THE ANXIETY OF RAISING TEENS
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode 110.
Hello, my friends. I don't know about you, but there are parts about the summer with teens that I absolutely love. And there are other parts that I love not as much.
I definitely love that my college son is home for the summer. I'm especially aware that I want to be in the moment with having him home because he's expressed a number of times that it's probably going to be the last summer when I'll be home for the whole break. It's amazing how quickly it already starts to feel like the home where he grew up may no longer be something that he considers his home.
I've also got my younger son at home. He's a rising senior in high school, and I've got to tell you that he is living his best life right now. Notwithstanding the fact that he's gearing up for the college application process and he's had a stressful junior year, he is definitely following the model work hard, play hard.
It's times like this when I'm honestly so infinitely grateful that I discovered mindset work and self-coaching when I did. Because, man, as these boys have grown up, the challenges I face only seem to grow exponentially. School is harder.
The goals are bigger. Navigating relationships is trickier. Kids may be having sex, trying out drugs or alcohol, struggling with their mental health.
These are not small problems, nor do they have easy solutions. And I wonder if you also sometimes feel alone on this journey. You see so many people online advising you to enjoy every minute, how it goes so fast, that you shouldn't complain because before you know it, the nest will be empty.
Be there for your kids when they want to talk at midnight, even if you're fast asleep. Don't get me wrong, I think the advice people give is well-meaning. In fact, you often find yourself reading these pieces of wisdom and you think to yourself, yeah, that's right.
I just have to be more present, more appreciative of this time. Maybe I need to learn to let go. I probably am too controlling.
I'm too needy. I have the privilege of coaching so many brave moms who want so much to be the best version of themselves for their kids, for their families. And maybe it's through these voices and perspectives that I've come to appreciate how many of us are so cruel to ourselves behind closed doors, the mean things we say to ourselves in the interest of being better.
Honestly, you think it's just you, that you're the only one who doesn't have our act together. But my friend, that's not true. This is hard work, this journey of raising teens.
There are no obvious right answers. And the risks and the dangers seem infinite and ever-changing. And yet so many of us put on this mask of everything being so great.
We don't want to admit what's going on beneath the surface. I'm not even judging, this is complicated and it's no one else's business. No one's right to judge.
But the problem is that it makes this time a pretty lonely time for us moms. The only measures of success that are readily available to us are the moms of teens who have it all together or seem to, the seemingly perfect hashtag blessed families. Or alternatively, you look at the families who suffered public tragedy, people in your family or in your town, or even kids you've read about online.
These tragic stories of kids taking drugs for the first time and dying or girls being abducted, kids taking their own lives. It's the stuff of nightmares, but it's also real life. You see it everywhere.
I wonder if our own moms were shielded from these worst case scenarios and painful comparisons to some extent because they didn't get bombarded with it on social media. For us today, we are bombarded with these possibilities. How many women tell me, I can't stop catastrophizing.
And yet when they look on social media or watch the news, the worst case is readily available. Your imagination doesn't even have to run wild for you to see these terrible possibilities. So there are dangers out in the world, and you don't have that many people who you may feel you can trust to open up to about your fears.
And to top it all off, the things you do to try to protect and guide your team can be met with ambivalence or annoyance. Mom, let it go. Stop being so annoying.
You're trying to control my life. Whether you're worried about your team because they're taking risks, maybe experimenting with drugs or alcohol or just hanging out with a questionable crowd, or maybe you're worried because your team is a loner. They don't seem as connected as you'd like them to be.
They might even tell you they feel lonely, or maybe they're anxious or depressed or any number of things that could be going on with your team that make you feel anxious. The bottom line is that we've been working so hard for close to two decades to keep our kids safe, happy, and to help them be successful. And we might even realize that this isn't entirely in our control anymore.
But damn, isn't it hard to let it go? Who among us would really want to just say, oh, well, they're being unsafe. I can't do anything about that. Or, so you're unhappy.
