Among the enunciations most commonly used by those beginning the therapy process are: “I/he/she have/has a problem,” “I believe there’s a problem with…,” “The problem is that…”.
What is a problem that leads us to seek psychotherapy?
People come to therapy for very diverse reasons. Some of these include:
Someone keeps telling them: “You have a problem: you’re too impulsive,” “Your problem is aggressiveness,” “You’re shy, that’s the problem,” “You’re not sociable and it’s a problem,” “You’re not punctual,” “You don’t communicate,” etc.
They experience emotional, relational, and behavioral discomfort and feel they need a change of perspective.
They believe that by coming to therapy, they will understand and eventually solve others’ lives.
Let’s take a subitem of item 1.
Adolescent, 15 years old. Introvert, but not antisocial. Shy, but not completely withdrawn. He came to therapy because his parents believe he has “a problem,” but also because he wants to experience “high school life.” He speaks confidently, and with quite a bit of courage for an introvert, about himself:
“If nobody invites me to hang out during breaks, I just stay in class all day. Well, it’s also complicated. Those who go out usually smoke, I don’t smoke.
He catches my gaze and answers the question that doesn’t even get a chance to be asked:
“There are others, yes, who don’t smoke. And in the end, it’s not mandatory to smoke. I could go out even if nobody invites me. I’ve done that before and it was fine. I mean, they didn’t reject me. I even talked sometimes…”
We discuss briefly about some characteristics of his temperament and the type of personality that is starting to emerge. I tell him about how an introvert is just as good as an extrovert. I also tell him that balance is needed in both cases. And let’s focus on gaining this balance.
Please allow me to emphasize the phrase “you have a problem” that we use when we want to encourage teenagers to change a behavior. They face problem-solving daily. It’s not necessarily something that attracts them. If we give them another problem to solve, especially one related to their identity, we might lose them.
If we start by identifying the beneficial aspect of the behavior to be “solved” and which should actually be enhanced, the results we will achieve can be astonishing.
Not a problem, simply a personality characteristic
So we established that an introvert has deep thinking. We concluded, me and the adolescent, that introvert individuals analyze more, so they can make better-informed decisions.
„And my mouth doesn’t speak without me. And that’s good, right?”
Yes, it’s very good to be together when you have something to say. My remark amused him and he left with a self-imposed task: every day of the current week, he will go out during breaks. And he will also talk a bit with his classmates. I applauded his decision.
And I don’t know if I did the right thing or not, but I added that an introvert who speaks rarely is more likely to be listened to than an extrovert who speaks a lot.
Our mental, emotional, behavioral construction has given, hereditary elements and others taken from the influences of the environment, from the culture and civilization in which we live, from the education we receive. When any of these do us harm and we understand that, that’s the point of intervention: to adjust, to fade out, re-route, reformulate old beliefs. It’s not the feature itself that’s the problem. A problem can be how we manifests it and how it affects our lives.
It’s nothing magic
These are just a few lessons for the adolescent about identifying manifest and latent personal attributes. To that simple question: What do you like about yourself, about the way you are, teenagers generally have a hard time finding an answer. The reason is related to the image of themselves that they build by referring to the opinions of adults. Which wouldn’t be bad if they were well…formulated.
What would you like to value more about the way you are? What would you like to fade out about your behavior because it gives you “trouble”?
With these two questions and all their answers, I juggled for a good few weeks. I turned them all over, because they have a lot of faces. Lights, shadows, angles, curved lines, broken lines.
The fact is that after four months into high school, our teenager kindly asked me to change the therapy day so he could go get shawarma with his friends.
