brain works changes. And so I think it's true that a lot of teenagers harbor a secret concern that there's something wrong with them. And so when IT comes time to suggest that they should be in therapy, we have to do IT carefully.

Because I think if you just say, like, you know what you need to talk to approve, right? Then the kids like, oh my god, like this is exactly like my secret concern is now confirmed. So I always very careful about how I proto, even when I know it's the right recommendation.

And I will tend to say, a teenagers, listen for what you are up against. You deserve way more support than you, and we need to get someone who actually knows what they are doing to help support you through this. That is just a tiny shift that can make an enormous difference.

Then there's the issue of finding somebody, and this is hard. And part of what's hard about IT is there's just not a lot of clinicians who specializing caring for teenagers. And yeah, one thing that really never got discussed in in the broad conversation about the adolescent mental health crisis, there are two reasons for that crisis.

One, what teenagers went through that really you increase are suffering at a very fast pace. And the other, everyone who cares with teenagers is ready full in their practice before about twenty twenty. And so we're not really in a position to scale up the workforce of people who care for teenagers very quickly.

IT takes a long time actually to become trained at IT. And so that was really where things ended up in a bad place, is that the need accelerated and the workforce to address the need cannot be scaled up at that pace. So finding a clinician is hard.

IT was hard before after twenty. Twenty is it's hard now it's getting a little Better. What I would say is, in my experience, pediatricians are actually a really good resource.

They know your kid, they know the local talent in terms of psychotherapy. E, they are often good at doing a good match, you know, between your kid and who they know in the community. They can sometimes help facilitate making an appointment happen. And so that usually my genre advice is ascribed attrition. Who they like.

That is so hopeful and so accessible. And I really appreciate that answer because of something anybody can do. And IT makes a lot of sense. Let's pivot to this accelerating mental health crisis that we are reading about. We are experiencing ing, please.

So I don't have a single friend who doesn't have a family member who is spy rolling and all through the kind of locked down and you coming out of the last three years. IT doesn't feel like a new Normal IT feels like there is something that's been bubbling underneath the surface. And if IT hasn't already erupted with the Young people in your life, IT feels like everybody is very tender. And so I would love for you to talk about what you've seen and what your concerns are about what and how this age group, eleven to twenty five, roughly experienced the last three years, the isolation and lockdown.

Well, let's look at, at this way, teenagers have two jobs. Their jobs are to become increasingly independent, and they spend as much time with their friends as possible. Those jobs were made impossible by what they went through.

And i'll tell you now, I saw a wide range of responses, a few kids, but this isn't assign. This was a good thing. We're glad to be home very, very small and order of kids felt some relief and locked down.

But we have have the reality that they do need to return to the world large. And that's harder than I was before. Most kids just suffer through IT, found their way one way or another while feeling miserable.

I and they were miserable and, you know, miserable in all of its variety. You know, some incredibly anxious about what was happening with their social lives, some unable to do school in two d that is its own like fascinating universe um of kids who were otherwise very strong students. And I saw several of these really as long as they were in a brick motor school could do school.

And as soon as was, as IT was collapsed into a two d space, were actually incapable. And IT got me thinking, this is, you can hear I get excited about the phenomenology of this. Like I got me thinking about, oh, we never knew that so much of what kids had, some kids organized at school was moving physically from room to room. So I must be in this class. now.

I cause i'm sitting next to the kid, I said next to in this class, i'm going to focus on this class or that they knew that I was time to get out there, no book, because everyone around them was getting out there, no book, or they know that I was time to start writing down notes because they're noticing people doing IT. I I just became completely fascinated by all of these anti supports that we had never thought about because we had never been put in a position to think about. And I watch kids who really were incredibly strong academically creator, I mean, absolutely, completely unable to do school.