My child sounds like a you problem. If I'm being honest, I don't want to give up my desire and honestly, even my feelings of responsibility to help support and protect my kids. It doesn't even matter that they don't want my support or input as much as they did when they were little.
I just refuse to let it go. At the same time, I'm actually floored by how far I've come in terms of being able to manage my own anxiety in the face of raising teens as the challenges have only become bigger and more out of my control. And as we think about our lives, not just as moms, but also as women, the reality is when something's going on with our kids, it often goes to the forefront of our minds in ways that kind of crowd out a lot of the other positive intention or areas of focus that we might have in our lives.
And that's not to say that we don't do other things and continue on with our lives. But worrying about our kids becomes kind of like the top item on our to-do list whenever there's a challenge. It can be something big like our kids getting into trouble or getting into things we don't want them to get into.
Or it could be times when we worry about how they'll handle disappointment or heartbreak. Or we might worry about what's going on with them when all of a sudden they're quiet and not talking. In fact, our brains are constantly scanning our kids for danger, like a sonar or radar signal that we send out to be sure everything's okay with them.
And so in the process, we're collecting all this data about our kids, looking for signals that they're happy or at least okay, checking to see that they're doing what you think they should be doing, gauging whether or not what they're doing matches your hopes and expectations for them. In all the work I do with my clients to achieve any goal they might have, there are two simple steps that I help guide my clients to take. First, I help them embrace where they are now.
And second, I empower them to decide how to move forward. Two simple steps, and yet they're more difficult than they seem, particularly when we're talking about complicated challenges with our teens or situations with a lot of uncertainty, something we face quite a bit of as moms with kids growing up and leaving the nest. The second step, deciding how to move forward in the midst of uncertainty, difficult choices around parenting, these decisions about how much to hold on and where to let go.
Deciding how to move forward, it's so much harder than it sounds. We want to be certain about the right choice or the right way to parent. We want to avoid failure and disappointment.
Frankly, we want to avoid pain as much as possible, both our kids' pain and our own pain. And so when women come to me and tell me, I don't know, I get it. When it comes to our kids, we want desperately to help them be safe and happy and to help them reach their full potential.
But sometimes we just don't know how to move forward. Do you ever feel that your kid's happiness is your happiness and so that you can't possibly be happy if they're not happy? Look at what we're up against. Our kids are now in the driver's seat.
They're the ones who have to watch out for their own safety. There's nothing we can do to guarantee they'll always make the right choices or that they won't, God forbid, end up in unsafe situations that are entirely out of their control. Their safety is no longer in our hands.
Our kids' happiness, this is absolutely out of our hands. As much as we would do anything in our power to support our kids' happiness, we can quite literally not force them to be happy when they're not. You know because I'm sure you've tried.
We also can't force our kids to self-actualize. No matter how important these goals are to us, they're no longer in our power to pursue on behalf of our kids. But here's the thing, you still have the goal of supporting your kid's happiness and safety.
You just no longer have the power to achieve it, if you honestly ever did. Still, we try our best, thinking that there's still some way that we can influence or sway our teens to do the right thing. And it doesn't seem like an option to just give up.
Our teen's well-being is too important to us to just let it go. Honestly, I think this is one of the biggest problems with us judging our anxiety because we tell ourselves we should just let that feeling go. But we can't let go of our anxiety without fixing whatever we see the problem is with our kids or without letting go of the thought that whatever's going on is a problem.
Neither feels possible. And as your coach, I am never going to talk you out of how you feel. I'm not going to tell you to just look on the bright side or think about the problem another way just so you can get over it.
That's only useful if you really believe this new way of thinking. So instead, I start with helping you embrace where you are. When you feel anxious or honestly when you feel any negative, powerful emotion, you don't want to be there.
So it can feel hard and actually not even desirable to embrace where you are. I had an incredible coaching session with a dear client the other day and we were exploring the concept of compassion. She shared she was having a hard time having compassion for herself because she felt like that meant she had to accept where she was.
