If Someone You Love Is Having a Hard Time, Listen to This

[MUSIC]

“One of the hardest things in life is to watch somebody that you care about,”

going through a really hard time, and I don't know about you.

But in those moments, I step in and I attempt to help and make things better, and then, of course, what happens? My attempt to help just makes things worse. You want to help your kid, but they just barricade themselves in their room, your partners depressed, your friend is drinking too much, you're worried.

You ask questions, because you're anxious about it, you give advice, because you can see how this might turn into some disaster. I used to do that too, but oftentimes, I wasn't helping. In fact, I was making things worse, which is why today, I've asked one of the world's leading psychologists to teach you and me,

how to help someone you love without panicking, controlling,

turning the situation into a fight or making the situation even worse. You're going to learn the exact words to use when someone shuts down, pushes you away, or is making choices that truly scare you. This episode is an extraordinary resource for you, because I know you want to be supportive.

I know you want to see this person who's struggling, truly thrive, and what you're about to learn today will show you exactly how to do that. [MUSIC] Did you know that the average American only gets 13 grams of protein for breakfast? Now, the medical experts are recommending that I get at least 100 grams.

If you're only doing 13 grams for breakfast, you're already losing out of the gate, and that's exactly why I got involved and became a co-founder in a company called Pure Genius Protein. As soon as you twist the cap and throw this sucker down, you got 23 grams of high-quality protein handled. Plus, it's sugar-free, fat-free, has no artificial flavors or sweeteners,

and it's only 100 calories. Use code, Mel, 10 at Pure Genius Protein for 10% off, 23 grams of protein, and three seconds for under $3 a shot. [MUSIC] Hey, it's your friend, Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.

I'm really excited that you're here with me today.

It's always an honor to be together and to spend this time with you.

And if you're a new listener, or you're here because somebody shared this with you, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. Today, we're going to talk about three questions to ask when someone you love is struggling. And one of the reasons why I wanted to share this conversation with you is because for the past several months, someone in my life has been really struggling,

and my husband, Chris and I, we've been really worried about them. So, about a week ago, I went digging back through our library of episodes. I looked at over 400 episodes, and I found this particular interview that I've never forgotten. It's one that I do with clinical psychologists, Dr. Lisa Demore.

“In it, she talks about three questions you need to ask somebody in your life that's struggling.”

And these are questions that really give you a roadmap for how to truly offer support that helps. Now, my husband and I listened to this a couple of days ago, and we found it so incredibly helpful in guiding us and how to provide support that's effective for this person that we love who's struggling. And after I was done listening, I thought, you know what?

I should really share this with you because I bet you have somebody in your life who's struggling to. So, let me tell you a little bit about this extraordinary expert that you're about to spend some time with. Her name is Dr. Lisa Demore. She's a clinical psychologist. Three-time New York Times bestselling author of the Books Untangled Under Pressure and the Emotional Lives of Teenagers. Dr. Demore hosts the Asseless of Podcast. She works in collaboration

with UNICEF. Is a regular contributor to CBS News. She's served as a consultant to Pixar on the movie Inside Out, too. She's also a senior advisor to the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University. And today, she is here teaching you the three questions that

“you should ask anyone in your life who is struggling. I truly hope you will not only”

enjoy listening to this episode from our archives. I hope it's helpful. When my husband and I listened to this a few days ago, it was exactly the support and the three questions that we needed so we can help the person that we love who's struggling right now. Dr. Lisa Demore, welcome to the Valorabba's podcast. Oh, Mel, thanks so much for having me. So excited. I've so much I want to talk to you about. I do have a confession.

You were a tow rope that dragged me up the hill of parenting teenage daughters because I was an

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?”