There are also kids who could do school. They just hated IT, and they did IT and they hated IT. Um so we saw all of that. And then the other far limit, and unfortunate, we saw a weight. Too many kids in this area, I saw kids entirely derailed, right, who developed horrifying eating disorders, who were smoking so much weed that IT really pully changed their development trajectory, at least for a while, who ended up in just rip oring social conflicts that, you know, I think we're yeah how to deal with bottom and partly out of desperation and partly out of, who knows what I will tell you now, and you know, from having great my work like I am generally, you know, kids, resilient is all good. We'll find a way through this, and I still believe that. But I can tell you having dinner practicing clinton for a long time before twenty twenty march, and then post the stories I hear now of kids to rAiling are just much, much more extreme than what I used to hear that. And that part is alarming to me, and I don't get alarming very easily.

Wow, what do we need to know? Because know what we saw, which is very interesting as we saw, uh, a lot of grief because our daughters were in the middle of their college experience.

And so there was like daily racing emotion about, are we going back? We not going back, who's going back? And I can live off like all of that stuff and then all of those sort of milestones of graduation or prom or all of these things that people look forward to or just expected being ripped away.

And so I saw a lot of that, and I also have lots of friends whose kids just opted out of school, who started smoking pot, who became credibly rebellious, who became super depressed, eating disorders, retried gel. And so I think we've all, if it's not happened in our family, we have somebody close to us who is going through IT. What do you want us, first of all, to know about how not being able to do the two things you're supposed to do, which has become more independent and spend more time with your friends? How does that impact a child developmentally?

I think the best language for this is to think in terms of delay, not loss, though there's a lot and you know like what your daughters like, they lost elements of college that they're never getting back.

And I think that needs to be acknowledged is exactly what IT is in terms of developing a sense of independence, finding one's path and one's interests, developing one's peer relationships and increasing reliance on peer relationships and moving out into the pure world. We just have to accept that there's a delay in that and there is no getting around the fact that there's a delay. I really do think the development is like the most powerful force in the world, and kids will find their way back onto a trajectory that works for them.

I really do you know that humans as a group bend towards health. But sometimes I I think it's hard for us to accept that there are delays. And I have sometimes found myself in conversations where people are handling ing about what's how kids look academically. We are still seeing the attempt academically.

And I said to them, okay, but wouldn't IT be so weird if kids didn't go to school for a year and a half and they came back and we saw no impact from that, we would have to, what have we've been doing all this time, requiring them to show up for school. So we just have to say they're gonna be delayed because they missed out. And an but I think is Better than a lost language.

I also think we got to look for the big stuff. So we had talked about suicide. We just hit a head on because there's yes, it's the scarious thing. So IT is true now that thoughts of suicide are actually not rare, that I don't have this statistics at my fingertips.

But I know that when we've looked, you know you know but for two thousand, you know, we would take surveys of adolescence and in the frequency which with which they, you know, the thought hood crossed their mind. And it's not right. And I remember being a teenager, and like one time my mom and I read to fight like, oh, wouldn't SHE couldn't if I hurt myself right now SHE d feels so bad, right? So did I think about IT? yes.

was. Was I myself close to doing IT? No, right. So I would do want people to know that if you have a worry about a teenager or anybody in your life around questions of whether they are suicidal, what we recommend a psychologist is you just have to ask, you have to ask, and, and here's how I would have. You do IT.

I would say to the person, listen, I need to ask a question. And this may feel out of the blue. You know, something like that, but because of, and then you tell them why, right?

You don't just ask anything you say because you've been in your room for a day and a half or you have not seemed like yourself or you were so upset about that thing. I need ask, have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life? And the reason we're reluctant to do this is very afraid.

We're going to give the person the idea that a concern we know that's not a concern, but we do know when we have researched adolescence is if a teenager is thinking about suicide, their glad you asked. So I think we start with a scarious thing well and how to address the scarious thing, and then we can go thing down the line of of more manageable concerns. But that is the one we just have to address very directly.

Thank you. And IT was very reassuring to hear the research that teenagers are. Just glad you asked that. Glad you asked. Yeah, we did a episode with my r eighteen year old son now, where he disclosed to me on the episode.

