Some of my experiences with trying to help teens

I don't know how to really help these teenagers I talk to over the Internet. I know it helps them to have someone to listen to them. But that doesn't seem to be enough. It seems a little like listening to a prisoner or a slave without being able to free them. The laws regarding teens, slaves and prisoners are similar in some respects. For example, if a person had tried to help a slave gain his freedom in the USA, they could be arrested. It didn't matter how the slave was being treated. Slaves were not even allowed to testify in their own defense.

Depending on their age and where they happen to live, teens may also be denied any legal recognition in courts. It is as if adults don't believe anyone under a certain age has a mind or feelings of his or her own. I know how damaging this kind of thinking is to the individual children or teens, especially those who think more deeply at a younger age.

If a person tries to help a prisoner escape, they also can be put in jail. It doesn't matter if the prisoner is actually guilty or innocent -- Just like it doesn't matter if the teen is being emotionally abused or neglected at home. I have often said that many teens' freedom is being denied them as if they had been convicted of a crime they never committed. They just happened to be born in to the wrong family, state or country. Their freedom does not depend on their behavior, maturity or needs. It depends only on their age. A teen who would be legally free to leave some homes, is not free to do so in other locations, depending on where they happen to be born or to have been moved to by their parents, a move which can legally be made without their consent. It could quite easily happen that a parent who wanted to hang onto control of their teen a little longer could simply move to a location where the legal age for freedom is higher. In some places a teen can leave home at 14, in others it is 18, for example. And in some countries there are no such laws restricting a teen's freedom at all.

But if you are a teen who needs freedom and you live in a place where it is legally denied to you until a certain arbitrary age, there is virtually nothing you can do what you need for your emotional health and possibly your physical health. To me, this system can not be called fair and just. We have tried to make things fair, but trying to treat everyone equally, within categories at least, but many children and teens are suffering because of this. We are not all alike when it comes to our emotional needs. Some people need more freedom than others. Some are content to be told what to do, what to wear, what to study, how to behave, how to feel, what to believe and who they can associate with. For others, this is psychological torture. I am afraid those who make the laws have forgotten that children and teens are people, too.

If a person tries to help a child or teen escape to freedom and to an emotionally safe environment, they can be charged with helping a runaway. If they let the teen stay with them, they can also be charged with a crime of harboring a runaway. These laws are supposedly to protect children and teens. But what I have seen is they end up giving far too much power to the parents. Children who are being seriously physically abused are often helped by social services in most countries I have visited. But sexual and emotional abuse is much harder to help with for the simple reason there is no physical evidence. This is a huge flaw in the legal system. Studies have shown that emotional abuse can be more damaging than physical abuse. And from my experiences with teens I have seen how serious the affects of emotional abuse are. I am thinking of one case in particular, Steff of England. It is this case which has motivated me to write this article.

I have debated what to do with the information I have about Steff. I have debated whether to try again to report her parents to social services. I try not break the trust of the teens I talk to because often I am a last resort for them. They only start talking to me because they have no one else to talk to. Some need the anonymity of the Internet to be able to talk about what is happening to them. Usually they are simply afraid to report their own parents. They are afraid because their parents have threatened them and punished them in the past. They are afraid they won't be believed. They are afraid their families will be torn apart. They are afraid it will be too hard on their younger siblings.

In some cases though, they eventually tell me where they live. Then I have to decide when, if ever, to report what they are telling me. This is a huge burden on me. I know that if I do report their parents, the teen may stop talking to me. They may also deny that what they told me was true. The parents will also very likely do everything they can to stop the teen from talking to me. I have already encountered this on more than one occasion, including Steff's case. Steff's mother and father both threatened me, in fact.

Often, the teens I talk to depend on the Internet for their connections with others like them. If you are the only person in your school who is being sexually abused, yet you are afraid to tell anyone, it will be a great help to be able to talk to someone over the Internet who shares your problem and who therefore understands. You will feel less alone. Feeling alone is one of the major contributors to self-harm and suicide.

In some ways I understand why the school counselors like laws which requires them to report abuse. This way they don't have to think about things. They can just tell themselves they are doing their jobs. But some teens will not admit they are being abused. They would rather kill themselves. And many do before anyone knows what is going on. Others will lie to the school counselors or hide things from them. This is why I am opposed to the laws in some countries which require school counselors to break the students' confidentiality. Even if it is not legally required, some school counselors think they are helping the teen by calling the parents and telling them everything they teen had said, before the teen even gets home from school. This understandably causes deep resentment and mistrust. One of the main problems teens from dysfunctional families face is they have no one to trust, no one they can be totally honest with, including emotionally honest. If they go to the school counselor and that counselor betrays their trust, they often have no one else to turn to. Teens have told me on many occasions that they can't trust their school counselors not to tell their parents, even when the school counselors have promised not to.

