Your Teenager Won't Talk to You. That's Not the Problem.

It is late and you are on your phone, and she is asleep at the other end of the hall behind a door that has been shut since March.

You have tried asking. You have tried not asking. You have tried the drive, because somebody told you they talk in the car. You have been advised to give her space by people who do not have to listen to that silence.

I want to start somewhere other than where you expect.

The silence is not the illness

A sixteen year old who will not talk to her mother is doing something close to her job.

I do not offer that as a comfort. I mean it clinically. Adolescence is the period in which a person works out that they have an interior life which is theirs alone, and the discovery is thrilling and the first thing they do with it is close the door.

So the shut door on its own tells me very little. What tells me something is what is behind it. Has she stopped seeing the two friends she actually likes. Is she sleeping at odd hours or not at all. Has the work quietly fallen off. Is there a new flatness that is different in kind from ordinary teenage irritation with you.

Those are the signals. The silence by itself is weather.

The person I can help fastest is usually you

Here is the part that surprises parents, and it is the reason I am writing this to you rather than to her.

A family came to me for their teenager. We spent the first session on the root of her anxiety and made real progress on it. But the mother said afterward that she had benefited from those sessions personally and profoundly, and that mattered a good deal. It was part of why the daughter got better.

I am not saying you caused it. Let me be exact, because this is the sentence parents brace for and it is not the one I am making.

I am saying that you are the one who is available. You are in the house. You are the emotional climate she is living inside seven days a week, and I have you in the room for an hour, willing, motivated, and awake at midnight reading about it. She is asleep and would rather be anywhere else.

Working with the person who is actually reachable is frequently the fastest route in.

A family is a system with one thermostat, and it is almost never the adolescent. Change what the house feels like at seven in the evening and you have changed something in a person who will never agree to discuss it.

What usually changes at home

Small things, and they are not the ones parents expect.

Most often it is the volume of asking. A frightened parent asks constantly, because asking relieves the parent’s anxiety for about four minutes. To the adolescent, each question is a small demand for reassurance that she does not have the resources to supply, so she gives less, so you ask more.

Breaking that loop is often the first thing I work on, and it is a good deal harder than it sounds, because I am asking a worried mother to do less of the one thing that makes her feel briefly better.

The other common change is that the parents stop presenting a united front on everything, which they were doing out of good intentions, and which the child experiences as having nobody to go to.

What I understood about one mother

She told me her daughter never talked to her. Then in the next quarter hour she recounted four conversations they had had that week, in detail, and each one had ended with her giving advice.

I did not tell her she talked too much. She would have heard that as an accusation, gone home ashamed, and tried harder at the very thing that was not working.

I asked her instead what her daughter would say if she knew nothing was going to be offered back. Not silence as a technique. Genuine curiosity with nothing attached to it.

She used the word offer herself, a few minutes earlier, about wanting to offer her daughter something. I borrowed it deliberately, because the whole difficulty was living inside that word and she had already put it on the table.

She came back a fortnight later and said her daughter had talked for forty minutes in the kitchen.

What the first session looks like

I will usually want to meet the whole family once, and then your teenager on her own, and then you on your own. Adolescents almost always say more in the third meeting than the first, and I tell them at the outset what I will and will not repeat.

I will ask for the specifics of what has already been attempted, because the list is long by now and none of it needs handing back to you as advice.

And there is a reasonable chance that at some point I will suggest a few sessions for you. I will say so rather than manoeuvre you into it. That is simply where the leverage tends to be.

An Invitation

If you have been standing outside that door for a few months, you do not need to arrive with a plan or a diagnosis or the right words.

Come in with the worry. You are the one who is awake, and that turns out to be the useful thing about you.