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Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)

By Test User / December 18, 2024

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)

Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT)

The most confronting part of raising a teenager is

The most confronting part of raising a teenager isn’t them. It’s realising how much of your parenting is on autopilot, running on values you never actually chose.

Respect means obey. Don’t question adults. Because I said so. We absorbed them so young we never got to decide if we even agreed.

That resistance you feel when you hear them come out of your own mouth? That’s not you failing. That’s you waking up.

Some of what you inherited is gold. Keep it. Some of it was never yours to carry, and you are allowed to put it down.

You don’t have to pass down what was passed to you. You get to choose what stays, and what ends with you.

- Save this if you’re quietly rewriting the rulebook.
- Send it to a parent doing the same 🫶🏽
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#parentingteens #raisingteens #breakingthecycle #parentingadvice #gentleparenting

For the big-feelings kid who’s been told they’re t

For the big-feelings kid who’s been told they’re too much 🫶🏽
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#parentingteens #teencounseling #bigfeelings #teenmentalhealth #identity

It’s 11:49pm. You’re typing a message to the pers

It’s 11:49pm.

You’re typing a message to the person you swore you were done with. Again.

You told your friends you meant it this time. And here you are, about to undo it, already rehearsing ‘you don’t get it, it’s different now’

And you hate that you’re doing it. You promised yourself you wouldn’t

So let me explain what’s actually happening, because it’s not weakness and it’s not stupidity

When someone is amazing to you sometimes and awful other times and you can never tell which one you’ll get, your brain starts chasing the good version like a prize it has to win back. Every time they come back and it feels good, you get a hit. That hit is a chemical, not a sign. It’s called intermittent reinforcement, and it’s the exact same loop that keeps people glued to poker machines

So the intensity you feel isn’t proof they’re the love of your life. It’s proof your nervous system has been messed with so many times it can’t settle. You’ve confused ‘I can’t stop thinking about them’ with love, when really it’s ‘I can’t stop chasing the relief’

And here’s the part underneath all of it. Most of the time, it was never really about them. You just wanted to be chosen. To be the one they picked and kept picking. And they gave you just enough of that to keep you hooked, and never enough to keep you safe

The love of your life doesn’t keep you guessing. They don’t make you question everything. Calm isn’t boring. Calm is what it feels like when someone isn’t hurting you

You’re allowed to stop going back. Not because you stopped caring but because the thing you were chasing was never going to come from them 🫶🏽

- Send to someone who keeps going back

- Save this for the next time you almost do
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#teenlove #situationships #teenmentalhealth #parentingteens #teendating

Its 6:20pm. The house has been tense for months.

Its 6:20pm.

The house has been tense for months. Money, or a marriage, or someone’s health, or all three. You’re holding it the best you can

But tonight you catch your teen reading the room before they even say hello. Checking your face. Working out what kind of night it’s going to be before they take their shoes off.

Here’s what nobody tells parents going through a hard season

Kids don’t need a perfect home. Research is clear on that. What shapes them isn’t whether things got hard. It’s whether anyone helped them make sense of it

A teen in a stressful home often becomes one of two things. The manager, who tries to fix everyone’s moods and keep the peace. Or the ghost, who disappears so they’re not a burden on top of everything else. Both are kids carrying something too heavy for their age

You can’t always fix the hard season. But you can do the one thing that changes how it lands

Name it. Age-appropriately, honestly. ‘Things have been really stressful lately. That’s not your fault, and it’s not your job to fix it. You’re allowed to just be a kid in this house’

That sentence does more than pretending everything’s fine. Kids always know when it isn’t. The damage isn’t the stress. It’s the stress plus the silence that makes them think they’re imagining it

Then protect one small pocket of normal. A Friday dinner. A show you watch together. Ten minutes at bedtime. In a chaotic season, one predictable thing tells their nervous system they’re safe

When to look closer. If your teen is parenting their siblings, managing your moods, going quiet and flat, or acting far older than their age for months. Then they’re carrying too much. A counsellor gives them one adult whose job is only them.

You don’t have to have had a perfect home to raise a solid kid. You just have to be the one who names the hard thing instead of leaving them to carry it in silence

- Send to a parent doing their best in a hard season.

Save for the night the house feels heavy
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#parentingteens #raisingteens #parentification #teenagers #familysupport

For the parent who doesn’t want their teen to lear

For the parent who doesn’t want their teen to learn love the hard way, like we did.

I once asked a woman in her forties what she wished someone had taught her about love. She said: ‘That it was a skill. I spent twenty years thinking it was luck.’

We were taught how to find someone. Never how to love and be loved well. So we blamed ourselves when it broke, when really it was the skill no one ever handed us.

You can give your teen what we never got. Not with lectures about dating. With how they treat their friends, and with what they watch love look like at home.
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#parentingteens #raisingteens #healthyrelationship #raisingdaughters #raisingboys

For the parent whose teen suddenly can’t face scho

For the parent whose teen suddenly can’t face school.
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#parentingteens #raisingteens #schoolrefusal #teenmentalhealth #teenanxiety

Counselling for a brighter tomorrow.

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