Does This Sound Like You?

If you are one of these high school students, you may often have anxiety and then start judging yourself harshly for being anxious and not being able to control it. After all, you usually manage to control many aspects of your life and stay on top of things. You may notice having trouble falling asleep because your mind races when you first go to bed. Maybe you wake up with anxious thoughts in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back to sleep.

You may worry because you don’t know what you want to study in college or where you want to go to college. You may not want to go to college but want to have a good career and not know how to make that happen.

If this sounds like you, then you’re in good company. Many high school students worry about not knowing what they want to do with the rest of their lives after high school. Sometimes, you worry because you want to do something meaningful, you just don’t know what that means for you yet.

What to Do About It

There is time to figure it out. Many people change their minds during college and switch majors when they find something they like better. Many people get their degrees in college and end up changing careers to something totally different after being on the job for a figure years. An example is teaching. Many teachers get their Bachelors degree in teaching and get tired of dealing with the stress of teaching after a few years. They end up changing careers or getting trained in something else.

Of course, not worrying about it may not be an option either because telling yourself not to worry is as effective as telling yourself not to think about purple cows. As soon as you try not to think about something, that’s all you think about. So, the trick is to allow your mind to think these thoughts without judging yourself for thinking them or not being able to stop thinking about them. Just accept the thoughts as “that thing I do when I don’t know the answers” and remind yourself that you don’t have to have the answers right now.

Other Strategies

It may help to think about this in terms of “clarity”. You’re trying to gain clarity about your future. You can put your level of clarity on a scale from 1 to 10. If 10 stands for complete clarity about what you need to do and 1 stands for having no idea at all, where are you now? When you can say you’ve gone one number higher, what are some of the things you might know then that you don’t know now? This can be a useful trick to help gain some clarity about your future plans.

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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Later, I became a school social worker. While my attempts to be helpful became better as I learned more, I soon learned I was making another mistake. The schools I worked for had their own ideas about what students should be working on and improving. But we never really bothered to ask the teenagers what they wanted. We would devise treatment plans to get the teenager to do things they weren’t interested in doing. So, naturally, the plans never got very far. Resistance is basically the other person’s way of letting you know what you’re doing isn’t working. You need to try something else.

A Better Way to Talk to Teenagers

Eventually, I learned a model of therapy called Solution Focused Brief Therapy. Instead of the therapist making a determination about what is wrong with clients and then providing counseling as a way of “fixing” them, Solution Focused Therapy asks the client what they’d like to get out of counseling. This lets the client set the tone for what is important to them and what things they’d like to change. It builds on the clients personal goals and their existing strengths.

This approach works amazingly well when providing counseling for teenagers. Teenagers spend a lot of their time worrying that they are screwing up and not measuring up to their peers. They get lectured by adults about how they are not living up to their potential. They already know most things the adults are going to tell them (they can do a great job imitating their parents’ lectures too). So it comes as a surprise to them to be asked what they want, what they are good at, what things they’d like to see change in their lives, and for the counselor ask their parents what they are doing right instead of what they’re doing wrong.

Avoiding Teenage Resistance In Counseling

Talking to a teenagers this way does away with what therapists call “resistance”. How can they be resistant when they’re talking about things they want for themselves and things they’re good at? When I ask my teenage clients what they want from counseling, their ideas are often very close to what their parents want for them.

Sometimes, my teenage clients have just one goal for counseling–to not have to go to counseling. Then we talk about what changes they can make so their parents won’t make them go to counseling anymore. Once they start making these changes, they’re often much more relaxed due to the renewed peace around the house. Consequently, they are interested in continuing counseling so they can make more changes and get more of what they want for themselves. And this attitude is what makes it so easy to work with teenagers now.

Gary Watson is a counselor in Grand Rapids, MI who provides counseling for teenagers, adults, families, and couples. For more information go to his website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com or contact him by phone at 616-914-9874.

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