And to her this felt terrible, hopeless, and dark. She had a great point. So it seems like if you're really to embrace where you are when you're feeling emotional pain, it's almost like you have to just accept it and learn how to get over it.
Because if this is reality, then you're stuck with it, right? This can feel like you're doomed to be stuck in eternal misery. In fact, I've seen this in so many comments on social media from moms stuck in pain about situations with their kids or the transition to the empty nest. They'll ask, how can I let go of this pain? The first step, my friends, is to embrace where you are.
And here's what I mean. When we find ourselves struggling, we're almost always resisting the emotion we're experiencing. So let's say you feel anxious.
It doesn't feel great. It feels tight in your body. Your head spins.
You have trouble sleeping. You can't think about anything else but the problem you're anxious about. You feel stuck in the emotion and yet what your brain is doing is frantically trying to solve for it, to make the emotion go away.
I'll share a personal example of a time when I was in this place to illustrate what embracing where you are looks like. My son was in a toxic relationship with a girl. Now if I were coaching myself now, I would explore this interpretation of the relationship as toxic.
Was it really or did you just not like it? But no, my friend, it was toxic. If you want the cold hard facts about it, my son stopped sleeping because he was always in trouble with this person. Then he started cutting himself off from friends.
He cut himself off from his family. He was struggling and in trouble, constantly trying to make this other person happy. And no matter what he did, no matter what sacrifices he made, it was never enough.
That was the truth. In fact, I've only learned about the extent of how terrible the relationship was after the fact because he wasn't talking to me about any of it at the time. What I saw was my son who was exhausted, losing weight, telling us that we had done things to offend his girlfriend, and eventually shutting himself off from us completely.
I didn't need to know the details to know something was seriously wrong. Needless to say, I felt anxious. Actually, I felt a thousand other terrible emotions.
It was agony. And for a while, all I wanted to do was fix it, help my son through this challenge so he could be happy and safe. And so I could let go of this crippling anxiety.
Makes sense, right? Who among us would stand by and do nothing? But what it looked like was me trying to get him to set boundaries with his girlfriend. I came down on him for not sleeping. I tried to hold him accountable to his responsibilities at school and to his curfew.
I would stay up late at night replaying our interactions, trying to think about other ways to approach him. I tried everything I could think of, everything from a calm, rational approach to screaming and begging. My friend, the truth is I tried it all, and nothing worked.
What I actually did was push him further away from me. Everything I said was shared with this girl, and she used this to try to make my son believe that we were the toxic ones. In an effort to make her happy, he started to close himself off to us.
It's taken me some time to be able to reflect on the situation without crying. When we were in the thick of it, for a period of about a year, I felt hurt, betrayed, angry, frustrated, anxious, and I didn't want any of it. Most of all, what I really didn't want was to lose my son.
But fighting reality wasn't working. How can you embrace a situation like this? Whatever you've been through with your own teen when you're in these dark places, it seems impossible to just accept it. And this is why I use the word embrace rather than accept, because let's be honest, I didn't want to accept the situation my son was in.
Acceptance does seem to imply that you're giving up, learning to live with something that you don't want, doomed actually to be stuck in this place forever. No, I couldn't ever accept it, but what I learned to do was embrace it, not love it, not accept it. Instead, I learned to understand it, to have compassion for it, for my son and for myself.
So this is what it looked like. First, I acknowledged that my pain was coming from the thought that none of this should be happening. This is really important to understand because what we typically do is we think our pain is being caused by what the other person is doing or by the circumstance we're facing.
So in this case, I could think my emotional pain was being caused by my son's relationship, the way she was treating him and the way he was treating me, the way he was showing up in his life. But the truth is my pain was being caused by my thoughts. The thought, this shouldn't be happening, he shouldn't be treating me this way, she shouldn't be this type of person.
But the truth is, the truth not colored by my perception, whatever the actual facts of the situation were, all of it was happening. It wasn't good, but also it was happening. So I spent some time considering this, the truth of the situation.
