August 7, 2023 • 41 mins
Everyone is talking about healing our inner child, but what about our inner teenager? We experience certain things in adolescence that we don't experience as children and these can manifest in different behaviours, defence mechanisms and emotional wounds that continue with us into adulthood. Whilst the inner child is seen as gentle and vulnerable, the inner teen may be angry, misunderstood and lonely. So in this episode we break some some of the psychology and theories behind healing your inner teen, including the interactions with our hormones, certain life experiences and the impact of our first romantic encounters and sexual experiences. We also explore how we can release the rage of our inner teen, express those wounds and use the adult chair method to feel more connected with this past version.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:27):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it's great to have you here.
Back for another episode. Today, we're in for a freaking
fascinating topic. I think we've all heard of in a
child healing by this stage and the value in acknowledging
(00:48):
and making peace with our childhood wounds. However, our childhood
self is not the only past version of us that
deserves love and attention. So today we are going to
expand on the principles and the theories behind healing out
in a child, to talk about healing our inner teen
(01:09):
and what exactly that means and why it requires more
of our focus. This is not spoken about enough, I think,
because the idea of healing out in a child is
a lot more. I would say, well, well, gentle and
sweet and lovely, it's very easy to not blame our
childhood selves. So what they went through and how they're
(01:29):
showing up in our adult behavior because of our innate
vulnerability at that age, But our teenage selves are this
whole different ballgame. I think I'm not the only one
that looks back at my teen years with like an
overtone of cringe, seeing the decisions she made, the rage
she felt for the world, but then also how alone
(01:52):
she felt and misunderstood. It's this mixture of embarrassment and
I guess also sadness. But what I've come to realize
is that this version of me deserves just as much
consideration and compassion as that younger version of myself and
my current version of myself as well. The wounded taine
(02:15):
looks a lot different to the wounded child. As we'll discuss,
it's not just about needing love and care and security,
but also about feelings of intense anger at times and
rebellion and frustration. And this shows up in many ways,
like impulsive behaviors, emotional outbursts, self sabotage, overspending, rejection, sensitivity,
(02:40):
all things that I think we could do without. So
in today's episode we are going to discuss it all.
I will say that compared to healing out inner child,
there is a lot less psychological research on this, but
I think a lot of the foundational knowledge is still
the same, as well as some of that emerging literature
(03:01):
on things like suppression and early teenage isolation, identity theory,
and also some really fascinating articles on events and experiences
like our first time having sex, our first sexual experience,
especially in our teenage years. Things like that are a
lot more impactful than we once thought. So we're going
(03:22):
to break down the way that our wounded in a
teen shows up and why the experiences during this period
are highly influential for our adult selves, as much as
we may try to avoid looking back at that time.
We're also going to dive into some of the catalysts
for our inner teen wounds, things like rejection, feeling excluded, parentification,
(03:46):
and how we can identify with this lonely, angry, perhaps vengeful,
impulsive version of us, but also how we can reconnect
and how we can move forward. Some of the stratuses
we'll discuss include the adult chair method, one I haven't
spoken about before but which is so deeply influential I
(04:08):
cannot wait to discuss it, and also why listening to
your old Taylor Swift or Blink one eighty two albums
might actually be rather healthy for us. So I'm so
fascinated by this topic. I'm really keen to get into
it because if this didn't make me realize how much
I actually hated my teenage self, oh my goodness, there's
(04:30):
a lot of work to be done there, and I
also want to share how I've been approaching it and
all the value that I've found in this level of
deep retrospection. So I'm going to stop rambling. That's not
why you're here, So without further ado, let's jump into
how to heal. You're in a team, all right, So
(04:55):
you've most likely heard of inner child healing before, especially
if you are in low time listener of this show.
I talk about it quite a lot because I think
it's really valuable to understand how the experiences of our
childhood self impact our adult behavior, in particular our self
perception and how we approach things like love and attachment
(05:18):
and decision making in a child healing for a bit
of a refresher, it essentially rests on the premise that
within all of us is this injured, vulnerable being who
needs caring for, who needs you to step up and
parent them and show yourself, the compassion and the unconditional
(05:39):
love you maybe previously hadn't experienced. A core foundation of
this practice is that past versions of ourselves still exist,
even if our overall physical form has changed. Those experiences
we had during our formative years, either in childhood or lessons,
(06:01):
they don't disappear. They stayed with us as very emotionally
present and salient memories, and so in some ways we
are still carrying every version of us that has come before,
including all the baggage that they themselves were carrying. Now,
whilst in a child, work and talking about our inner
(06:21):
child is really about reflecting on our emotional core, the vulnerable, innocent,
often needy part of you. Our inner team is a
lot more messy. As they say, maybe they're angry, maybe
they're isolated, maybe they're misunderstood. This version of you, this
past version. They were intellectually and emotionally developed enough to
(06:45):
be able to rationalize what they were experiencing, but perhaps
not to process it. And the nature of the experiences
they went through that perhaps left these psychological scars are
going to be very different. So approaching in a child
healing and in healing separately is really valuable. And the
(07:06):
distinction is mainly the age at which you received certain
emotional or social wounds. So you're inner teenager is a
representation of what you went through in your teen years,
the emotional experiences that perhaps shaped you, and most importantly,
how that is still impacting you today. And the age
(07:28):
at which we had these experiences will impact how they
manifest So, in developmental psychology, the distinction between children and adolescents,
it's kind of more than just age. Yes, we kind
of tend to see teenagers as those between the ages
of thirteen to eighteen or nineteen, and that's our main
way of categorizing this group of people. But during that time,
(07:52):
we're also undergoing a really rapid level of development that
distinguishes us from children. And it's not just physical, because
this is the time when we really begin to figure
out our identity and where we sit in the world.
This includes things like our sexual identity, our relational identity,
(08:12):
perhaps where we stand, you know, in relation to our
parents and our peers, and then most importantly, I would say,
is our personal identity. It's kind of a combination of everything.
Who are we actually, who do we feel like we are?
It's this stage of development that the psychoanalyst Eric Ericksson
called the conflict between identity and identity or role confusions. So,
(08:36):
during this stage adolescence search for a sense of self
through a really intense personal exploration of values, of goals,
of belief systems, and they tend to also rebel against
broader societal norms, particularly those represented in the family unit.
(08:56):
As a way of going about this, So maybe from
your personal experience, you had a bit of an emo
phase during this time, got a few piercings, your parents
didn't approve of, listen to angsty music, you know, skip school,
drank alcohol, or you just kind of tried on different
costumes or masks for who you wanted to be. Even
(09:20):
though you may cringe at that now, it's actually really
valuable because what Ericson concludes is that if you don't
give yourself that space to really figure that stuff out,
if you don't make mistakes, if you don't successfully move
through this stage or resolve that conflict between who we
think we are whose society thinks we are in our
(09:41):
true self, this is when we begin to see some
of those emotional and social wounds and that are most
characteristic of a wounded in a team, and at the
same time we're experiencing a lot of independence and a
lot of i would say, personal identity growth. We're also
(10:02):
seeing a very big biological shift, you know, the beginnings
of puberty, and this exacerbates a lot of the experiences
that we ultimately need to move through. So beginning at puberty,
the brain is literally being reshaped because we're going to
start pruning some of those synapses and neural pathways that
(10:22):
we no longer need. But also, hormonally, our bodies are
being pumped with things like adrenal stress hormones, growth hormones,
and sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen. All of these
greatly impact things like mood and impulse control, even our
mental health. So there's been studies that have shown that
(10:44):
higher rates of estrogen impact the availability of serotonin. So serotonin,
as we know it more generally, it's one of the
primary neurotransmitters responsible for happiness. So it kind of explains
why women, in particular teenage girls who have such high
levels of this hormone have significantly high rates of things
(11:06):
like anxiety and depression because of those shifts as we
become you know, women rather than girls. So what does
this actually mean just sounds like a bunch of science.