So the way we talk about mental health is 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 suggests that being mentally healthy means feeling good or calm or relaxed or at ease. 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 role in my hands, we expect sadness, we expect them to be really heartbroken and maybe bitter in a little angry like those are all appropriate emotions. What we're really interested in is what does the kid do next? Do they weep? Do they talk to their friends? Do they get their ice cream? Do they do things to help themselves feel better? Or do they trash that kid online? Do

they turn it against themselves? Do they smoke a ton of weed? We only worry 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? Absolutely. That what I have noticed is that people's ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions and the ups and downs in life have gotten way worse over time. It's true. I think we have run into a situation where for too many people uncomfortable feels like unmanageable. Yes, there's not a distinction between those two and it's an important

distinction because discomfort is part of life and teenagers are going to feel that adults are going to feel it and it's important and we want to care for people under 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 our clinical supports that we can bring to that. But those are two very different things. Yeah.

And just for the sake of this conversation, when you say teenager, what age group are you talking about? It's a critically important question. So adolescence begins at 11 and this is something that psychologists have done a terrible job of getting out to the public. Most people think

are teen because they hear teen at the end of that and they think teenager, we have always marked

the onset of adolescence at age 11 and that is because adolescence begins when puberty's underway and by 11 most kids, even if you can't see it on the outside, they are underway with puberty. And we mark the end of adolescence. You can push it as far as 2425. You can hear the asterisk in my voice on that. By and large, their brains are in great shape, very fully developed by 18, 19, 20. But their better reasoning is still more readily knocked off line until they're

about 2425. So if they're very, very stirred up, young adults don't always handle things as well as they will, you know, after 2425. But I always get a little uncomfortable when people are like, oh, their brains are not developed until they're 2425. I'm like, well, but look at that English paper that kid wrote. Look at that beautiful piece of art that kid made. That's a developed brain. But we're talking up big window here. I mean, 11 to 2425. 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 immature 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 your through college. 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 it 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 I think that mental health is often defined by experiencing distress. And it is 180 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. It's so easy. Where the presence of distress is actually

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 to you, right? If you're a teenager in adults and someone's really mean to 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 pathologize all of that means that people are spending their normal, healthy days feeling like there's something wrong with them. When in fact, that distress is proof that they

work perfectly. Lisa, you're a genius. 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 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 every time you have lunch with somebody,

you'll 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 information. And our job is to take it in. I love this reframe. I absolutely love it. I would love to tease us out a little bit more

“because I think this applies to all of us. It does. So Lisa, what is a normal emotion?”

And what's not? I guess what I mean by 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 want to 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 before. So there's not always a perfect map of what we expect to see. And here again, psychologists can just usually just take a much more curious, like borderline anthropological 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, understand conditions. We don't expect to see depression, which is where mood becomes so low that it really casts a poll over everything in a person's life. We fully expect to see anxiety if there's something wrong, right? If there's danger around you or at least a 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 can and should be able to do. So for us, the index is really much more about functioning and dual motions undermine the ability to function well in the world, because they should be supporting our ability to navigate our lives and deepen our relationship. They shouldn't be getting in the way. So the real takeaway 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 hygiene protocol of taking showers and exercising and eating or you start over medicating your feelings with alcohol or weed or whatever, that's the red flag. That's right, I'm gonna even tease that part a little bit more. So the emotions can either get in the way, right? So mood that actually disturbs the ability to live one's life or and you moved in this

“direction and it's such a critically important direction, what I would call costly coping.”

So people are coping with moods, but they're 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 know they're running themselves down or even engaging in self-harm, those may be actually providing some relief. People only do things that actually

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 and I out for. I got it two flags, mood and costly coping and I want a role play for a little bit of that's cool. 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, how do you as a parent or a friend or a partner of somebody? You see somebody smoking too much weed playing video

games for too long. Those sort of coping mechanisms that you write, let you escape. How do you even begin to approach it? Because every time we would approach it in our household, you get the big

“shove 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 numb distress. They're incredibly effective at that. That's the problem with them. Right? Is that they work to make pain go away? My gosh, hold on a second. Can I just stop there? 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 premise of my whole training is that humans are rational actors. They don't do things that don't serve a purpose. Even if those things outwardly end up causing so much trouble,

there's always a rationale and that's actually the best part about my job is it 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 self-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 it 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 that if you come at a kid or