This is happening. My son is in this relationship. He's choosing to be with this person.
Why is this so hard for me to accept? Well, clearly it didn't look like what I wanted it to look like for him. I certainly didn't want him to be in a relationship that took a toll on his physical and mental health. And of course, I didn't want to be disconnected from him in any way.
But despite all of this, he was choosing this relationship. I asked myself, why? Of course, you can never truly know what's going on in another person's head, but people's actions are a direct result of how they feel. And so the obvious answer in this situation was that my son was in this relationship because he truly cared about this other person.
In fact, he was in love for the first time. This was a fact I hadn't allowed myself to consider because this didn't look like the type of love I wanted for my son. But no matter how much I didn't want it, this is what was true.
As I considered this, I really started to find compassion for my son's experience. I could see it. My son was in love, struggling to make this other person happy.
He hadn't yet learned how to set healthy boundaries in a relationship. In fact, this beautiful young man, full of empathy and a desire to love and be loved, was doing his best. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how this young man was being everything I had raised him to be.
Caring, loving, selfless. As I tried to see the world from his perspective, I started to understand why the war I had been raging against this relationship wasn't working. I was trying to tear down something that was really important to him.
Something he was fighting so hard to save. I didn't want it. And I didn't want to lose my son.
But also I could see it. I could see why my son would be fighting so hard. I also deeply understood why I was fighting so hard.
I found compassion for both of us. I embraced him in my mind, because he definitely wasn't looking for me to embrace him in real life. But I embraced him and I embraced myself.
It wasn't easy, I won't lie. There was a period of about six months when I was grieving my son. But during that time, I stopped fighting.
I took off my gloves and I made a decision that I could love my son so much that I could let him go. At least let him make decisions about this relationship even if they were decisions I didn't want him to make. This is how much I love my son.
That wasn't hard to find. He was doing his best. I knew that even then.
But now that the relationship is over and we've been able to find each other again, it's only now that I understand how hard he was fighting for me too. In his heart, he never gave up on the possibility that he didn't have to choose between this relationship and his family, his life. As moms, we want so much for our kids to be safe and happy that we can be blind to the reality that our kids actually desperately want this too.
The problem is we can have very different perspectives about how they should get there. It's messy, my friends. These baby adults are doing the best they can, even when that looks like a hot mess from our perspective.
Embracing this doesn't mean you have to accept it and give up. Embracing it, embracing the reality of your child's experience, even if you can't fully understand it, embracing it means opening your mind up to the possibility that they are also working hard to figure things out. Through this process of self-coaching and learning how to embrace the reality of my life, I finally saw my beautiful son and his experience and I let go of the thought that it shouldn't be happening.
I had a hard time embracing the relationship, but what I could do was embrace my son, embrace my love for my son, and also embrace my desire for him to be okay, for him to be safe and happy, and let's face it, for him to be connected to me. But I even realized that as I found compassion for my son and recommitted to my unconditional love for him, I found new connection with him that didn't actually require anything from him. And then a miracle happened.
I stopped fighting reality. I took off the gloves, I loved my son, I didn't yell, I didn't criticize his relationship, I still held him accountable to his responsibilities, and I didn't expect him to be happy about it. But I also didn't pull away from him.
I didn't retaliate against the distance he was putting between us. He didn't look me in the eye, but that didn't keep me from showing up to the relationship. I embraced him.
I took that second step, which is I made the decision to show up for him. I made the decision to be the mom I wanted to be for him. That meant holding tight to my unconditional love for him, but also taking care of myself as I allowed and processed the grief of this relationship with my son, not looking like what I wanted it to, fearing honestly that it would be a long time before I ever had it back.
Here's the miracle. I'm convinced that as I embraced unconditional love for my son, I created a light that brought him back to me. Embrace where you are.
