TheTeenDoc.com » Abuse

Is Your Teen Running Away OR TOWARDS Something?

teendoc — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Let’s say that for whatever reason your teen looks forward to leaving your household one day, their focus is on getting OUT whichever way they can.

My hope is that they focus less on running away from you and take the time to plan what they want to run towards. Where they’re going is important otherwise it’s like running out of a burning building with hands waving in the air. They don’t realize they have no clothes on until the cold temperature grabs their chest by the neck. This type of escape is reckless and unorganized and causes more complications even though there is the temporary relief of being out of immediate danger.

Help your teen plan the escape so they can know they’re leaving to run towards something rather than just getting the h*ll out of your house.

No related posts.

Self-Medicating Teen

teendoc — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:00:41 +0000

I don’t know, it’s just that when I drink I feel…well, I feel less nervous somehow.

Teens who struggle with anxiety may find themselves drinking or using drugs to help them calm down. By nature teens develop coping mechanisms, they aren’t born with them. So there will be times your teen will happen upon poor coping skills like anorexia, drugs or even sex before they happen upon a good coping skill like talking about it. In the meantime, what it looks like to you is strange teen behavior, lack of concern for their future and laziness. If they just applied themselves then…

Teens don’t know the words for I feel anxious, or I’m nervous all the time. Instead they think they’re the only one and they figure something out. Have a bit of suspicion that something else is going on and help your teen stop dealing with a very real issue in a poor way and allow them to develop good coping skills that will last them a lifetime.

Teen Girl Violence

teendoc — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:00:50 +0000

The group most likely to be sexually assaulted is the teen girl. No wonder fathers want to lock up their daughters.

Its teen dating violence awareness month and so it bears reminding that violence, real violence happens to teen girls. They are without so much as a blink from their friends kicked, spit on, name-called, slapped, raped and even punched and the excuses roll out faster than you can say hot cheetos. Yes, it can seem like there is a particular kind of girl this happens to, but all girls of all socioeconomic brackets and all strengths are capable of the subtle seduction that abusers perform in order to put someone in a position of being vulnerable to abuse.

Abusers by their very nature are charming. They are amazingly good at looking trustworthy so if you’re looking for the guy on the motorcycle and the leather jacket who dropped out of school, but looks like James Dean, you’re going to miss it. And when you do, you’ll miss the opportunity to help your teen; the opportunity to believe your teen when they tell you who it was.

Abusers are people your teen trusts, they are close to them or friends and most likely visit or live in their homes. After all, who else would they trust enough to touch them inappropriately and not go yelling immediately down the street? No, it’s much more complicated than that.

Are You Lying?

teendoc — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:00:03 +0000

A teen told her parents she was raped and her parents felt she was lying to protect her reputation.

Her parents thought just maybe she was lying because she didn’t want to tell them she was actually sexually active. They asked her if she was lying. It sounds like a simple question. Why not ask a teen who might have been known to lie in the past, but unfortunately what this does to someone who was already struggling with their role or even consent in their rape is add to the weight of the guilt they’re already feeling. By the way, the answer doesn’t matter.

Raped teens are struggling with questions like why them? Why did they trust this person because it is almost always someone they know and trust. Why can’t they forget it ever happened? The last thing they need is your doubt. It puts them in a position of having to defend themselves rather than feeling supported. What you want to do is support your teen with the hopes that one day possibly they will be strong enough to realize it really wasn’t their fault and it wasn’t that they shouldn’t have trusted this person as much as it was this person who shouldn’t have abused their trust.

Corporal Punishment

teendoc — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:00:10 +0000

Corporal punishment. That’s fancy language for a good ole fashioned spanking. For some this may conjure images of tree branches, belts or even an electrical cord, while others are asking who still spanks their kid?

For the most part spanking is not just old fashioned its painful. I suppose your thinking that is the intention, duh. But it isn’t just physically painful, its emotionally painful. Your toddler does something so you spank them. Your child does something so you spank them. Your teen does something, are you still going to spank them? How are you going to get the spanking to hurt enough? How about your teen who is about your height or taller and stronger, do you think your still going to make an impact with the spanking? Do you think they won’t repel so much from the strike they instinctively move to hit you back?

