Family Conflict

Family Conflict with Teens and Young Adults:

• Patterns of interacting which interfere with connection, emotional honesty, collaboration, and healthy development in the relationship.

• Caused by ruptures in the relationship rooted in difficulty navigating strong emotions together.

• Leads to teens and young adults feeling isolated and disconnected from important adults in their lives, which in turn can intensify symptoms and self-destructive coping behaviors.

• Parents are often left feeling confused, hurt, and scared, which can turn into controlling or dismissing actions and deepen impairments in relationships.

• Cured by understanding the problematic patterns, learning new ways of expressing and connecting with emotional honesty, and supporting reparative emotional experiences to strengthen healthy relationships.

The connection between parents and their children are the root of every relationship thereafter. 

So, when teens and young adults are struggling with mood disorders, anxiety, eating disorders, and substance abuse, the effects are felt throughout the whole family.

But if parents and their children can connect, listen to each others’ feelings, and correct destructive interaction patterns, the turnaround in the family can be enormous. 

Healthy relationships between parents and their teen and young adult children are associated with countless indicators of mental health, including:

• lower anxiety and depression

• reduction in self-destructive 

• more honesty and flexibility to navigate changing roles as teens mature

• more effective problem-solving 

• better self-esteem and stronger sense-of-self

• healthier partner relationships in the future

• improved physical health

• less physical pain

• better immune functioning 

• better sleep

Why do these relationships have to be so difficult?!

The saying “kids aren’t born with manuals” holds a lot of truth, especially in the rapidly evolving landscape of the growing up on social media. 

Rising rates of youth anxiety and mood disorders make it hard to know how to navigate the quickly changing emotions of tweens, teens, and young adults.

Generational differences leave parents without the templates of their own childhood to guide parenting, models that are often wrought with unexplored ruptures and emotions themselves.

With conflicting advice out there about behavior management and various parenting styles, parents often feel overwhelmed, inadequate, and hopeless about bringing together the close family they have always wanted. 

Types/Examples of Parent-Child Difficulties: 

• Dismissive: teens and young adults avoid parents and parents feel the need to control, question, and punish 

• unable or unwilling to open up

• aloof, shutdown, walled off

• unable to feel close with others

• lonely, even if with others

• may avoid through substance use or running away

• Anxious/Insecure: teens and young adults may be perfectionistic and feel inadequate and parents feel overly responsible and worried   

• seeking reassurance

• seeking approval

• clinging

• expecting judgment/rejection

• Reactive: teens and parents respond with poorly regulated emotions leading to destructive acting out including self-harming behavior in teens and anger, punishment, and ultimatums from parents 

• outbursts

• fights/conflict/violence

• instability in relationships

Common associated diagnoses: 

• Parent-Child Relational Problem

• Major Depressive Disorder, with and without suicidal ideation

• Generalized Anxiety, Social Anxiety, or OCD

• Non-suicidal self-harming behaviors

• Substance Abuse Disorder

• Oppositional Defiance Disorder

• Grief and Loss

• Trauma and PTSD

• Personality Disorders including Borderline Personality Disorder

• Eating Disorders

• Sibling Relational Problem

• Relational Problem Unspecified

• Spouse or Partner Violence

• Child Affected by Parental Relationship Distress

• High Expressed Emotion Level Within Family

• Disruption of Family by Separation or Divorce

• Upbringing Away From Parents 

• Child/Partner Abuse/Neglect

So what can we do?

At EmotionFit, we utilize Attachment-Based Family Therapy, a brief evidenced-based model. ABFT has been shown to quickly address relationship ruptures in the family system, rebuilding secure and flexible attachments, and improving the symptoms of the teens and young adults as well as the quality of family relationships.

We begin by exploring the teen and young adults problems from a relational perspective and establish that addressing rifts to relationship is important to both the child and the parents.

There is then individual time spent with the teen/young adult to understand their perceptions and felt experience of the relationship. We then focus on skills to express these feelings with emotional regulation and vulnerability.

Separate sessions with the parents are held to understand their own childhoods—which highly inform how we parent—and build skills for responding with curiosity and a desire to connect. We also discuss strategies for parents sharing their feelings about and during the situations shared by their children with emotional regulation and vulnerability as well.

As we come together again, the child and parents, with the coaching of the therapist, share and understand the moments where their relationship encountered ruptures and practice the new ways of communicating and feeling to repair those ruptures.

Finally, with a secure connection and relationship back in place, the challenging behaviors or symptoms can be addressed through respectful boundaries within the family relationship. Family members can see each other as supports once again.

Parents don’t have to battle or fight to control their child with challenging behaviors.

Families don’t have live in fear of symptoms that don’t make sense or are worsening.

Teens and young adults don’t have to continue feeling as if they don’t belong in their families.

Contact a therapist today to rebuild the connections that your family deserves.