It means that what we're battling as teenagers is in
some ways a lot more advanced than what we needed
as children. Our inner child just wants love and security
(11:29):
and attachment, and that probably feels very different to your
inner teenager, who has a lot of feelings of perhaps
displacement and frustration, confusion, and I think most importantly insecurity.
I think our teenage years is when we become clued
into the world and perhaps very angry with what it
(11:51):
has to offer. I remember feeling really misunderstood as a teenager.
I would sit in my room for hours. I would
have these bites with my parents, and for many of us,
our transition into adolescence is marked by these very heightened
emotions and a changing landscape around what society expects of us.
The three main I would say, like social cultural experiences
(12:15):
are trying to find independence and perhaps grow up a
bit too fast, feeling misunderstood and maybe trying to be
someone where not for other people's benefit. And then finally
the experience of shame. The last one in particular, I
think really distinguishes our childhood selves from our teenage selves.
(12:37):
We start feeling shame as we enter our teenage years
about our behavior and worrying about other people's perceptions of us.
If you kind of think back to your childhood self,
you really didn't have those concerns. You know. We were
pretty happy to play and run around. If you've ever
spoken to like a seven or eight even nine year
(12:58):
old child, they say, like the wildest shit, like they
have no impulse control, and we would wear whatever we wanted.
And I think it's important to notice when did that stop.
When was the first time you realized that maybe you
didn't fit in or you became conscious of the expectations
(13:19):
and opinions of others. And is that still impacting you now?
In what ways? Is that teenage version of you still
seeking out approval from others in your adult behavior, in
your current adult life. And then we also want to
be perceived as older than we are. We're in such
a rush to grow up, to push the limits, and
(13:42):
yet we actually don't really have the cognitive or emotional
skills to process some of the things that we go through,
particularly how they impact things like future attachment style and
self concept. Because we are still very much children. That's
how the legal system says us, our voting system, our
healthcare system, and yet we're having these very adult experiences
(14:07):
in this like weird limbo between childhood and adulthood. One
of these experiences in particular is around sex. So the
average age most of us lose our virginity is kind
of smack bang in the middle of the teenage years,
according to a lot of the research, so around sixteen
(14:30):
to seventeen. Now, I will say this is self reported,
so there may be some level of social desirability that
people want to be seen as sexually active younger, but
that kind of actually helps my point that we really
do want to grow out faster. And you know, it's
not everyone's experience, but for those of us who did
have our first sexual experience during our teenage years, that
(14:54):
may actually have a lot of long term impacts that
we don't really come to terms with until much later
in life. And they've just you know, conducted studies into
this quite a few recently, actually suggesting that the age
of a person's first sexual experience can determine your romantic
outcomes later in life. One study in particular, published in
(15:18):
the Journal of Sex and Marital therapy. It kind of
concluded that this is particularly profound for women and their
later sexual desire because losing your virginity, you know, we
don't really talk about it on the podcast, but it's
such a powerful learning experience and our you know, especially
(15:38):
for our teenage years, and sometimes it can contain quite
a bit of you know, not just trauma, but a
real sense of like we've suddenly grown up. We've suddenly
this is like this milestone that kind of really sits
in our brains as teenagers, and we might feel like
(15:59):
we're old and enough to deal with things, you know,
and take on adult responsibilities like having sex, but our
brains aren't really fully developed until much later on. So
in essence, in a teen, healing acknowledges those experiences that
may have been quite painful, all the ways in which
(16:23):
you were perhaps rejected or unheard or trying to fit in.
And what we want to do is provide space to
feel and verbalize and process all of that in a
way that you know, your arrogance as a teenager, just
kind of your naivity didn't let you do. What we
(16:43):
might see is this power struggle around the fight for control,
wanting to feel older, than we are, and then also
feeling very much alienated. And when we internalize these feelings,
this contributes to a lot of uncomfortable things. And that's
where the kind of remus lies. So what does it
look like when you're entertain kind of takes control. So
(17:07):
there are a few signs that you may have what
we would call a wounded in a tein, and they'll
differ from person to person, but I want to list
a few that are most commonly shared. So the first
is being highly emotionally reactive or responding to situations in
a manner that others see as immature, experiencing intense rejection, sensitivity,
(17:31):
self sabotaging behaviors like procrastination, overspending, even addictive behaviors, replicating
early romantic experiences, or partners holding onto resentment, self isolating,
or even reverting to kind of like the silent treatment
or withdrawal, feeling intense anger, you know, for no apparent reason,
(17:54):
wanting to be violent or petty or scornful. And finally, regression,
which is what we would call a maladaptive defense mechanism
against stressful or overwhelming situations. So regression is not as common,
but it's pretty profound, and it's a very interesting indicator
(18:16):
of an inner tea or even a childhood wound. So
it involves reverting to behaviors that are not age appropriate
in order to kind of replicate a time when you
felt safer and more secure. So for example, sucking your
thumb when you're feeling really stressed, wanting to go and
like hide away in your closet or go into the
(18:38):
feet or position, even talking in like a baby voice
or a stuffed you know, using a stuffed animal from
your childhood as kind of like a coping device something
to attach to. It's not as common as the others,
but you know, things like temper tantrums could even fall
under this category as well. It's just these things that
(19:01):
we did to self soothe as younger versions of us
that are no longer appropriate, and yet we still rely on.
So these behaviors are going to impact us all very differently,
and there are certainly more than just this list, but
opinions and kind of psychoanalytic psychology in particular really suggests
(19:22):
that these emotional habits and behaviors are really indicative that
at some stage in your adolescence you experience something that
altered your ability to relate to yourself and relate to
others in a sustainable and productive way once you kind
of I think it's one of those things when you
start on this journey you can't really come back like
(19:44):
You may find that a lot of the behaviors or
habits you've learned over time can be traced back to
your teenage self and a lot of the emotional conflicts
that you encountered. For example, if you're a highly sensitive
person and highly sensitive to any indicators of rejection, perhaps
from a partner or a friend, and you respond by
(20:06):
pulling away, by acting cruelly, by feeling incredibly anxious, that
may be indicative that at some stage as a teenager,
you felt really excluded and you felt really unliked, and
so you now feel like you have to work for
people's attention, and you feel uncomfortable when they take away
(20:28):
that feeling. You feel uncomfortable in a way that you
want to have control over this situation, because you didn't
have control over feeling liked or feeling like your authentic
self when you were younger. Another one that I find
really interesting is when you continually replicate early romantic experiences
(20:50):
that might be indicative that you haven't really processed how
they were maybe quite negative and gave you the wrong
impression of how love should be. But because you haven't
come to terms with that, you're stuck in this really
repetitive pattern. So I want to talk about what events
or triggers or experiences create these reactions, Specifically, how did
(21:14):
your entertain come to be wounded? The biggest one kind
of in my personal opinion, I just find this one
perhaps most relatable is a time when you felt really
rejected or ostracized, especially if you've been bullied or perhaps
excluded by certain groups or supposed friends when you're a teenager.