I did not know that this was the case that he had had big scary thoughts like that freshman year, and I had no idea. And so one of the things that was interesting about IT is he was pretty surprised to learn that IT is frequent and Normal to have a thought like that. And there's a big difference between having a thought and actually wanting IT to happen and that they do come and go and they do go away.

And IT doesn't mean you're at the end of the end, but even just talking about IT made him feel Better. And so I love that you just gave us permission based on the research to just ask and they will feel Better even if they thought I cross the right. Thank you for checking in.

I am would love for you to help us understand some of the issues that you've seen coming out of this and how to how how to really pass, especially in the wake of the rising crisis that you're saying, even if it's just starting to come to the surface, it's sort of even delayed that. You know, now we're kind of throw IT and quote back to school and back to this that there are still this delay and they're still this hangover, so to speak, of the emotional experience. And i'm convinced everybody's nervous system is in fighter flight still.

And we on the nervous system stuff, I mean, not really rocked our world. And and when we think about really huge ally unsettle events, they do sort of rewire our nervous system, and I think they were having to find our way through that. Um two things we are seeing after math and and we can be very specific about that.

I really worry about eating disorders. I really worry about kids were abusing substances. We don't know yet what the np shot of mental health is right this minute for teenagers. And part of what's confusing is that in february of this year, the cdc released a report that was very devastating about atos mental health. But what's important about those numbers is that they were collected in the fall of twenty twenty one, asking about mood over the previous year.

Oh yeah.

that kind of a got lost in a lot of the reporting. And I think that's actually a really critically important point because when I think about the follow twenty twenty one, what we were looking at, where kids who were there entering their third school year that was disrupted, they were all entering their third school year.

Either they were going back in masks and terrified or not going back in masks and terrified or you know still hybrid and unhappy. So IT was a very particular time. So just um so like we cannot know and we won't know for about another eighteen months where we still are now ando tally. And this is important to say for kids who we are back to their regular routines, they looked to me like kids did before twenty, twenty.

That awesome.

I'm seeing a lot of just typical out lessons, which is also written spicy on a good day. But it's take the things I worry about. I worry about increased isolation. People spend more time away from one another um I worry about eating disorders, kids of odd genders. We are traditionally touched these two girls that's not actually how IT works and I worry about we having talked about social media, it's a big topic and I feel very um I feel like it's way more complicated then just you know all good are all bad.

I worry about the norms in digital environments where kids hang out and what I mean that is that one thing I feel that we definitely saw between march twenty, twenty and then the subsequent years was the kids who were stuck at home, who felt like they were gonna use that time to get in shape right, and improve themselves. So they start searching online for fitness, diet, exercise, anything like that. The algorithms that drive social media picks this up and start to flood their feet with image after image after image of ultra thin or ultra fit.

And then how to lose weight. And here's an advertisement for IT. Teenagers are vulnerable to norms. They are more vulnerable to norms than kids are. They are more vulnerable to norms than adults are.

And I IT hard because we can't prove this with the data, but I will just go out on a lemon, say, I am convinced if you are looking at four thousand images a day of alpha altera on people that impacts real world behavior, and that changes how you eat, and that changes how you exercise. And we did see an explosions of eating disorders. So what I would say is we got a watch where kids are online now and forever because the norms are powerful.

I can't agree more. In fact, IT happened our daughter. And um I remember when he got into treatment for disorder reading SHE ended up deleting her visco and her instagram and SHE said, like my entire feed is basically models and waste trainers and a puppies and IT makes me feel terrible and I keep looking at these images and IT makes me feel like I i'd like, need to get like that and I know I know that these are fake.

I know there are filters, but I still can't help you. I want to be like that and so IT drove all of this obsessive behavior. Is there also a connection with the Spike and eating disorders because IT is typically something driven by this need to control.

It's interesting. I wrote a piece for the times um I think I came at an April twenty twenty one about the spec eating disorders. There is a variety of reasons that, that can come into IT. So some is everything else out of control. Here's one thing I can control that can be really powerful.

