Becoming a teenager should mark a great milestone in your life. You have worked your way up in the ranks and have earned your stripes and are now well and truly on your way to becoming a young adult! Of course mum and dad will still be in the wings supporting you and offering the benefit of their experience (even if you believe you don’t need it).
You are developing and expanding your social network inside and out of school/college. You have a strong sense of the importance of identifying with your peers and being part of ‘the group’. It is also a time when issues surrounding your identity and body image come to the forefront. For some teens, whose self perception may have become distorted as a consequence of bullying or family breakdown, this means that they could be exposing themselves to the damaging physical effects from an eating disorder or even begin to self harm….just to cope or feel better.
As educational demands increase and family expectations grow, unwanted behaviours arising from disorders such as ADHD, OCD and ODD can cause real anxiety and even depression. Both academic performance and achievement can be severely impacted and can lead to being shunned by peers and excluded from social networks.
Home life can become a battle ground with conflict with parents becoming the norm rather than the exception. Communication begins to break down and anger and frustration just seem to makes things a hundred times worse.
For the younger teens or ‘inbetweenies’ (no longer a child and not quite an adult yet) as I like to think of them, it is a time of emotional imbalance and hormonal change and some manage this better than others and to varying degrees. I can help smooth the path of this transitional phase by equipping you with tools and techniques to conquer a negative self perception and to establish more helpful ‘self talk’. I can help you eradicate the negative beliefs and behaviours which enable you to ‘get in your own way’ and hold you back. You can easily learn NLP techniques to improve concentration and memory which are especially useful when approaching exam time. While anger is not a bad thing, I can help you manage this better and in a more constructive way so that you can learn to avoid conflict arising and improve personal interactions with others.