“anyone saying you need to stop and then fill in the blank, what you're going to run into is the”

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 you're a smart 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 or running around and sleeping with a wrong people or which is what I was

doing in high school but yeah right and 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 helpful 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 clinician around”

if a client 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 clinician to say to someone listen

and that's the part that's telling me that you're having those thoughts I'm going to stick up

“for the part of you that wants help and that's how you don't turn it into a fight that's incredible”

there's 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 nom 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 say you wouldn't be letting you know if you didn't want help there's a part of

you that want help. What do you do if they didn't tell you or you don't let you know what 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 weed coming out of the room or you notice that a young person has

harmed themselves so I think the first thing we want to do as sort of the helpful people 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 it 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 is the way to go so I think um you know let's just use marijuana 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 Dr. Lisa outside the door and I'm the

kid in the bedroom rolling up the joint okay but we're gonna take a quick break our sponsors bring

us all of this zero cost to you so I want to give them your time and attention and when we come back Dr. Lisa's gonna be knocking on my door while I light up a dubie. They'll go anywhere Welcome back I'm with New York Times bestselling author Dr. Lisa Demore and we're about to role play here. Me I'm the weed smoke and teens sitting in my bedroom no clue that mom standing outside and Dr. 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 um teenage male I'm rolling up a big dubie I'm lightening it up I'm puffing away I don't even know my mom's outside I'm listening to music I'm texting my friends I got my headphones on I don't know that you're home because I didn't even hear the garage doors open so there I am okay and here I come so knock knock knock on the door no answer so I let myself in

right and I say oh buddy oh buddy you and I both know that smoke and weed like this is going to get in the way of the kind of life you want to lead we got to figure out what's getting in the way if you make in different choices whoa like you just spoke to a different part of me that's so cool right that's so cool now do you leave the room do you just drop it like a grenade

“and then let that kind of settle for them or do you sit down on the bed like because I think we just”

don't know what to do and then we get so emotionally so that we react which makes it worse well I think I'd see what the kid does I mean I'd sort of take the cue from them I mean because he just did say something I think we also have to give kids room to come to where we are right I mean I think it's so hard in parenting so often and I have to teenagers myself right so often in parenting we have a full head of steam they walk in the door like we need to talk about boom right

and the kid's like whoa like I was gonna go get a snack right I was not ready for this conversation so I think plus now I'm high mom right and my tongue feels like it's filled my mouth I can't have a conversation so then I think let's just say for the sake of argument like this is in a great time to have a conversation because the kid is not entirely available to it and then I think you say you know we're gonna have to have a conversation about what's happening here and my

favorite phrase and I also remember the moment I learned this in my training is because what we're doing isn't working but you're doing isn't working right and that's the thing about substance is they do get to a place where they start to undermine a person's life you know that they're not showing up at school or they're under functioning academically or they aren't actually maintaining friendships or they're you know not contributing to the home or the community

working we have to come up with something else so if you're in so much pain that you're doing this

“we're gonna find another way for you to address that pain but the the goal and you can hear this”

in every approach is to not turn it into a showdown between the person who's trying to help and the person they want to help it just had this visual of kind of that you're right it is a showdown the knock on the door the screaming the shame the this and now you're like putting your 40 or 50 year old angst about this onto your 16 year old and it just compounds everything that they're trying to escape anyway if you can center yourself and realize you're trying to get on the same

page with a part of them that wants to do better instead of pounding on a door of literally like

putting your arm around them you know like buddy I love that you're like hey buddy you 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 a head 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 and all this stuff because you probably be dead if you weren't but you got to start that you know like you got to get in therapy and you got to take because 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 we got to do something else and I'll tell you about so when I was in training I had a really

brilliant and terrifying supervisor and she said to me you get eight words and an utterance when you're listening and sitting with a client they can say as much as they want to 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's head you've bypassed their heart right but if you can keep it tight and if you can go to the core of it in eight words or fewer it lands and so what's interesting

is that discipline of needing to find just the arrow the end the end the through line