Decide who you want to be. This is the power of self-coaching, my friend, and the process I teach in my Mom 2.0 program. It allows you to untangle the painful emotions, the crippling anxiety of raising teens and transitioning to the empty nest, understanding and finding compassion for your experience, giving you tools to get to the heart of the mindset, that perspective you have that's causing your pain.
Look, that's not to say your mindset is wrong. I had a perspective that this relationship was toxic, and I can point to plenty of facts to back it up. To this day, I don't think differently.
But what I did discover was that it was the fighting against that reality, the perspective that it shouldn't be happening. This was the cause of my pain. As Byron Katie says, when you fight against reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.
Embrace where you are and decide who you want to be. Look, my friends, the ups and downs with our kids are going to keep coming, not just before they leave to go to college, but throughout college and beyond. We're never going to stop wanting our kids to be safe and happy, but how can we understand ourselves enough to be able to leverage these strengths, these gifts that we bring to our role as a mom, our desire to protect, to guide, to advance, and to love our kids? This is why I created the four mom archetypes.
The guardian, the mentor, the achiever, and the nurturer. Four facets of who we are as moms that we will never let go. The guardian in all of us wants to protect our kids from harm.
I will never let go of this goal. But the flip side of this is we experience anxiety when our kids aren't safe. We can catastrophize, fear the unknown, feel guilt and blame ourselves when things go wrong, or fear that we'll make the wrong decision and face dire consequences.
The guardian mom in me did not want my son to be suffering in this relationship. I found compassion for this side of me, but also found compassion for the reality that my son didn't want my protection. He wanted to find love.
In your experience with your teen, when you feel anxiety, this is how to embrace where you are. First, you want your child to be safe, happy, and successful. Of course you do.
What is it specifically that you want that's not happening right now? This difference between reality and your hopes and expectations? This difference in your mind, this disparity is causing your anxiety. Of course it is. Now, consider what if everyone involved is doing the best they can? What might be causing your teen to act the way that they're acting? What motivations might they have for doing what they're doing? And don't blame yourself.
What if their actions have nothing to do with you? Are they desperately trying to find love, to have fun, to avoid failure, to make the best of a tough situation? Are they trying to succeed by cheating, or experimenting with drugs or alcohol to fit in, to alleviate some of their own pain? As I said, you can't ever really know what's going on in the mind of another person, even your own kids. But if you take the perspective that they're doing the best they can in this moment, that they're reacting or responding to their own feelings in the best way they can, then often you can find a glimmer of compassion and understanding for their experience, even if they don't tell you a thing. And often you start to realize that your child has been giving you signals.
Sometimes we're just so uncomfortable with what's going on that we don't listen. My son told me he loved this girl, but I didn't want to hear it because I was so convinced that it shouldn't be happening, not the way it looked to me. It's messy, my friends.
There are no perfect solutions. I'm convinced that we as moms are always doing and trying our best, even when we get it wrong, we're trying our best. When I was yelling and desperately fighting with my son about his relationship, that was me doing my best in that moment, because I was responding to my anxiety and anger.
And so my best in that moment looked like me trying to get him to see my perspective. That doesn't make me wrong, but it definitely created results I didn't want. My embracing reality and deciding who I wanted to be, this was me making the decision to take action from love and compassion rather than anxiety and anger.
And while I couldn't guarantee that this shift would bring my son back to me, it most definitely opened the door to that possibility. I became a safe place for him again. It was one place where he didn't have to fight anymore.
And then he came home. Can you trust that what your teen really wants is also to be safe, happy, and successful? Could it be possible that they want this for themselves as much as you do? Maybe the gift you can give them right now is to love them enough to believe that they are in the process of figuring it out. And that no matter how messy that looks, you love them unconditionally.
I know that's already within you. Embrace where you are, decide who you want to be. The easy part is loving your kids.
That's not hard to find. If you're ready to learn these tools to let go of anxiety and find peace, really to find your power to be the mom and the woman you want to be, apply to my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. Embrace where you are, decide who you want to be. Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