So this brings me back to the question of how I can best help teens. And when do I betray their trust not to report their parents. I have only reported two teenagers' parents. In Steff's, the social services worker apparently did nothing. In another case they have simply been trying to put the teen on drugs rather than take any truly helpful action. A whole other problem is the wall of silence behind which mental health workers operate. The problems I have found in the social services and mental healthy system are so profound that I often feel totally overwhelmed by them. I sometimes feel completely incredulous at how these people -- who claim to be helping teens -- defend themselves, their employers and all the rules which are supposedly there to protect the "children." I put children in quotes because these young people I talk to are not "children." In fact, they are being treated like infants, not even treated with the respect a 6 year old needs. Decisions are being made about them without anyone even asking them how they feel about the decision. They are being treated as if they don't even exist except as physical bodies that are not behaving according to someone else's idea of what is "appropriate."

What frightens me the most is how effective the systems have become at crushing people's individuality. The teens I talk to are typically some of the most intelligent, sensitive, strong willed, rebellious, and defiant people in their schools or towns. They are the kind of people with the potential to become leaders. They are the kind of people who have the potential to challenged dysfunctional systems, destroy them and come up with something better. I believe they are the kind of people the world desperately needs right now. They talk to me because I understand and I care. But over the years now, I have seen them be worn down until there is little that remains of their former selves. They are people who were once idealistic and caring; Who questioned things, who saw through falseness and hypocrisy, who saw injustice and tried to speak out against it. But when they spoke out, they were shot down, invalidated, punished, mocked, ridiculed. They were attacked verbally, psychologically and often physically. Some withdraw. Some take up "safe" pastimes like poetry, art, photography, or reading or writing fiction. Others become resentful, hostile and defensive. They then learn how to hurt others without feeling their own pain, and therefore without feeling compassion for others. I am seeing this happen at ages as young as 14, 15, and 16. These are the kind of people I wrote about in my article on the dark side of emotional intelligence.

I believe the public needs to know about what is happening inside the homes, and schools, of the people I talk to. The public needs to know so it can make better decisions, better laws. I am not a big supporter of laws, but that is the way society has decided to try to improve things. I would rather see more education. So I will at least hope that some of what I write will get into the hands of a few people who want to improve society through knowledge, information and education. And by education I don't mean the kind of forced memorization and behavior control which takes place in most schools. Most of what is called education strikes me more as obedience training and behavior control through punishments and rewards. In my July 14 writing on my personal site I talk about the "merit" system at Silverbrook Middle School, in West Bend, Wisconsin, for example. Eventually I will clean up that bit of journal writing and move it to this site because I want more people around the world to know how people there are being trained.

I can't call it being "educated." To me, education would include truly explaining cause and effect about the most important things in life -- things like how emotionally incompetent and needy parents damage their children and teenagers, and what can be done to prevent such damage. I have coined a new term, by the way, EIPD: Emotionally Incompetent Parent Disorder. The drug companies could make another fortune if they could come up with a pill for that one.

I also wonder if it would help the teens I have lost contact with (or the parents/ legislators/ school counselors or romantic partners) if I started disclosing more of what I learned about their individual cases. Then people who know them can start to sort out what was true and what was not, given that some them have lied to me, and given that their parents can be expected to lie to defend themselves. I would also like to know what happens to these teens as they get older. I am afraid they are going to have a lot of problems, especially with their relationships. I expect that many will end up seeing psychologists, marriage counselors, divorce lawyers, etc. I wonder if some day it could be helpful to a psychologist to read what these teens wrote in their journals and what they said to me in emails and chats when they were still living under their parents' and teachers' rules. It could be interesting if a psychologist typed in a name and found something like this. Unfortunately, some of the teens have gotten defensive already and stopped talking to me for various reasons. Some have started to defend their parents, just as, I suppose, a prisoner of war subject to brainwashing, sometimes takes the side of their captors over time. (The case of Patty Hearst comes to mind. I wonder what really happened there.) This also reminds me of the 13 year old who claimed she never said anything critical of her mother when she was 11. I had showed her something I wrote just after she said it at the time and two years later she looked at me in disbelief, saying, "I never said that."

So in any case, I can't count on the teens or former teens, to ever tell the truth about what they said. But I think a lot of it is true and needs to be known. I would really like to keep helping the people that I once cared about, even though sometimes I have gotten so frustrated and hurt by them that I have at times become hurtful myself. I have sometimes felt used, in fact, and I don't want to accept being treated that way. I am afraid it will continue to happen if I don't stand up for myself. I really don't like hurting people or facing conflicts, but I also don't like feeling used and abused myself. Many people underestimate how hurtful a teenager has learned to be at such a young age. For some, when they find out you are truly sensitive and really care, they use this against you when it suits them. I have to remind myself that it is because they have been hurt that they lie and turn hurtful. But it still hurts me deeply when this happens. I need to find a way of getting "closure" myself on some of these cases. I don't really like to call them "cases," because I don't look at these people as "clients." I would rather call them my friends. But there is no word really that adequately describes our relationships. I have gotten emotionally close to several of the people I have met online.

People say I shouldn't get emotionally involved, but these teens need emotional involvement because it shows that someone cares. I don't think you can separate the caring from the emotional involvement. Especially not when the teens are so highly emotionally oriented, not only because of their age, but because they are, like me, both more emotional by nature and more emotionally sensitive due to having been emotionally abused.

So this is another of my rambling editorials. I hope that it has helped someone else besides me through my writing of it.

S. Hein
July 10, 2003