(21:38):
This is such a painful experience and it can leave
very long lasting psychological scars, particularly around our innate sense
of self worth and feeling worthy of friendship. Each of
us has an innate need to belong and to be
(21:58):
accepted by this social groups we are surrounded by. Belonging
is actually our third most important need according to Maslow's
hierarchy of need. It's just above things like literal food
and shelter, but below things like a sense of esteem
or identity or self actualization. So we need to belong
(22:21):
before we can come to terms with our higher self.
So if you perhaps didn't feel like you really had
a place where you felt accepted as a teenager, you
may have been unable to kind of undergo some of
that discovery that other people did. What that means is
that in adulthood or when we feel like we are
being excluded, like we spoke about before, that hurt lonely
(22:45):
teenage version of us who maybe spent time really longing
for the future, who really just wanted to belong, who
wanted a friend, that version of us is activated and
it begins to take control, perhaps isolating you you even further.
We see this in so many ways because we are
worried that we will be hurt again, that people won't
(23:08):
accept us. We can react by becoming quite codependent with
just one person, feeling intense anger at even the slightest
sense of rejection, all of these being indicators of some
deeper emotional origin or dysregulation. One way in particular I've
actually seen this exhibited in my own behavior is the
(23:31):
need to almost hold or like collect friends and sometimes
even take on different personalities or identities with different people
or groups because I want them to like me. I
want them to accept me. It's definitely something I've had
to work on over the past five years. You know.
Filling up our social calendars or our circles with so
many people that we can't even maintain all the relationships
(23:54):
at once is really, in some ways our subconscious brain saying,
you know, hey, if we do this, we'll never have
to feel alone again. We will never have to feel
rejected because there will always be someone there. I think
the second thing that we can see really cause in
a teen wounds has to do with parentification. So I
(24:17):
talked about this in our hyperindependence episode, and I think
it's one of the most fascinating concepts to kind of
come out of developmental psychology. Parentification occurs when we experience
a role reversal with our parents or caregivers as children
or teenagers. In this way, we kind of had to
provide them with the emotional support, not the other way around,
(24:41):
and we acted as their confident or their mediator. This
role reversal disrupts the natural process of maturing because we've
been forced to take on responsibilities as adolescents well beyond
what our years should require, and we were also denied
that kind of chance to be a little bit helpless
to have someone help us and to provide room for
(25:04):
us to make mistakes. The consequences of this advanced maturity
may show up later in life, you know, by us
acting out or doing impulsive, risky things because we didn't
get that opportunity as teenagers. We may also be highly
emotionally reactive, particularly when we feel a sense of restriction
(25:26):
or responsibility, because our inner teen is once again in
this situation in control. Those unhealed wounds are telling us
to act in a certain way based on past experiences,
and the same kind of goes for things like strict
parents that may have contained our identity, not kind of
allowing us to pass through that role confusion stage, or
(25:49):
to be exploratory or to make mistakes. This gives us
a sense of almost hatred for authority, and you may
struggle later in life with people in high positions, like
your boss telling you what to do acting in defiance
because it's triggering that teenage version of you who felt
misunderstood and wasn't allowed to make mistakes. Narcissistic parents and
(26:14):
also the kind of environment they created fall under the
same banner. I think it's a major contributor feeling like
you were forced to maintain a certain image for their benefit.
That might come with a lot of future rebellion or anger.
And then finally, major life changes and adolescents, and I'm
talking about things like the death of a parent or
(26:36):
a close family member, maybe divorce, maybe you moved around
a lot. What this all links to is a that
pressure to grow up too fast, not giving our teenage
self the time to properly come into their own and
experience the important events they needed to at the proper
time and be a sense of alienation or disconnet and
(27:00):
with that a lot of unresolved emotions like frustration and
rage and resentment. The kind of simplified premise of why
we need to focus on our innertain and not just
our inner child is this. The wounds we carry from
our adolescents are going to be a lot more nuanced
than the unmet needs we faced as children. They will overlap,
(27:24):
but how they show up later in life is profoundly
different in that our teenage wounds are a lot more active. So,
for example, our inner child wants peace and they want
love and security, and our inner teens want that as well,
but they also want expression and identity and rage, but
ultimately acceptance. So what I want to discuss next is
(27:46):
how to actually heal this wound and come to regard
it as a really important element of who we are.
And you know, as they say, we sometimes do really
need to shake hands with who we are and to
reach that next stage of self action. Part of that
process is managing those inner feelings and those inner wounds.
So we're going to talk about all of that and
(28:08):
more after this short break. When I think about my
teenage self, I really remember this girl who was really
struggling with a sense of place and identity. I haven't
really spoken much about like my high school experience because
(28:28):
it feels like a lifetime ago. But I went to
this like really progressive school where everyone was studying you know,
music or art, and you know, it was in Brunswick
in Melbourne, so everyone was just like really cool. They
were really cool, and I did not feel cool. I
was academic, I was really studious. I played the trum bone,
(28:51):
and I never really felt like anyone understood me. Felt
very alone, and that created a lot of negative feelings,
probably a bit of depression, but also anger at the
world for kind of treating me unfairly. On the other
side of this was this need to be a good girl.
I wasn't going to be a bad girl because I
(29:12):
didn't fit in with the kind of kids that were rebelling,
and I also wanted everyone to like me. I needed
the validation of others like it was like it was water.
And when I didn't receive it, when I didn't get
the grades that I wanted or I felt excluded, I
would project that kind of onto my parents or onto
like the system. So I think what I've reflected on
(29:33):
a lot is that in many ways I really didn't
allow myself a teenage experience because I was a always
worried about what others thought of me, and B I
was really deeply committed to being good. And you know,
you know what happened after high school. I completely regressed
and I became incredibly rebellious because I hadn't allowed myself
to act out, to try different versions of myself. So
(29:56):
when I went to UNI, I decided I wanted to
speed up that pro I wanted to grow up quickly
like we talked about, and I kind of partied really hard.
I got tattoos, I spent all my money going to Europe.
I dyed my hair, I smoked cigarettes behind my college block.
I missed classes because my inner tein now I can see,
(30:17):
really missed out and she was trying to make up
for lost time. Slowly, as I got older, I obviously
have begun to settle down and I came to terms
with what was really at the root of this behavior
that seemed so very contradictory to the version of myself,
you know, twelve even six months before. And the first
(30:38):
step to coming to terms with that was where I
noticing where I hurt, what was I afraid of that
was causing this behavior, Because not all of it was bad,
as we'll talk about in a second. You know, contained
rebellion is actually one really valuable way to get in
touch with your inner tain. But really, you know, what
was I fighting? What was at that core, and it
(31:01):
was this very foundational insecurity. I wanted to belong, I
wanted to be liked. I never felt like I was
meant to be somewhere, and I never really gave myself
permission to make mistakes, and so all of that pain
and suppression had bubbled to the surface. I think if
you want to heal your entertain you have to be
(31:22):
able to identify or when they have control or are
reacting to this situation. I want to return to those
indicators from before, so things like being highly emotionally reactive,
angry outbursts, self sabotaging, withdrawing, replicating early romantic experiences, and regression.