Another that one of the experts I interviewed reference to that I thought was really important, is that we had a lot of very hard driving teenagers with the whole lot of energy, who suddenly could not do the things they usually did, right, who would have poor, their growth, self improvement. Choose into ban and sports and all these other things. Anyway, just a whole bunch of that lying around.

And so then they turned IT against themselves. And two, and just going to get really fit, because I might as well do something to make myself Better finger quite Better in this time. But I do also just think if all you looking at or ultra ultra IT bodies and you are not going to school and looking at Normal bodies in three d your sense of what bodies looks like, changes in your view of your own body changes.

I want to ask you very specific question on this topic because I I think there's also this kind of cultural obsession with being in shape and being healthy and being good looking.

And if you've got a kid that suddenly goes on a health kick and other exercising and they get positive reinforcement because they're look and great and they're not going to run the five k and now they are going to get in triathlons or now, you know, I runs like, oh, you're a great night bathing suit. Where's the line? Well, it's a healthy thing. Vers, this is now something that scary because I miss the science you and kids are also remarkable at just kind of, oh, it's thought I just and then because it's in this lineup but they look Better but they say they're going for a run um how do I insert myself here? How do you do that?

It's tRicky and IT is easy to miss. So some framing stuff。 One is teenager shouldn't be losing weight.

And usually they are gaining way in in the course of typical development and later puberty. And they're gaining weight. They're gaining strength.

So if you notice that your teenager has lost weight, you should be attentive to that. There's just an unusual thing for teenagers to do here, and it's not all bad. I mean, you can talk with your petition.

There are some teenagers who the people may say, this way is not in a healthy place. You know, losing some weight would be healthiest thing to do. Then you can do that with a nutritionist in the pedestal and do IT in a controlled and careful way.

But one thing i've learned from my colleagues in the eating disorder world is, by the time the teenagers losing weight, some things usually up. And wow, I think that's just a valuable you marker to have. The other thing that we want to watch out for is dropping entire food categories. So I put in this way, not everybody who becomes a vegetarian goes on to developing needing disorder. Everybody who goes on to developing an eating disorder, drops of food category.

Oh my god, our daughter, the one who did have disordered eating, did a research paper in college about, I don't remember the name of IT, but that there's a lot of people in her age group that are gluten free or vegan or dairy free or this and IT is a socially acceptable and praised way to have disorder eating. It's not actually analogy. It's literally a it's crossed the line is that what you're talking .

about is a flag. It's a and one of the ways I sometimes assess that flag is all sometimes care for teenagers who are like, I don't need sugar and i'll be like, right and my eyebrows will go up. But if I also know that they don't need sugar and lesson body brings them some really good cupcakes, I don't worry about IT too much.

okay. So there's like what people say and what people do. And what we want fundamentally is to see that food is a pleasure, but IT is a wonderful worse of energy that there's a variety in a Young person's died in any new of our diets.

So those are some flags to keep an eye out for. And then I would say if concerns really start to rise, we can actually go back to where we started around people having two sides. And it's the job of all of us.

And teenagers are developing in their capacity to take good care of ourselves. That's our job. And so if a teenager is suddenly eating nothing but salary and running, know a lot that he is not taking good care of themselves.

And so before IT gets to that extreme, I would want the loving person in their life to say, hey, you know, I see that you're getting pretty, but i'm not so sure you're taking good care of yourself. Are you taking good care of yourself? Are you eating the kind of variety of nutrition? Are you being gentle enough on your body like exercise? yeah.

But not to the point of injury. No, to use that as a guard rail. That fundamental that the goal is for the teenager that d be doing a really, really excEllent job of caring for themselves.

beautiful. I worry a lot about how we seem to have a parenting crisis of parents who can't tolerate their kid's anxiety and are allowing their kids anxiety to run the house. Can you give us some advice, especially given that teenagers are so such emotional beings to begin with, how do you give space for the Normal emotion without letting a teenagers emotion run your house or dictate what they do?

