Signs Your Teen May Benefit From Therapy
Dr. Tamar Gordon
Dr. Tamar Gordon is the founder and clinical director of the Gordon Therapy Group; Tamar Gordon Psychology, PLLC. Dr. Gordon is a NY and CT State licensed clinical psychologist and an expert in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and evidence based mental health treatment for adults and children.
Dr. Tamar Gordon
Dr. Tamar Gordon is the founder and clinical director of the Gordon Therapy Group; Tamar Gordon Psychology, PLLC. Dr. Gordon is a NY and CT State licensed clinical psychologist and an expert in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and evidence based mental health treatment for adults and children.
How do you know when it’s time to call a therapist? Teenagers are notoriously difficult, after all, and you probably heard something like “you think this is hard? just wait until they’re a teen!” many times during early childhood.
Is the moodiness, irritability, and crying normal development and puberty? Or is something more going on? It’s a hard question specifically because the teen years can be tumultuous. However, it’s also critically important to answer, given the increasingly high rates of suicide and suicidal gestures in American teenagers.
Here are some guidelines you can use to help figure things out:
Normal Developmental Processes for Teens
Not every difficult behavior during the teen years is cause for alarm. Understanding what’s developmentally typical can help you stay calm, and respond more thoughtfully, when things feel hard.
- Identity Exploration and Experimentation: Making new friends and leaving others behind, changing hair styles or colors, new political perspectives, abandoning a beloved old hobby for something new, or trying out alcohol with friends.
- Privacy: Pulling back from family time to spend more time alone, or with peers. This is a time of life when the peer group starts to feel more important than parents and siblings, and a desire for increased privacy and independence is healthy.
- Mood Fluctuations: Some crying or irritability is normal. Teens experience rapid shifts in emotion due to ongoing brain development, hormonal changes, and increased intensity in social relationships.
- Boundary Pushing: Your previously cooperative teenager may start questioning your rules, or negotiating limits as a natural way to test independence.
Red Flags That Suggest It’s Time for Therapy
Unlike the normal fluctuations above, these patterns tend to be more severe, more persistent, and more likely to interfere with your teen’s functioning at school, at home, or with peers.
- Sudden change in school performance: School and social development are a teenager’s primary jobs. A sudden drop in school performance, or total social isolation, are both red flags.
- Severe Emotional Dysregulation: Reactions that are completely out of proportion to the trigger and that last hours, not minutes.
- Destructive Coping: Dramatic change in weight or eating behaviors, Cutting, talking about death or dying, saying that things are hopeless, throwing things or becoming aggressive when angry, smoking weed or other substances regularly, or drinking excessively.
- Isolating: Not just spending less time with family, but not spending time with anyone, including friends.
- They Ask For a Therapist: Some kids do. If your child asks for help, listen!
The teen years can be tough, but they can also be a wonderful time of growth, increasing ability to have adult conversations, and independence. Try to enjoy your teen, not pathologize them, while still keeping an eye out for concerning patterns of behavior.
If you’re not sure what to do, learn more about our teen therapy on the Upper West Side, or we’re just a phone call or an email away.
