Yes, Adolescents Do Bad Things—And Why That’s Okay
Jul 19, 2023- In the early 2000’s when the No Child Left Behind Act was beginning to take its terrible hold on public education, I was teaching Language Arts and Social Studies to 12 and 13-year-olds. This particular year, during the summer break when the standardized assessments were being scored, I heard that one of the students in their writing assessment essay had indicated that they hated one of their teachers and wanted to kill the teacher.
Now, to be fair, the then-unimaginable horror of Columbine was close, present, and terrifying. So I’ll give the school district some credit and the teacher they threatened. However, this student was receiving special education services for behavioral issues—and, in my experience, this always indicates underlying and unaddressed trauma. Those assessing the essays reported the threat to the school district, the school district reported it to the teacher, the teacher filed a restraining order, and the child was relocated to another school.
Teens will act out.
Teenagers don’t act out because they are bad. They act out because:
they may have experienced trauma;
their brains aren’t fully matured;
emotion regulation often isn’t possible at this stage;
peer pressure is a powerful instigator;
they may not be allowed to appropriately express their anger;
they are navigating an invalidating, disempowering environment;
there isn’t enough scaffolding or companioning as they adolesce;
and a dozen other possible reasons.
Adolescents think, feel, and do bad things. Let’s just assume right out the gate that this is a given. It is to be expected. For this student, this experience most likely just added trauma to trauma.
I’m not condoning it, excusing it, or giving permission for it. I’m saying—it’s going to happen no matter what we do to prevent it.
Because they are human.
Because they are adolescents.
Because there are shadows lurking in the imagination and psyche of every single person who walks this planet and has ever walked this planet.
One of the most valuable lessons I learned and firmly integrated into my work and worldview as a Jungian psychotherapist is that we ignore or dismiss these shadows within us at great risk. Conversely, there is tremendous value to be found in turning toward these shadows/burdened parts with compassion and curiosity. This is the core efficacy of the Internal Family Systems model.
So what is our responsibility as adolescent service providers?
The answer is in the title of the role we have in the life of the teenager: our responsibility is to be in service to the adolescent. That is our ultimate and final responsibility. In the face of adolescents doing, thinking, feeling, and/or expressing bad things, the service provider has many effective tools and resources to draw upon. Here are four to start with.
Know the essential nature of Adolescence
To be in appropriate, effective service to the adolescent it is absolutely imperative that service providers understand the inherent and essential nature of Adolescence within the social and cultural contexts in which the child is adolescing.
In my experience, the world of Adolescence teems with monstrous images and feelings. It can be a dark place and time, frightening for the kids and for the adults in their lives. Transformative times are often like this, as many of the myths and hero tales show us.
Recognize the shadows within us
Do you, as an adult, look back on your teen years and shudder? At the choices you made, risks you took, people you hurt, times you just didn’t care about yourself or others? At the memories of those times when you weren’t the victim but the perpetrator?
I have heard stories from many clients of all ages who admit that they engaged in one or more of these activities during their adolescence:
stealing/shoplifting from stores, parents, teachers, and friends
verbally abusive towards others
being the “mean” one in the group
pornography addiction
sharing personal pornographic images
sneaking out of the house
intentionally or unintentionally seducing older people
substance abuse
threatening others with bodily harm
cheating
lying to teachers, parents, principals, employers
and the list goes on.
In clinical sessions, I also encounter Adolescent ‘perpetrator’ feelings and thoughts through dreams, art, or sandtray:
homicide
suicide
patricide
fratricide or sororicide (murder of brother or sister)
longing to abandon parents, family, friends
envious wishes to take away from others
dropping out of society altogether
violence against property
cannibalism
torture
anarchic destruction and chaos
Are my clients psychopaths? Sociopaths? Are my clients evil or bad? No. They are human. These thoughts, feelings, and images are fantasies. If you are a human being you will have thoughts and fantasies that will make you cringe in the light of day. Avoiding them leads nowhere good.
As adolescent service providers, we must always engage in our own internal work, withdrawing what we project onto our clients/students, and owning our shadows.
Be compassionately curious and validate
Internal Family Systems therapy has taught us that there are no bad parts. When we get compassionately curious with our kids after they’ve done something bad then we tend to either an internal wound or a reaction to that wound. More importantly, we teach the child how to do this work without creating more shame.
One of the most powerful ways to teach accountability is to help kids face what is shameful and guilt-provoking with compassion and understanding. To further shame the adolescent sets up the dynamics within that will lead to more reactive behavior, more shadowy material, and the child is left alone with all of it.
Validating our adolescents when they are bad is also one of the most potent responses to build respectful relationships, trust between us, and self-compassion in the child. These are almost 100% guaranteed preventive measures. I’ve seen it again and again and again. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it not work.
What a different outcome for the student in the situation I describe above if one of the staff members had been curious instead, asked questions not to correct but to connect, used that opportunity to teach the student how to effectively manage their anger and speak for the anger, and validated that anger—not the behavior. As it was, the student got yet one more message that they’re too much for the adults in their life. And yet again the service providers lost an opportunity to connect with a student who desperately needed connection.
To know the dark
In conclusion, Wendell Berry has a brilliant poem to wrap this up—
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
It is a reminder that when our teenagers are doing or saying bad things, when they go dark, something important is happening. We don’t have to be afraid or reactive. We have a wonderful opportunity to step into those places with them, with our Self-leadership, and both adult and child come out the other side with Courage and Wisdom in hand.
Photo by Francesca Emer