(31:45):
I Also, I think part of that is under self
sabotaging behaviors is things like overspending and things like procrastination.
So let's kind of look at overspending as an example.
Money is something that we all struggle with. Would say,
I think our relationship to spending is highly influenced by
(32:05):
how money was approached in our adolescence and within our
family system. It's a very unique in a teen experience
to worry about money because I think we only really
become conscious of its value in those later years. So
if your family always struggle with money, when you kind
of begin to make your own income, you might find
(32:27):
that it's really hard to not spend without thinking kind
of as a way to fulfill material needs that you
never felt you got to experience at a younger age.
And adulthood is expensive, so you know, spending money on
your rent or to fix your car, or for healthcare.
(32:48):
That is not what I would call overspending. It's the
money we put towards our wants rather than our needs.
So if you find that you have a tendency to
overspend when you're stress or when you're lonely, or you
feel out of control, maybe that's urinity. In that moment,
you have to recognize this version of yourself is kind
(33:10):
of asking you to recognize them, is asking you to
look at them face on and really trying to assert
their independence and authority, kind of at the detriment of
your adult sense of responsibility. Now, the crucial tip here
is to not fully suppress this behavior. We know from
psychological research that suppressing certain urges is about as effective
(33:36):
as complete avoidance or abstinence. It may feel effective in
the short term, but over time you cannot rely on
willpower alone. That behavior of feeling or instinct is going
to feel more taboo and therefore a lot more attractive,
and I guess you'll relapse, you'll feel shame, you'll spend more,
(33:56):
and you're back in the toxic cycle with your kind
of wounded teen at the wheel. So you need to
find an outlet and give yourself permission to actually connect
with that need, acknowledge where it's coming from and why,
and then treat it like a welcome visitor. For example,
(34:17):
budgeting for free spend money that you can spend on
whatever you want within limits. Anger is another example. Often
when our wounded teen is kind of speaking up, it's
through things like rage or outbursts or tantrums, and it's
possibly caused by us feeling the need to suppress this
feeling for quite a while. And if we look at
(34:39):
the origins, it may have been that as a child,
you weren't really given permission to feel emotions intensely, so
as an adult you don't have the same level of
self control that others may have. It feels nice to
be angry, it's highly satisfying, but you need to channel
that in a product active way to satisfy both your
(35:01):
inneriteen's needs and your adult needs as well. So go
to a rage room. I did one of those the
other day. It was honestly so fun. You can go
to a boxing class, or better yet, go to a
nice secluded spot out in nature and just scream or
dance intensely in your room headphones on Blink one eighty two.
(35:21):
Some Fearless by Taylor Swift, classic teenage angst albums, and
let out all of that steam. Emotions like rage and anger,
they are stored in the body. This study conducted in
twenty sixteen. It was published in the Oxford Academic. It
found that anger can create muscle tension and automatic arousal
(35:42):
in certain areas of the brain. So giving this feeling
of physical expression will stop you from doing so inappropriately.
And it feels so nice to give yourself permission to
actually feel, rather than scolding your enterteen, as you know
was often done by your parents or by teachers. Do
(36:03):
you know, express that in a productive way. And that's
also really important because a lot of researchers have concluded
that when we store anger and then we let it
out through lashing out or drinking or other things like that,
this just creates addictive behaviors. So give in and let
go in a way that is emotionally fulfilling. And when
(36:23):
you catch yourself governed by your wounded in a teen,
it's important to not believe everything that they're telling you.
You know, you don't want to feed into those beliefs
that you'll never be loved or accepted or happy. Positively
reaffirm why all of that isn't true. Speaking to them
as if they are a separate person, is if they
(36:44):
you know that version of you, that angry, you know,
depressed teenager is sitting in front of you right now,
and then try to switch back to your adult self,
focus on the life you've now created for yourself, knowing
you will be okay, and comfort them that foresight. There's
one final method here that I really want to discuss.
(37:05):
So I discovered this technique through this podcast called the
Adult Chair Podcast by Michelle Chalfan. Now, when I say
this method has absolutely changed my life, I'm being dead serious.
And in all of my courses in psychology studies, I
really i'd never heard of this before. So what this
(37:26):
method asks you to do is to use three chairs
to represent or symbolize you're in a child, you're in
a teen, and your current self your adult self. And
working with this model, we're going to understand how you
feel on the inside and what needs to be healed,
what might be damaged. So you sit with the three chairs,
(37:48):
real or imagined, and you speak to each of these
versions of yourself. What stories would your teenage self tell you?
What was going on in that phase of life and
how did that feel. Literally monologue as if you were
that version of yourself writing your autobiography. I don't know.
This is kind of intimate and a bit vulnerable. But
(38:09):
the first time I did this, I also had my
old journals from when I was a teenager. If you've
got your old journals, you should really read through them
because it was so emotionally profound. I genuinely cried because
it felt so real and so honest and raw, and
it made me contemplate things that I hadn't for so long,
and remember things that I could see in my current behavior,
(38:31):
and take that load for them, you know, tell them
that everything is going to be okay, tell them about
the things they never would have expected, that it does
get better, that you're pushing through, and that you love
them now. I know when I talk about these techniques
some people find them quite strange, but I think what
the very simple psychology would tell you is that it
(38:53):
is your job to process how your memories and experiences
have shaped you out of that is, integrating them into
the current version of yourself, finding a place where these
experiences sit in your current reality. This is kind of
just one exercise that allows us to do that, and
it kind of lets us answer that deep question at
(39:16):
the very core of inner teen healing. What does this
version of myself need? What are they missing right now
that is causing them to react, and how can I
give them that? It's also valuable to know. I think,
much like in a child healing, healing you're inner teen
is a lifelong process, but one that gets easier. I
(39:36):
think some final reminders would be this, with anything that
happens in life, you need to choose to be gentle
with yourself self Punishment unfortunately, never works. It's really just
our ego punishing us or relieving a sense of guilt
that we don't know how to process. To make friends
with who you are, Your past self helped you get here,
(39:59):
whatever they want through whatever ways they were misbehaving or
were cringe. It's all still valuable. It's all part of
the journey, and part of that is three getting to
know yourself better. I think at the core of this
podcast is the idea that all of us could benefit
from some additional introspection and self awareness, and if part
(40:20):
of that is acknowledging your teenage wounds, then I really
think that's amazing. So I really hope that this episode
has benefited you. We talk so much about inner child
healing on this podcast. I think that our teenage selves
get a little bit neglected at times, which is not helpful,
as we have learned. So I'm hoping that this episode
has really allowed you to contemplate how this version of
(40:41):
you is showing up in your life and yeah, just
where you're at with that version of you? Did you
feel lonely, did you feel neglected? Did you feel angry
at the world? And have you really come to terms
with what that meant and how that's still impacting you.
So I'm so glad you've made it this far. As always,
(41:01):
if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to share
it with a friend or give us a five star
review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening. Right now,
I'm going to plug my Patreon here. If you like
this episode, for just one dollar a month, one dollar,
one dollar, you can help me make more of this show.