“that's how I've 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 go clinical work you're just going for the the central message as cleanly and as easily understood as possible. I love how you simplified this verse you have 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 and your daily functioning or you start having costly coping

mechanisms that we got to sound the alarm so to speak because what they're doing is working for them to escape or 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 you also write in your bestseller 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

a whole 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 surrounded the table to study kids who do not fit into one of the traditional categories so everything I'm saying needs to sort of be couched in that broader understanding of how we do the research and what we've studied so having said that when we look at traditional gender categories a 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 veer to the extreme or you use that strategy all the time can you give us an example of what you mean by discuss or distract so we kind of have a knowing and then also what's sort of within range of of helpful coping and what gets to be on

the fringe absolutely so let's say a girl someone's mean to her school and she goes and finds

you know such a jerk to me and her friends is all me and she 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 of the jerk 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 plays basketball for a little while blows off steam gets it out of a system gets past it let's go moves on those are two perfectly reasonable outcomes of those two different strategies what we don't want to see is girls who then they discuss it with their friend and then they end up in a three hour conversation discussing it 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 of the girls hop in on this there's two problems with this one is girls are more likely than boys to engage in vicarious distress meaning if my friends upset now I'm upset too yeah so it has this like why doing you know swath of distress the other thing is it threatens to turn into what psychologists call rumination though it's kind of gross it's really helpful metaphor it's like picking it in the emotional wound right the more you talk about it

the worse it 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 what we don't want to see is that you know every time

this kid has something that feels bad he just shuts down goes plays basketball or hops 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 knows he's 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

they practice it all the time and boys can get worse and worse and worse they're talking about feelings because they're not practicing it with one another especially so the ideal management

is somewhere in between 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 who's we're 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 holding on to it how do you approach that with somebody so

“I think that let me do the girl example version and then let's yes let's go back to the”

relationship let's just go back to the diminution road so what I encourage parents and also peers to do if they're caring for a teenager who is really 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 we'll we'll like schedule it we're coming back to

it but between now and then let's 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 kid the next day or talked to the person 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 brings it down to size and they've they're no longer dumping stress hormones into their bloodstream you know

for that 24 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 they popped up I think there's probably a different answer”

for those bigger questions around you know people who are struggling to let go of a painful divorce or struggling to let go of how things went down in the family in the wake of a parent's death and my hunch is for that there's just a lot of meaning to what occurred that has not really been examined or resolved yeah yeah what about with the boys how do you approach that you know where 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 as costly coping right we can go right back to that category

for eight hours okay well he may have gotten past the rough day but now he has a new problem because

he hasn't done his homework and he needs to go to bed right and it 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 may have 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 there another way you could 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 in why they don't talk about feelings and I would say it's one of the hardest things in parenting that I hear about is parents of adolescent boys in particular who become very very speaks like

“and very very reserved and and I think that's its own fascinating and complex universe”

to make sense of I think that's its whole 45 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 of boys express emotion but it's not always in words though I also wish they were more often talking about what they were feeling yeah 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 Lisa 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 gonna answer that when we return don't go anywhere”

welcome back I'm Mel Robbins and I am here with Dr. Lisa Demore one of the world's leading experts in parenting education child who 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's struggling one of the things that I learned in this book that was just life changing

I wish I had known this 10 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 who does this they emotionally dump on me so I've realized that when our daughters want a 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 them. When there is any kind of upsetting or distressing situation I will get three phase time calls in a row until I pick up I get the tears the venting the frustration the world is ending and then it's all done they go back to their life and I feel like somebody has thrown a bucket of slime 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 it is especially organized around adolescence is the use of the we call it the defense of externalization and Mel 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 in Connecticut 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 like calling her and be like I don't know I don't really like it here I don't really have any friends I'm not sure I'm gonna make it I don't know then like then I see my roommate like I got to go right so I knew the phone yeah I go out with my roommate I have a super good time and I remember my mom called me the next day and she's like are you okay and I'm like yeah like I don't know what your problem is but I'm fine and my dad told

me later like she'd been up all night I mean she was getting ready to like pack the cooler and

drive across the planes to retrieve me so this is not a new maneuver teenagers have forever and always

done this it's not a fun maneuver for parents for sure but it is also really hard to be a teenager

day is to conveniently dump them treat them like emotional trash and the people who love them

