I’ve been watching the HBO series In Treatment that follows a therapist and his sessions with various patients over the course of 9 weeks. I watch it partly to keep track of how my profession is portrayed in the media and partly because I’ve come to like HBO programming (the monthly cable fee is considerably less than going to the movies every weekend, squeezing in a meal like my husband I used to do pre-children, and paying for a sitter). My favorite character is the teenage girl, Sophie, who makes suicidal gestures in her effort to make sense of her confusing life with a depressed mom and elusive dad. I find her characterization the most authentic of all the characters.
But even more so, I can see glimmers of my own girls’ sweeps of mood, impulsiveness, and yearning – and I suppose my own recollections of a torn childhood with divorced parents. I could as well say my mom was depressed and my father elusive – and that I made it through OK. I think what strikes me now, watching the character of Sophie unfold and her sense of self solidify in her growing attachment to her therapist, is that adolescence is one wild card and it’s a wonder any of us survive it at all.
Sophie has sex with her mentor and gymnastics coach, rides her bike into traffic breaking both arms, verbally abuses her mother, idealizes her absent father who sleeps with the models he photographs, and she only finds structure and control in the restrictive world of competitive gymnastics that keeps her body like a child's.
I can’t predict what my Rosie or Adele might be like as teens but I can be pretty sure that they’ll do some pretty stupid things. I can see it in the inexplicable burst of tears and the occasional storming up the stairs and the impulsive and sometimes provocative dancing around the kitchen table – I know these behaviors will exponentially increase. There’s apt term in Barbara Strauch’s book, The Primal Teen (a primer of any parent with the approaching adolescent) where refers to this manifestation of teen behavior as the brain’s “exuberance”.
I would say that’s a pretty good “positive reframe”. I hope I remember it in a few years.
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