It's really just me here doing it all, writing the episodes,
(41:23):
doing the research, and I love it so much, but
there is a lot of work that goes behind it,
so I really appreciate the support and if you have
an episode suggestion, follow us at that Psychology Podcast on Instagram.
I love to hear what's going on in your lives
and you can see video content over there and just
be part of the community. So we will be back
next week with another episode. Thanks
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:27):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it's great to have you here.
Back for another episode. Today, we're in for a freaking
fascinating topic. I think we've all heard of in a
child healing by this stage and the value in acknowledging
(00:48):
and making peace with our childhood wounds. However, our childhood
self is not the only past version of us that
deserves love and attention. So today we are going to
expand on the principles and the theories behind healing out
in a child, to talk about healing our inner teen
(01:09):
and what exactly that means and why it requires more
of our focus. This is not spoken about enough, I think,
because the idea of healing out in a child is
a lot more. I would say, well, well, gentle and
sweet and lovely, it's very easy to not blame our
childhood selves. So what they went through and how they're
(01:29):
showing up in our adult behavior because of our innate
vulnerability at that age, But our teenage selves are this
whole different ballgame. I think I'm not the only one
that looks back at my teen years with like an
overtone of cringe, seeing the decisions she made, the rage
she felt for the world, but then also how alone
(01:52):
she felt and misunderstood. It's this mixture of embarrassment and
I guess also sadness. But what I've come to realize
is that this version of me deserves just as much
consideration and compassion as that younger version of myself and
my current version of myself as well. The wounded taine
(02:15):
looks a lot different to the wounded child. As we'll discuss,
it's not just about needing love and care and security,
but also about feelings of intense anger at times and
rebellion and frustration. And this shows up in many ways,
like impulsive behaviors, emotional outbursts, self sabotage, overspending, rejection, sensitivity,
(02:40):
all things that I think we could do without. So
in today's episode we are going to discuss it all.
I will say that compared to healing out inner child,
there is a lot less psychological research on this, but
I think a lot of the foundational knowledge is still
the same, as well as some of that emerging literature
(03:01):
on things like suppression and early teenage isolation, identity theory,
and also some really fascinating articles on events and experiences
like our first time having sex, our first sexual experience,
especially in our teenage years. Things like that are a
lot more impactful than we once thought. So we're going
(03:22):
to break down the way that our wounded in a
teen shows up and why the experiences during this period
are highly influential for our adult selves, as much as
we may try to avoid looking back at that time.
We're also going to dive into some of the catalysts
for our inner teen wounds, things like rejection, feeling excluded, parentification,
(03:46):
and how we can identify with this lonely, angry, perhaps vengeful,
impulsive version of us, but also how we can reconnect
and how we can move forward. Some of the stratuses
we'll discuss include the adult chair method, one I haven't
spoken about before but which is so deeply influential I
(04:08):
cannot wait to discuss it, and also why listening to
your old Taylor Swift or Blink one eighty two albums
might actually be rather healthy for us. So I'm so
fascinated by this topic. I'm really keen to get into
it because if this didn't make me realize how much
I actually hated my teenage self, oh my goodness, there's
(04:30):
a lot of work to be done there, and I
also want to share how I've been approaching it and
all the value that I've found in this level of
deep retrospection. So I'm going to stop rambling. That's not
why you're here, So without further ado, let's jump into
how to heal. You're in a team, all right, So
(04:55):
you've most likely heard of inner child healing before, especially
if you are in low time listener of this show.
I talk about it quite a lot because I think
it's really valuable to understand how the experiences of our
childhood self impact our adult behavior, in particular our self
perception and how we approach things like love and attachment
(05:18):
and decision making in a child healing for a bit
of a refresher, it essentially rests on the premise that
within all of us is this injured, vulnerable being who
needs caring for, who needs you to step up and
parent them and show yourself, the compassion and the unconditional
(05:39):
love you maybe previously hadn't experienced. A core foundation of
this practice is that past versions of ourselves still exist,
even if our overall physical form has changed. Those experiences
we had during our formative years, either in childhood or lessons,
(06:01):
they don't disappear. They stayed with us as very emotionally
present and salient memories, and so in some ways we
are still carrying every version of us that has come before,
including all the baggage that they themselves were carrying. Now,
whilst in a child, work and talking about our inner
(06:21):
child is really about reflecting on our emotional core, the vulnerable, innocent,
often needy part of you. Our inner team is a
lot more messy. As they say, maybe they're angry, maybe
they're isolated, maybe they're misunderstood. This version of you, this
past version. They were intellectually and emotionally developed enough to
(06:45):
be able to rationalize what they were experiencing, but perhaps
not to process it. And the nature of the experiences
they went through that perhaps left these psychological scars are
going to be very different. So approaching in a child
healing and in healing separately is really valuable. And the
(07:06):
distinction is mainly the age at which you received certain
emotional or social wounds. So you're inner teenager is a
representation of what you went through in your teen years,
the emotional experiences that perhaps shaped you, and most importantly,
how that is still impacting you today. And the age
(07:28):
at which we had these experiences will impact how they
manifest So, in developmental psychology, the distinction between children and adolescents,
it's kind of more than just age. Yes, we kind
of tend to see teenagers as those between the ages
of thirteen to eighteen or nineteen, and that's our main
way of categorizing this group of people. But during that time,
(07:52):
we're also undergoing a really rapid level of development that
distinguishes us from children. And it's not just physical, because
this is the time when we really begin to figure
out our identity and where we sit in the world.
This includes things like our sexual identity, our relational identity,
(08:12):
perhaps where we stand, you know, in relation to our
parents and our peers, and then most importantly, I would say,
is our personal identity. It's kind of a combination of everything.
Who are we actually, who do we feel like we are?
It's this stage of development that the psychoanalyst Eric Ericksson
called the conflict between identity and identity or role confusions. So,
(08:36):
during this stage adolescence search for a sense of self
through a really intense personal exploration of values, of goals,
of belief systems, and they tend to also rebel against
broader societal norms, particularly those represented in the family unit.
(08:56):
As a way of going about this, So maybe from
your personal experience, you had a bit of an emo
phase during this time, got a few piercings, your parents
didn't approve of, listen to angsty music, you know, skip school,
drank alcohol, or you just kind of tried on different
costumes or masks for who you wanted to be. Even
(09:20):
though you may cringe at that now, it's actually really
valuable because what Ericson concludes is that if you don't
give yourself that space to really figure that stuff out,
if you don't make mistakes, if you don't successfully move
through this stage or resolve that conflict between who we
think we are whose society thinks we are in our
(09:41):
true self, this is when we begin to see some
of those emotional and social wounds and that are most
characteristic of a wounded in a team, and at the
same time we're experiencing a lot of independence and a
lot of i would say, personal identity growth. We're also
(10:02):
seeing a very big biological shift, you know, the beginnings
of puberty, and this exacerbates a lot of the experiences
that we ultimately need to move through. So beginning at puberty,
the brain is literally being reshaped because we're going to
start pruning some of those synapses and neural pathways that
(10:22):
we no longer need. But also, hormonally, our bodies are
being pumped with things like adrenal stress hormones, growth hormones,
and sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen. All of these
greatly impact things like mood and impulse control, even our
mental health. So there's been studies that have shown that
(10:44):
higher rates of estrogen impact the availability of serotonin. So serotonin,
as we know it more generally, it's one of the
primary neurotransmitters responsible for happiness. So it kind of explains
why women, in particular teenage girls who have such high
levels of this hormone have significantly high rates of things
(11:06):
like anxiety and depression because of those shifts as we
become you know, women rather than girls. So what does
this actually mean just sounds like a bunch of science.