“that are willing to collect their trash and having discarded the trash what we often find as”

parents is the kids don't want to talk about it they're like no no I don't the trash like 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 trash and make it go away that's unbelievable you're exactly right because on the receiving end of it I feel like they've dumped the trash on me I'm weighted down I'm worried about it I'm thinking about it I just had 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 and she's like oh what that's fun oh yeah I don't know and it says if nothing happened I'm like excuse me I should take the conversation so you heard the DEF CON 10 mom that you dropped on me and I should probably apologize Lisa to my mom because I would call her every day from the pay phone in my dorm hallway at Dartmouth collect to cry and complain I don't like it here I don't know anybody here everybody

always he has her friends here and it got so bad after two weeks of this that my mom said

you either hang up the fucking phone and don't call me again and get out there and make some friends or I'm coming to pick you up the next time you call me and you will come back home and you'll go to the community college and that'll be that I never called her again but then our daughters both that 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 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 to vent and that is often if they say I just need to vent which is overwhelmingly what they are looking for what I would say is visualize yourself opening an emotional garbage bag right and just let them unload all of that garbage into the bag and then when the call is over just pose of it right don't carry it around don't take it to bed with you right just feel like that was a garbage collection moment and the kid needed a place to dump the garbage and I am

as the loving person in their life willing to collect their garbage but yeah you don't need to then go through the trash yourself you could have saved me years in marriage counseling because I feel like a lot of the times what my husband 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 for writing about that

when do you know it's time to get a therapist involved and how do you look for one the right one so I think we would 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 are to help thing right because nobody starts at a therapist 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 our kid is still suffering that's when it's 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 teenager is a very disregulating and very disorganizing experience there 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 a pro right then the kids like oh my gosh like this is exactly like my secret concern is now you know confirmed so I always am very careful about how I approach it even when I know it's the right recommendation and I will tend to say to teenagers listen for what you are up against you deserve way more support than you have and we need to get someone who actually knows what they're 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 specialize in caring for teenagers what I would say is in my experience pediatricians are actually a really good

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's usually my generic advice is”

ask your pediatrician knew they like that is so hopeful and so accessible and I really appreciate that answer because it's 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 Lisa I don't have a single friend who doesn't have a family member who is spiraling it feels like there is something that's been bubbling underneath the surface it feels like everybody is very tender

so we had talked about suicideality let's just hit it head on because there's yeah it's the scariest thing

so it is true now that thoughts of suicide are actually not rare that I don't have this

statistics at my my fingertips but I know that when we looked you know before 2000 you know we would take surveys of adolescents and the frequency which with which they know the thought had crossed their mind and it's not fair and I remember being a teenager and like one time my mom and I read a fight and I was like oh wouldn't she couldn't if I hurt myself right now she'd feel so bad right so did I think about it yes was I was I myself close to doing it no right so I 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 you 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 randomly 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 and you ask have you had any thoughts of harming yourself for ending your life and the reason we're reluctant to do this is we're afraid we're going to give the person the idea that's a concern we know that's not a concern but we do know when we have researched adolescents is if a teenager

is thinking about suicide they're glad you asked so I think we start with a scariest thing and how to address this scariest thing and then we can go and think down the line 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 you just glad you asked the glad you asked. Yeah we did a episode with our son 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 the thought hadn't even crossed our line thank you for checking in. Yeah but the things I worry about I worry about increased isolation people spend more time away from one another I worry about