You just hurt my G*damn feelings and that was the last one I had sung by Eminem and he’s talking about another person, but your teen wants to say this same thing to you. Whether you call it corporal punishment or just a spanking, your teen only articulates what they could only show with raw emotion as a toddler or child when the tears just came pouring out. Not only does that spanking hurt physically which wears off in a relatively short period of time, but that spanking hurt emotionally and I’m not so sure I’m going to get past that one. Now that I’m bigger, it just looks like you, my parent wants to fight me the person you said you loved more than anything over what?

Punishment v. Discipline, which is your style?

10 Things You Never Say To Your Teen

teendoc — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:00:32 +0000

There are some things you should probably never say to your
teen probably anyone you really care about. Here are some overheard phrases.
See if you repel in hurt as their teen probably did.

10. Get out of my face. You disgust me!

9. Get out of my house! I don’t want to see you again.

8. No wonder you have no friends

7. You’re such a devil.

6. You’re so manipulative. Do you ever tell the truth?

5. You’re just like your father!

4. I’m taking you to the clinic to see if you’re a virgin you dress like such a whore

3. You’re worse than your sister who got pregnant at 16.

2. You make me sick.

1. I regret the day you were ever born

You are what you eat and if you get a constant diet of
hateful words well, one shouldn’t be surprised if you get an angry teen.

Struggling With Your Overweight Teen?

teendoc — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:00:32 +0000

You’ve done everything to try and get your teen to lose weight. You’ve tried programs, joining the gym and even humiliation. You thought if they were embarrassed like you seem to be, they might do something about the weight, but what if the weight means more than that?

One of the first steps to losing weight is your teen accepting themselves the way they are, large or small. They have to accept themselves the way they are and then recognize what is contributing to them being “out of control” when it comes to their eating. For some teens it’s about creating a barrier between themselves and others. If they have a history of abuse, the weight is a way to make themselves less attractive to people who might want to abuse them. In other words, the weight becomes a protective mechanism. Asking these teens to lose weight is like asking them to be vulnerable to abuse they endured like molestation or rape.

Overweight teens have all sorts of reasons they’re not able to control their eating and lose the weight so taking the time to understand what the weight means to them can help them solve more than just heir weight issues.

A Teen’s Nervous Laughter

teendoc — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:00:52 +0000

A woman in an abusive relationship is more likely to die once she becomes pregnant. The violence increases when she becomes pregnant. When the fourteen year old male heard this, he exploded with laughter. It was uncontainable his laughter. He thought it was so funny he had to share it with his neighbor.

This is what discomfort looks like. This is what it looks like when a teen has fear of intimacy and no desire to appear vulnerable in front of others. This can happen for both boys and girls, but it’s the boys that we teach not to cry or be “soft.” They think soft is like being Gay. They don’t want to be Gay at all. This is especially true if they are. Their role models are not soft. Al Pacino in Scarface, their favorite action hero, possibly Dad…there is no touchy feely. The layers of guarding against any emotion create an inappropriate response to the description of brutality directed at a pregnant woman in an abusive relationship.

How do you feel? How do you feel? Ask them. Show them. It takes heart to be a human man or woman. It takes a big heart to be a real human man or woman. If you don’t show your male teen that, the disconnection to their emotions creates the man behind the newspaper at the breakfast table who only knows how to mumble his “Good Morning.”

Domestic Violence Victims

teendoc — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:00:16 +0000

“Let’s get ready to leave for father’s day service! We’re late.” Her teen daughter’s voice is screeching from her room, “You’ve got to be kidding me! I’m not going to honor a man who is so cruel to us. Mom, what are you doing? Don’t you live here? Don’t you see? Why are you doing this? Well I’m not having any part of this charade. I’m staying here!”

What do you do? You are Mom and what do you do when faced with your daughter’s truth; A truth about which you have been in denial? She is goading you. She is asking that you do something no, she is begging that you do something. She is begging you to stick up for her; that you keep her safe. She is appalled that you are celebrating someone that makes your lives miserable every day.