Oh thank you for bringing up this I mean a huge topic um and actually between untangled and the emotionalized teenagers I publish a book call the under pressure confronting the epidemic of stressed end's idea girls but what I hear all the time is eighty percent applies to kids of all genders which I am sure is true and in that book I actually make at the outset a case for healthy anxiety and a case for healthy stress and we have always a psychologist recognized that healthy anxiety is the anxiety that alerts us when something's wrong.

IT is not oniton on pathological and we have not helped the situation by using the same word to describe healthy anxious and something that we diagnose. It's sort of Better that we have the word sadness and we have depression for the agnolo is. But we using anxiety in both categories that doesn't help as much.

And same as stress. Stress is actually the human experience of adaptation. We experience stress anytime things change, anytime we have to adapt to a new condition.

And IT can be a wonderful condition or allows the condition, but we experiences stress under change conditions. And we only consider stress pathological if IT is chronic or traumatic. But all other stress, we just talk to the you help when you grow doesn't always feel good category.

Um what I will tell you is that the most important thing for people to know about anxiety is that avoidance fades anxious. And this is one of the, again, most critical findings in psychology and one that we have done a completely terrible job of getting out to the public. And here's how that works.

If I, let's say, I have some social avoidance, some social anxiety, and there is a party that i've been invited to, and it's a good party to go to, right? Rational, I should be for in front of minds party, but say, I feel anxious and say I agreed to go to the party but then the day of my anxiety is starting to really accelerate and then i'm thinking, I don't think I should go. I don't want to go and say my parents is like, uh, it's just a party you don't have to go, right? Here's what happens.

The first thing that happens if I feel so much Better, right? My ex idea is resting and then I get to avoid and IT immediately. Plum its its like what we call reinforcement, instantly relief.

And so the upshot of that is, next time I feel anxious, I know what helps me feel Better. It's avoidance. So that's the first problem.

The second problem is that I never go to the party and check out how would IT, right? So whatever I have daydreamed about how terrifying this party is, or how to, you know, like, cruel, everyone will be at the party that is now sealed in Amber. And I continue to believe IT, because I have no counter evidence.

Where's if I go to the party? And like, oh, wait, it's not so bad, but if I don't go, so i'd actually entrenches anxiety, I, to avoid the things we fear. Now, if a kid is avoiding school, which a lot of kids are right now, there is a third issue, which is the minute you don't show up at school, you are at loop social and and you are attitude academically.

So it's that much harder to get back in. So there is not a lot in psychology where there is agreement across the entire field, where there is zero controversy. But on this one, everyone's an agreement that avoids, feeds anxiety, and everyone's an agreement that exposure is the answer.

And what I mean by that is you have to get in, you know, you don't have to go to every party all the time, but you have to baby step your way in. You have to go check out the party. You cannot have the reinforcement of the avoidance.

You cannot have the daydream become the reality. And so if this is your kid in their life, I can go to school, I can go to the party. I can, you know, fell in the black, you say, all right, here's a deal.

You're going to go to the party for twenty minutes and then i'm gonna get something and text. You see, you know, you need me to pick you up. And if you need me to pick you up after twenty minutes, i'll get you.

But if you can stay, that would be Better. So you have to negotiate. You have to help them get in.

Breathing as powerful for helping to control anxiety, reframing as powerful for helping to control anxiety. But avoidance is anxiety. His best friend. It's devastating because IT.

you're right. I think about the fact that I was home sick at every camp, so much so that I would just escalate IT until the councils got so tired and my parents to show up because IT works, because back to original thing, we do these things because they work. They work.

And when we allow our kid to keep transfering from one school to another because they can't handle IT, we are locking in anxiety as a coping mechanism and avoidances a coping mechanism. Wow, you are so good. I want to ask you one final question, which is if you had the bottom line IT to make IT really simple because clearly is very complicated to have teenagers in your life, they're amazing and they're also incredibly chAllenging emotional beings going through a lot of change. If you had a bottom line, the way you want us to think about your role in a teenager's life.

what are we .

there to provide for them? As parents, uncles and mentors, teachers, doctors, how do we show up in this calderon of emotion and uncertainty?