eating disorders in kids of all genders we traditionally attach these to girls that's not actually how it works and I worry about you know we haven't talked about social media it's a big topic and I feel very I feel like it's we're complicated then just you know all good or all bad I worry about the norms and digital environments where kids hang out and what I mean by that is that one thing I feel that we definitely saw between March 2020 and then the subsequent years

was a 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 started searching online for fitness diet exercise anything like that the algorithms that drive social media picks this up and start to flood their feed with image after image after image of ultra thinner ultra fit and then how to lose weight in 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's hard because we can't

at 4,000 images a day of ultra fit ultra thin people that impacts real world behavior and that changes how you eat and that changes how you exercise and we did see an explosion of eating disorders so what I would say is we got to watch where kids are online now and forever because the norms are

powerful I can't agree more in fact it happened to our daughter and I remember when she got into

treatment for disorder eating she ended up deleting her Instagram and she said like my entire feed is basically models and waste trainers and puppies and it makes me feel terrible and I keep looking at these images and it makes me feel like I'm I 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 it 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 I think it came out in April 2021 about the spike and eating”

disorders and there's a variety of reasons that that can come into it so some is everything feels

out of control here's one thing I can't control that can be really powerful but I do also just think

if all you're looking at or ultra thin ultra fit bodies your sense of what bodies look like changes and your view of your own body changes I want to ask you a very specific question on this topic because 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 now they're exercising and they get positive reinforcement because they're looking great and they're not going to

run the 5k and now they're going to get in triathlons or now you know everyone's like oh you look

great in that bathing suit where is the line where it's a healthy thing versus this is now something

that's scary because I miss the signs yeah and kids are also remarkable at just kind of oh it's yeah I'm just on and then because it's in this lane 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 teenagers shouldn't be losing weight and usually they're gaining weight in the course of typical development and post-late later puberty you know that they're gaining weight

“and they're gaining strength so if you notice that your teenager has lost weight you should be”

attentive to that this is an unusual thing for teenagers to do and it's not all bad I mean you can talk with your pediatrician and you know there are some teenagers who the pediatrician may say you know this weight is not an healthy place you know losing some weight would be healthier thing to do then you can do that with a nutritionist and the pediatrician 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 teenagers lose weight something's usually up and wow I think that's just a valuable you know marker to have the other thing that we want to watch out for is dropping entire food categories so I put it this way not everybody who becomes a vegetarian goes on to developing eating disorder everybody who goes on to developing an eating disorder drops the food category oh my god our daughter the one who did have disordered eating did a research paper and college about

“I don't even 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 an allergy it's literally a it's crossed a line is that what you're talking about it's a flag it's a flag and one of the ways I sometimes assess that flag is also times care for teenagers who are like I don't need sugar and I'll be like

somebody brings in 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”

that it is a wonderful source of energy that there's a variety in a young person's diet in any 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 where job and so if a teenager is suddenly eating nothing but celery and running

you know a lot that kid 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 fit 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 you know”

to use that as a guardrail that fundamentally that's the goal is for the teenager to 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 kids 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 teenager's emotion run your house or dictate what they do well thank you for bringing up this I mean it's a huge topic and actually between untingled and the emotionalized teenagers I published a book called Under Pressure confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety and girls but what I hear all the time is 80 percent of plays 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 recognize that healthy anxiety is the anxiety that alerts us when something's wrong it is not on its own pathological and we have not helped the situation by using the same word to describe healthy anxiety and something that we diagnose it's sort of better said we have the word sadness and we have depression for the diagnosis but we use anxiety you know in both categories so that doesn't help as much and seamless 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 you condition but we always experience stress under change conditions and we only consider stress pathological if it is chronic or traumatic but although

there's stress we just tuck into the you know helping you grow doesn't always feel good category