It means that what we're battling as teenagers is in
some ways a lot more advanced than what we needed
as children. Our inner child just wants love and security
(11:29):
and attachment, and that probably feels very different to your
inner teenager, who has a lot of feelings of perhaps
displacement and frustration, confusion, and I think most importantly insecurity.
I think our teenage years is when we become clued
into the world and perhaps very angry with what it
(11:51):
has to offer. I remember feeling really misunderstood as a teenager.
I would sit in my room for hours. I would
have these bites with my parents, and for many of us,
our transition into adolescence is marked by these very heightened
emotions and a changing landscape around what society expects of us.
The three main I would say, like social cultural experiences
(12:15):
are trying to find independence and perhaps grow up a
bit too fast, feeling misunderstood and maybe trying to be
someone where not for other people's benefit. And then finally
the experience of shame. The last one in particular, I
think really distinguishes our childhood selves from our teenage selves.
(12:37):
We start feeling shame as we enter our teenage years
about our behavior and worrying about other people's perceptions of us.
If you kind of think back to your childhood self,
you really didn't have those concerns. You know. We were
pretty happy to play and run around. If you've ever
spoken to like a seven or eight even nine year
(12:58):
old child, they say, like the wildest shit, like they
have no impulse control, and we would wear whatever we wanted.
And I think it's important to notice when did that stop.
When was the first time you realized that maybe you
didn't fit in or you became conscious of the expectations
(13:19):
and opinions of others. And is that still impacting you now?
In what ways? Is that teenage version of you still
seeking out approval from others in your adult behavior, in
your current adult life. And then we also want to
be perceived as older than we are. We're in such
a rush to grow up, to push the limits, and
(13:42):
yet we actually don't really have the cognitive or emotional
skills to process some of the things that we go through,
particularly how they impact things like future attachment style and
self concept. Because we are still very much children. That's
how the legal system says us, our voting system, our
healthcare system, and yet we're having these very adult experiences
(14:07):
in this like weird limbo between childhood and adulthood. One
of these experiences in particular is around sex. So the
average age most of us lose our virginity is kind
of smack bang in the middle of the teenage years,
according to a lot of the research, so around sixteen
(14:30):
to seventeen. Now, I will say this is self reported,
so there may be some level of social desirability that
people want to be seen as sexually active younger, but
that kind of actually helps my point that we really
do want to grow out faster. And you know, it's
not everyone's experience, but for those of us who did
have our first sexual experience during our teenage years, that
(14:54):
may actually have a lot of long term impacts that
we don't really come to terms with until much later
in life. And they've just you know, conducted studies into
this quite a few recently, actually suggesting that the age
of a person's first sexual experience can determine your romantic
outcomes later in life. One study in particular, published in
(15:18):
the Journal of Sex and Marital therapy. It kind of
concluded that this is particularly profound for women and their
later sexual desire because losing your virginity, you know, we
don't really talk about it on the podcast, but it's
such a powerful learning experience and our you know, especially
(15:38):
for our teenage years, and sometimes it can contain quite
a bit of you know, not just trauma, but a
real sense of like we've suddenly grown up. We've suddenly
this is like this milestone that kind of really sits
in our brains as teenagers, and we might feel like
(15:59):
we're old and enough to deal with things, you know,
and take on adult responsibilities like having sex, but our
brains aren't really fully developed until much later on. So
in essence, in a teen, healing acknowledges those experiences that
may have been quite painful, all the ways in which
(16:23):
you were perhaps rejected or unheard or trying to fit in.
And what we want to do is provide space to
feel and verbalize and process all of that in a
way that you know, your arrogance as a teenager, just
kind of your naivity didn't let you do. What we
(16:43):
might see is this power struggle around the fight for control,
wanting to feel older, than we are, and then also
feeling very much alienated. And when we internalize these feelings,
this contributes to a lot of uncomfortable things. And that's
where the kind of remus lies. So what does it
look like when you're entertain kind of takes control. So
(17:07):
there are a few signs that you may have what
we would call a wounded in a tein, and they'll
differ from person to person, but I want to list
a few that are most commonly shared. So the first
is being highly emotionally reactive or responding to situations in
a manner that others see as immature, experiencing intense rejection, sensitivity,
(17:31):
self sabotaging behaviors like procrastination, overspending, even addictive behaviors, replicating
early romantic experiences, or partners holding onto resentment, self isolating,
or even reverting to kind of like the silent treatment
or withdrawal, feeling intense anger, you know, for no apparent reason,
(17:54):
wanting to be violent or petty or scornful. And finally, regression,
which is what we would call a maladaptive defense mechanism
against stressful or overwhelming situations. So regression is not as common,
but it's pretty profound, and it's a very interesting indicator
(18:16):
of an inner tea or even a childhood wound. So
it involves reverting to behaviors that are not age appropriate
in order to kind of replicate a time when you
felt safer and more secure. So for example, sucking your
thumb when you're feeling really stressed, wanting to go and
like hide away in your closet or go into the
(18:38):
feet or position, even talking in like a baby voice
or a stuffed you know, using a stuffed animal from
your childhood as kind of like a coping device something
to attach to. It's not as common as the others,
but you know, things like temper tantrums could even fall
under this category as well. It's just these things that
(19:01):
we did to self soothe as younger versions of us
that are no longer appropriate, and yet we still rely on.
So these behaviors are going to impact us all very differently,
and there are certainly more than just this list, but
opinions and kind of psychoanalytic psychology in particular really suggests
(19:22):
that these emotional habits and behaviors are really indicative that
at some stage in your adolescence you experience something that
altered your ability to relate to yourself and relate to
others in a sustainable and productive way once you kind
of I think it's one of those things when you
start on this journey you can't really come back like
(19:44):
You may find that a lot of the behaviors or
habits you've learned over time can be traced back to
your teenage self and a lot of the emotional conflicts
that you encountered. For example, if you're a highly sensitive
person and highly sensitive to any indicators of rejection, perhaps
from a partner or a friend, and you respond by
(20:06):
pulling away, by acting cruelly, by feeling incredibly anxious, that
may be indicative that at some stage as a teenager,
you felt really excluded and you felt really unliked, and
so you now feel like you have to work for
people's attention, and you feel uncomfortable when they take away
(20:28):
that feeling. You feel uncomfortable in a way that you
want to have control over this situation, because you didn't
have control over feeling liked or feeling like your authentic
self when you were younger. Another one that I find
really interesting is when you continually replicate early romantic experiences
(20:50):
that might be indicative that you haven't really processed how
they were maybe quite negative and gave you the wrong
impression of how love should be. But because you haven't
come to terms with that, you're stuck in this really
repetitive pattern. So I want to talk about what events
or triggers or experiences create these reactions, Specifically, how did
(21:14):
your entertain come to be wounded? The biggest one kind
of in my personal opinion, I just find this one
perhaps most relatable is a time when you felt really
rejected or ostracized, especially if you've been bullied or perhaps
excluded by certain groups or supposed friends when you're a teenager.