As it turned out this Mom did not understand her daughter’s anger towards her. Her daughter always seemed to be so angry. This Mom did not know why. Why her daughter wasn’t more respectful. She could sense that her daughter thought she was weak. Her daughter swore she would not grow up to be anything like her mother. Her anger is understandable only when you can appreciate what the mother has done to her daughter. She has let her down. She should be keeping her daughter safe and instead it would seem as though she has conspired with her abusive husband to maintain the façade of a happy home rather than the truth of a safe home.

You can never underestimate the personal self-esteem challenges that it takes to have a woman marry and stay with an abusive husband, but when you are confronted with a daughter that has guts to say what she sees rather than keeping those feelings inside and bleeding or purging them out, it should give you a reason to pause. Her daughter’s anger is justified. Parents are supposed to keep their teens safe, not put them in harm’s way.

If you know of a teen that is enduring abuses, please do what you can to change their environment. It is the one way you can change the teen. Sometimes you can recognize it when they take their anger out on others while other times you will see them direct it inwards as depression, cutting or addiction disorders like drug abuse. If it is not safe, call the police, call protective services, offer a safe haven, or give safe resources in the community, pro bono lawyers, organizations that help battered women and their children. Whatever you do please do something. These teens are suffering and if they can’t depend on their parents in order to restore their faith in themselves, they should be able to depend on an adult in their community.

Resources:

National Domestic Violence Hotline

Helpguide.org

Eminem’s Take on Domestic Abuse

teendoc — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:00:44 +0000

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn. This is Rihanna’s line in the Eminem song Love the way you lie. The lyrics and video are hard because the pain and the romance is uncensored, as it should be.

If there were a way to have your body shut down when you’re in a relationship that’s all bad for you, we could all be better for it. But as it happens seventeen, possibly the age when Eminem met Kim, the most likely muse for this song, is about the time 1 in 3 teens say they know of someone who has been in a relationship where they have been hit, slapped, punched, or kicked.1 Of the teens in an abusive relationship eighty percent stay.1 They stay for years and when they finally get out if they are a recording artist they write a song called Love the Way You Lie.

You push pull each other’s hair/scratch, claw, bit ‘em/throw ‘em down/pin ‘em/so lost in the moments when you’re in ‘em/It’s the rage that took over/It controls you both…and it is very controlling. One might even say over powering.

The video has been called sexualized because after all Rihanna is standing there in only what Rihanna would be seen in -a pair of hot pants and Megan Fox, the girlfriend in the video, is terribly cute with pouty lips and long dark hair, but the fights are painful. They look real and when you are in a relationship like this you see the person as your sexual object not your abuser that is what Eminem is trying to tell you when he says, “I can only tell you what it feels like.” Ask the teen that was forced by her parents to file charges against her boyfriend for breaking her arm. She sits there welling up as she says, “I feel bad because now he has a record.” She didn’t feel that bad about her broken arm.

Cause when it’s going good/It’s going great/I’m Superman/With the wind at his back/She’s Lois Lane because unfortunately even when it hurts, hurts like the pain of when you touch fire, which should register to your brain that you never touch it again –the desire to be loved is so very strong. The hole in your teen that prevents them from feeling whole without this person or any person makes them go back, makes them stay. Makes them come to love the highs and lows and suffer the lows because the highs are absolutely intoxicating. If they did not have their father fill that hole, or their mother fill that hole and they instead took the drill and made the hole bigger, this type of love is absolutely intoxicating. No one understands looking in from the outside because it doesn’t make any sense to an outsider. No one can make them leave until they’re strong enough to understand that the pain is well, painful and furthermore unnecessary.

I laid hands on her/I never stoop so low again/I guess I don’t know my own strength, and teens don’t. Adults who still have these emotional needs never really got passed a lot of the emotional challenges of being a teen because lack of support stunts your development. Why people are in abusive relationships, why they stay and why they will see what they want in this video even if there were subtitles is so complicated that it could never be explained simply. What we can do is talk, talk, talk and challenge our sons and daughters to think more of themselves, think of how others treat them and consider always… consider that everything like everyone has a context, a history, and nothing is as it seems on the surface. Otherwise, why after being so brutally beaten could Rhianna still say, “I love him.”