I can say IT in two words, but now this is to be filed under easy to save, very hard to do. Our job is to try to be a steady presence.

What does that mean?

That means that when teenagers are having their big feelings and their feelings are big and they come away with their big feelings, that we don't meet them where they are, we don't get as agitated as they are, oh, that we can listen, be attentive and offer empathy, which a huge percentage of the time is all they want. And there's two reasons why this is critically important.

One is that when teenagers ers are bringing us their concerns, they're watching our reaction. And if they are having a really bad fifteen year old day, and then they bring IT to us and then we hit the ceiling, they can help but think, oh my gosh, I thought this was like fifteen year old size bad IT turns out it's fifty two year old size bad, right? So that is not reassuring to them.

And then the other thing is when we offer our empathy as the response that we're there, we're there and we're empathic with whatever they are distresses. I think that is actually the all time steady presence move because what you're doing is your highly present. You are empathy.

You are saying that stinks. I am sorry, I wish that had not happened. So you are there for IT, but you're incredibly study.

You are not picking up the phone, you are not canceling plans, you are not becoming highly agitated. And so deep empathy and just listening goes so much further than we sometimes give a credit for. And even if there's more to be done, starting with empathy is never a bad move. And a huge percentage of the time gives teenagers everything that they want and need.

Wow, I I love your phrased stinks because you're right. If there are big emotions that all you need to say that things I I never really thought about IT from the standpoint that if I get distressed, I magnify their distressed. I think i'm going to use the power of objectivity and use you as my abbati and the next time candle face times me because we know SHE graduates from college, uh, a week from thursday.

And so i'm just sort of like waiting for the roller coasters and I am going to anybody you i'm going to just be a steady presence and i'm gona realize that the emotions that she's going to feel, from the grief to the excitement to the fear to the sadness, I just have to hold space for I don't need to project, oh know, what if a trigger eating to support? What if this happens? What if, hey, that a create teer up calm down. It's going to be OK like I don't to do any that I just have to say it's thanks. Wow because that's Normal and it's actually is fine that she's mentally well oh my g evident .

end of her perfect functioning and and the .

same as truth. The adults in your life that if the big feelings and the distress is related to a corresponding event that makes sense, there are mentally well, that is a revelation. A revelation, everybody, you have got to pick up this book, the emotional lives of teenagers.

I cannot tell you how helpful, hopeful, encouraging, empowering IT is. I find your work so helpful because he is always grounded red in a larger framing. And so the advice that sounds simple is suddenly so profound because you understand IT in the context of the larger framing.

Thank you. I I am so glad I can be helpful.

It's h my gosh.

It's a hard time to be a person and it's a hard time to be resent teenagers. And here's a lot of people to know. We have studied to add list at midnight health for decades.

And the single most powerful force for protecting teenage mental health is strong relationships with Carrying adults. We're not gonna a medicate or therapists are a way out of this at lesser mental health crisis. It's gonna be about the adults around teenagers, parents, caregivers, bosses, mentors, coaches, teachers, being there for teenagers and being invested in their emotional lives. That's how we can to find our way through this.

Well, thank you for giving us the tools to be able to show up and do just .

that an hour to be here.

Well, it's incredible. Talk to you. You are so cool.

Who I got so much out of that conversation? Holy smokes, I wish you live closer to me. I wish you live closer. You, I would love to have her on speed dial or as my walk and buddy. But now we've got her on the melrose's podcast and you've got me and i've got you and i'm so happy were doing this thing of life together in case nobody else tells you today, I wanted to be sure to remind you that I love you, I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to feel all those big emotions, to ride the wave and to be a steady presence for the people in your life and for yourself. Because, as we just learned, that's exactly what everybody needs for us already outside a few days.

I love you.

Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented soly for educational and entertainment purposes. IT is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional. stitcher.

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