(21:38):
This is such a painful experience and it can leave
very long lasting psychological scars, particularly around our innate sense
of self worth and feeling worthy of friendship. Each of
us has an innate need to belong and to be
(21:58):
accepted by this social groups we are surrounded by. Belonging
is actually our third most important need according to Maslow's
hierarchy of need. It's just above things like literal food
and shelter, but below things like a sense of esteem
or identity or self actualization. So we need to belong
(22:21):
before we can come to terms with our higher self.
So if you perhaps didn't feel like you really had
a place where you felt accepted as a teenager, you
may have been unable to kind of undergo some of
that discovery that other people did. What that means is
that in adulthood or when we feel like we are
being excluded, like we spoke about before, that hurt lonely
(22:45):
teenage version of us who maybe spent time really longing
for the future, who really just wanted to belong, who
wanted a friend, that version of us is activated and
it begins to take control, perhaps isolating you you even further.
We see this in so many ways because we are
worried that we will be hurt again, that people won't
(23:08):
accept us. We can react by becoming quite codependent with
just one person, feeling intense anger at even the slightest
sense of rejection, all of these being indicators of some
deeper emotional origin or dysregulation. One way in particular I've
actually seen this exhibited in my own behavior is the
(23:31):
need to almost hold or like collect friends and sometimes
even take on different personalities or identities with different people
or groups because I want them to like me. I
want them to accept me. It's definitely something I've had
to work on over the past five years. You know.
Filling up our social calendars or our circles with so
many people that we can't even maintain all the relationships
(23:54):
at once is really, in some ways our subconscious brain saying,
you know, hey, if we do this, we'll never have
to feel alone again. We will never have to feel
rejected because there will always be someone there. I think
the second thing that we can see really cause in
a teen wounds has to do with parentification. So I
(24:17):
talked about this in our hyperindependence episode, and I think
it's one of the most fascinating concepts to kind of
come out of developmental psychology. Parentification occurs when we experience
a role reversal with our parents or caregivers as children
or teenagers. In this way, we kind of had to
provide them with the emotional support, not the other way around,
(24:41):
and we acted as their confident or their mediator. This
role reversal disrupts the natural process of maturing because we've
been forced to take on responsibilities as adolescents well beyond
what our years should require, and we were also denied
that kind of chance to be a little bit helpless
to have someone help us and to provide room for
(25:04):
us to make mistakes. The consequences of this advanced maturity
may show up later in life, you know, by us
acting out or doing impulsive, risky things because we didn't
get that opportunity as teenagers. We may also be highly
emotionally reactive, particularly when we feel a sense of restriction
(25:26):
or responsibility, because our inner teen is once again in
this situation in control. Those unhealed wounds are telling us
to act in a certain way based on past experiences,
and the same kind of goes for things like strict
parents that may have contained our identity, not kind of
allowing us to pass through that role confusion stage, or
(25:49):
to be exploratory or to make mistakes. This gives us
a sense of almost hatred for authority, and you may
struggle later in life with people in high positions, like
your boss telling you what to do acting in defiance
because it's triggering that teenage version of you who felt
misunderstood and wasn't allowed to make mistakes. Narcissistic parents and
(26:14):
also the kind of environment they created fall under the
same banner. I think it's a major contributor feeling like
you were forced to maintain a certain image for their benefit.
That might come with a lot of future rebellion or anger.
And then finally, major life changes and adolescents, and I'm
talking about things like the death of a parent or
(26:36):
a close family member, maybe divorce, maybe you moved around
a lot. What this all links to is a that
pressure to grow up too fast, not giving our teenage
self the time to properly come into their own and
experience the important events they needed to at the proper
time and be a sense of alienation or disconnet and
(27:00):
with that a lot of unresolved emotions like frustration and
rage and resentment. The kind of simplified premise of why
we need to focus on our innertain and not just
our inner child is this. The wounds we carry from
our adolescents are going to be a lot more nuanced
than the unmet needs we faced as children. They will overlap,
(27:24):
but how they show up later in life is profoundly
different in that our teenage wounds are a lot more active. So,
for example, our inner child wants peace and they want
love and security, and our inner teens want that as well,
but they also want expression and identity and rage, but
ultimately acceptance. So what I want to discuss next is
(27:46):
how to actually heal this wound and come to regard
it as a really important element of who we are.
And you know, as they say, we sometimes do really
need to shake hands with who we are and to
reach that next stage of self action. Part of that
process is managing those inner feelings and those inner wounds.
So we're going to talk about all of that and
(28:08):
more after this short break. When I think about my
teenage self, I really remember this girl who was really
struggling with a sense of place and identity. I haven't
really spoken much about like my high school experience because
(28:28):
it feels like a lifetime ago. But I went to
this like really progressive school where everyone was studying you know,
music or art, and you know, it was in Brunswick
in Melbourne, so everyone was just like really cool. They
were really cool, and I did not feel cool. I
was academic, I was really studious. I played the trum bone,
(28:51):
and I never really felt like anyone understood me. Felt
very alone, and that created a lot of negative feelings,
probably a bit of depression, but also anger at the
world for kind of treating me unfairly. On the other
side of this was this need to be a good girl.
I wasn't going to be a bad girl because I
(29:12):
didn't fit in with the kind of kids that were rebelling,
and I also wanted everyone to like me. I needed
the validation of others like it was like it was water.
And when I didn't receive it, when I didn't get
the grades that I wanted or I felt excluded, I
would project that kind of onto my parents or onto
like the system. So I think what I've reflected on
(29:33):
a lot is that in many ways I really didn't
allow myself a teenage experience because I was a always
worried about what others thought of me, and B I
was really deeply committed to being good. And you know,
you know what happened after high school. I completely regressed
and I became incredibly rebellious because I hadn't allowed myself
to act out, to try different versions of myself. So
(29:56):
when I went to UNI, I decided I wanted to
speed up that pro I wanted to grow up quickly
like we talked about, and I kind of partied really hard.
I got tattoos, I spent all my money going to Europe.
I dyed my hair, I smoked cigarettes behind my college block.
I missed classes because my inner tein now I can see,
(30:17):
really missed out and she was trying to make up
for lost time. Slowly, as I got older, I obviously
have begun to settle down and I came to terms
with what was really at the root of this behavior
that seemed so very contradictory to the version of myself,
you know, twelve even six months before. And the first
(30:38):
step to coming to terms with that was where I
noticing where I hurt, what was I afraid of that
was causing this behavior, Because not all of it was bad,
as we'll talk about in a second. You know, contained
rebellion is actually one really valuable way to get in
touch with your inner tain. But really, you know, what
was I fighting? What was at that core, and it
(31:01):
was this very foundational insecurity. I wanted to belong, I
wanted to be liked. I never felt like I was
meant to be somewhere, and I never really gave myself
permission to make mistakes, and so all of that pain
and suppression had bubbled to the surface. I think if
you want to heal your entertain you have to be
(31:22):
able to identify or when they have control or are
reacting to this situation. I want to return to those
indicators from before, so things like being highly emotionally reactive,
angry outbursts, self sabotaging, withdrawing, replicating early romantic experiences, and regression.
(31:45):
I Also, I think part of that is under self
sabotaging behaviors is things like overspending and things like procrastination.