“what I will tell you is that the most important thing for people to know about anxiety”

is that avoidance feeds anxiety 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 it works if I let's say have some social avoidance some social anxiety and there's a party that I have been invited to and it's a good party to go to right it's a rational it should be fun from the mind's party but say I feel anxious and say I agree 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 parent is like ah it's just a party you don't have to go right here's what happens the first thing that happens is I feel so much better right my anxiety was cresting and then I get to avoid and it immediately plummet it's like what we call reinforcement instantly relief and so the upshot of that is the 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 it is right so whatever I have daydreamed about how terrifying this party is or how to you know like cool everyone will be at the party that is now sealed in amber and I continue to believe it because I have no counter evidence whereas if I go to the party I'm like oh wait it's not so bad but if I don't go so it actually in trenches anxiety to avoid the things we fear now if a kid is avoiding school there's a third issue which is the minute you

so it's that much harder to get back in so there's 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 avoidance feeds anxiety and everyone is 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 avoidance you cannot have the daydream become the reality and so if this is your kid and they're like I can't go to school I can't go to the party I can't you know fill in the link you say all right here's a deal you're gonna go to the party for 20 minutes and then I'm gonna forget something and text you you know you need me to pick you up and if you need me to pick you

up after 20 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 is powerful for helping to control anxiety reframing is

powerful for helping to control anxiety but avoidance is anxiety's best friend

“devastating because it you're right I think about the fact that I was homesick at every camp”

so much so that I would just escalate it until the counselors got so tired then my parents would show up because it works it goes back to your original thing we do these things because they work they work and when we allow our kid to keep transferring from one school to another because they can't handle it we are locking in anxiety as a coping mechanism and avoidance as a coping mechanism wow you are so good I want to ask you one final question which is if you had to bottom line it

to make it really simple because clearly it's 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 to 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 aunts mentors teachers doctors what what how do we show up in this culture and of emotion and uncertainty I can say it in two words but Mel 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 our way with their big feelings that we don't meet them where they are we don't get as agitated as they are 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 are bringing us their concerns they're watching our reaction and if they're having a really bad 15-year-old day and then they bring it to us

and then we hit the ceiling they can't help but think oh my gosh I thought this was like 15-year-old size bad it turns out it's 52-year-old size bad right so that is not reassuring to them and then the other thing is when we offer empathy as the response so we're there we're there and we're empathic with whatever their distress is I think that is actually the all-time steady presence move because what you're doing is you're highly present you are empathizing

you are saying that stinks I am sorry I wish that had not happened so you were there for it but you're incredibly steady 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 me 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 I I love your phrase it stinks because you're right

“if there are big emotions that's all you need to say that stinks I never really thought about it”

from the standpoint that if I get distressed I magnify their distress I just have to say it stinks wow because that's normal and it's actually a sign that she's mentally well oh my gosh evidence of her perfect functioning and and the same is truthy adults in your life that if the big feelings and the distress is related to a corresponding event that makes sense

a revelation everybody you have got to pick up this book the emotional lives of teenagers I can

“not tell you how helpful hopeful encouraging and powering it is I find your work so helpful because”

it is always grounded 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'm so glad I can be helpful oh my gosh it's a hard time to be a person and it's a hard time to be ladies and teenagers and here's what I want people to know we have studied adolescent mental

health for decades and the single most powerful force for protecting teenage mental health

is strong relationships with caring adults we're not going to medicate or theorize our way out of this adolescent mental health crisis it's going to be about the adults around teenage years parents caregivers bosses mentors coaches teachers being there for teenagers and being

“invested in their emotional lives that's how we're going to find our way through this”

well thank you for giving us the tools to be able to show up and do just that

it's an honor to be here well it's incredible talk to you you're so cool

I got so much out of that conversation holy smokes I wish you live closer to me don't you 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 Melbourne's podcast and you've got me and I've got you and I'm so happy we're doing this thing called 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 I'll talk to you in a few days I love you oh and one more thing and no this is not a blooper this is the legal language you know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you this podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes I'm just your friend I am not a licensed therapist

and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician professional coach psychotherapist or other qualified professional got it good I'll see you in the next episode [BLANK_AUDIO]