So let's kind of look at overspending as an example.
Money is something that we all struggle with. Would say,
I think our relationship to spending is highly influenced by
(32:05):
how money was approached in our adolescence and within our
family system. It's a very unique in a teen experience
to worry about money because I think we only really
become conscious of its value in those later years. So
if your family always struggle with money, when you kind
of begin to make your own income, you might find
(32:27):
that it's really hard to not spend without thinking kind
of as a way to fulfill material needs that you
never felt you got to experience at a younger age.
And adulthood is expensive, so you know, spending money on
your rent or to fix your car, or for healthcare.
(32:48):
That is not what I would call overspending. It's the
money we put towards our wants rather than our needs.
So if you find that you have a tendency to
overspend when you're stress or when you're lonely, or you
feel out of control, maybe that's urinity. In that moment,
you have to recognize this version of yourself is kind
(33:10):
of asking you to recognize them, is asking you to
look at them face on and really trying to assert
their independence and authority, kind of at the detriment of
your adult sense of responsibility. Now, the crucial tip here
is to not fully suppress this behavior. We know from
psychological research that suppressing certain urges is about as effective
(33:36):
as complete avoidance or abstinence. It may feel effective in
the short term, but over time you cannot rely on
willpower alone. That behavior of feeling or instinct is going
to feel more taboo and therefore a lot more attractive,
and I guess you'll relapse, you'll feel shame, you'll spend more,
(33:56):
and you're back in the toxic cycle with your kind
of wounded teen at the wheel. So you need to
find an outlet and give yourself permission to actually connect
with that need, acknowledge where it's coming from and why,
and then treat it like a welcome visitor. For example,
(34:17):
budgeting for free spend money that you can spend on
whatever you want within limits. Anger is another example. Often
when our wounded teen is kind of speaking up, it's
through things like rage or outbursts or tantrums, and it's
possibly caused by us feeling the need to suppress this
feeling for quite a while. And if we look at
(34:39):
the origins, it may have been that as a child,
you weren't really given permission to feel emotions intensely, so
as an adult you don't have the same level of
self control that others may have. It feels nice to
be angry, it's highly satisfying, but you need to channel
that in a product active way to satisfy both your
(35:01):
inneriteen's needs and your adult needs as well. So go
to a rage room. I did one of those the
other day. It was honestly so fun. You can go
to a boxing class, or better yet, go to a
nice secluded spot out in nature and just scream or
dance intensely in your room headphones on Blink one eighty two.
(35:21):
Some Fearless by Taylor Swift, classic teenage angst albums, and
let out all of that steam. Emotions like rage and anger,
they are stored in the body. This study conducted in
twenty sixteen. It was published in the Oxford Academic. It
found that anger can create muscle tension and automatic arousal
(35:42):
in certain areas of the brain. So giving this feeling
of physical expression will stop you from doing so inappropriately.
And it feels so nice to give yourself permission to
actually feel, rather than scolding your enterteen, as you know
was often done by your parents or by teachers. Do
(36:03):
you know, express that in a productive way. And that's
also really important because a lot of researchers have concluded
that when we store anger and then we let it
out through lashing out or drinking or other things like that,
this just creates addictive behaviors. So give in and let
go in a way that is emotionally fulfilling. And when
(36:23):
you catch yourself governed by your wounded in a teen,
it's important to not believe everything that they're telling you.
You know, you don't want to feed into those beliefs
that you'll never be loved or accepted or happy. Positively
reaffirm why all of that isn't true. Speaking to them
as if they are a separate person, is if they
(36:44):
you know that version of you, that angry, you know,
depressed teenager is sitting in front of you right now,
and then try to switch back to your adult self,
focus on the life you've now created for yourself, knowing
you will be okay, and comfort them that foresight. There's
one final method here that I really want to discuss.
(37:05):
So I discovered this technique through this podcast called the
Adult Chair Podcast by Michelle Chalfan. Now, when I say
this method has absolutely changed my life, I'm being dead serious.
And in all of my courses in psychology studies, I
really i'd never heard of this before. So what this
(37:26):
method asks you to do is to use three chairs
to represent or symbolize you're in a child, you're in
a teen, and your current self your adult self. And
working with this model, we're going to understand how you
feel on the inside and what needs to be healed,
what might be damaged. So you sit with the three chairs,
(37:48):
real or imagined, and you speak to each of these
versions of yourself. What stories would your teenage self tell you?
What was going on in that phase of life and
how did that feel. Literally monologue as if you were
that version of yourself writing your autobiography. I don't know.
This is kind of intimate and a bit vulnerable. But
(38:09):
the first time I did this, I also had my
old journals from when I was a teenager. If you've
got your old journals, you should really read through them
because it was so emotionally profound. I genuinely cried because
it felt so real and so honest and raw, and
it made me contemplate things that I hadn't for so long,
and remember things that I could see in my current behavior,
(38:31):
and take that load for them, you know, tell them
that everything is going to be okay, tell them about
the things they never would have expected, that it does
get better, that you're pushing through, and that you love
them now. I know when I talk about these techniques
some people find them quite strange, but I think what
the very simple psychology would tell you is that it
(38:53):
is your job to process how your memories and experiences
have shaped you out of that is, integrating them into
the current version of yourself, finding a place where these
experiences sit in your current reality. This is kind of
just one exercise that allows us to do that, and
it kind of lets us answer that deep question at
(39:16):
the very core of inner teen healing. What does this
version of myself need? What are they missing right now
that is causing them to react, and how can I
give them that? It's also valuable to know. I think,
much like in a child healing, healing you're inner teen
is a lifelong process, but one that gets easier. I
(39:36):
think some final reminders would be this, with anything that
happens in life, you need to choose to be gentle
with yourself self Punishment unfortunately, never works. It's really just
our ego punishing us or relieving a sense of guilt
that we don't know how to process. To make friends
with who you are, Your past self helped you get here,
(39:59):
whatever they want through whatever ways they were misbehaving or
were cringe. It's all still valuable. It's all part of
the journey, and part of that is three getting to
know yourself better. I think at the core of this
podcast is the idea that all of us could benefit
from some additional introspection and self awareness, and if part
(40:20):
of that is acknowledging your teenage wounds, then I really
think that's amazing. So I really hope that this episode
has benefited you. We talk so much about inner child
healing on this podcast. I think that our teenage selves
get a little bit neglected at times, which is not helpful,
as we have learned. So I'm hoping that this episode
has really allowed you to contemplate how this version of
(40:41):
you is showing up in your life and yeah, just
where you're at with that version of you? Did you
feel lonely, did you feel neglected? Did you feel angry
at the world? And have you really come to terms
with what that meant and how that's still impacting you.
So I'm so glad you've made it this far. As always,
(41:01):
if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to share
it with a friend or give us a five star
review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening. Right now,
I'm going to plug my Patreon here. If you like
this episode, for just one dollar a month, one dollar,
one dollar, you can help me make more of this show.
It's really just me here doing it all, writing the episodes,
(41:23):
doing the research, and I love it so much, but
there is a lot of work that goes behind it,
so I really appreciate the support and if you have
an episode suggestion, follow us at that Psychology Podcast on Instagram.
I love to hear what's going on in your lives
and you can see video content over there and just
be part of the community. So we will be back
next week with another episode. Thanks
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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