Have you ever sent your teenager to counseling and suddenly found yourself undermined by their advice? Well it’s more common than you think and we’ll talk about how that happens in this week’s podcast, The Therapist Says I Need to Back Off.

Here’s a common situation. Mom wants therapy for her 15 year old daughter Olive, and after getting a recommendation for a therapist who works with teens, sets up some appointments for her. It seems Olive is arguing and fighting with her parents about almost everything they want her to do.

Until recently, Olive was your basic good kid, going happily along with the structures and standards that Mom had in place. But over the past year, things have been changing and Olive has become most interested in hanging out with friends to the exclusion of almost everything else. She quit piano lessons and soccer and her A’s have dropped to B’s and C’s and always getting behind and needing to catch up, so understandably, Mom is concerned and wondering if Olive is depressed or just needs someone to talk to other than her parents.

After a few sessions the therapist realizes that while Olive’s behavior is not great, she’s now a teenager and wants to be her own person.

Olive spends her time in counseling complaining about Mom being controlling and expecting her to be the perfect child and she’s not a child anymore. The therapist decides to have some sessions with Mom and Olive together to work out their differences and it becomes apparent to the therapist that Mom is overinvolved and expects Olive to get straight A’s, adhere to an earlier curfew than her friends and remains upset that she quit piano and soccer.

The therapist comes to view Mom as controlling and unrealistic about teenagers. The therapist sees that Olive is at least going to school and doing most of her work and while she has experimented with cannabis, it isn’t abuse and Mom has to accept that her daughter is growing up.

So the therapist gets Mother and daughter to make a deal; Mother will lengthen curfew to the same as her friends’ and won’t bug her about schoolwork or chores, essentially back off. In return Olive will improve her schoolwork and do better, maybe not all A’s but do all her work and will do her chores on her own time, not Mom’s.

Mom agrees and guess what do you think happened? Olive sank like a stone. She started staying out past her new curfew, more or less quit doing her schoolwork, and forgot that there ever was such a thing as a chore. Well Mom, who sticks by her word, said very little about any of this to Olive but was extremely worried and hoped that the therapist knew what she was talking about. If she brought anything up to Olive, Olive unloaded on her, “I can catch up in school. You promised to let me do it my way.” “Why are you making such a big deal about 15 minutes?” The usual stuff. Clearly Olive felt empowered by the therapist’s advice to Mom and their agreement, an agreement that she was not mature enough to honor.

What was the therapist’s mistake here? She correctly observed that Mom was overinvolved and managing Olive and her responsibilities more than one normally would for a 15 year old. Olive was understandably unhappy about it and wanting more independence. Why was having Mom back off the wrong therapeutic advice?

The answer is because the therapist was seeing things in terms of cause and effect and did not see the reciprocal relationship between Mom’s behavior and Olive’s.

In other words, Mom’s tendency to overfunction and control was encouraged by Olive’s avoidance of responsible behavior. And Olive’s avoidance of responsible behavior was encouraged by Mom’s overfunctioning and control.

In order to help this teenager and her mother, it helps to understand how they got there. Olive had always been a social and somewhat scattered kid, maybe with ADHD-like characteristics. Mom has always been an organized person and provided a lot of the structure that Olive needed to stay on track. This worked reasonably well when Olive was a child but as Olive moved into her adolescent years she increasingly resisted Mom’s structure (control) and Mom, knowing that Olive wouldn’t manage her responsibilities without it, fought to keep her on top of her responsibilities. Hence, they developed a first class Control Battle.

For therapy to be successful, the therapist would have to address the unhealthy pattern, the Control Battle. The therapist had the right idea that Mom needed to be less in control of Olive’s responsibilities, but in order for Mom to back off, Olive needed to step up. The therapist could have helped Olive reframe her frustration with her mother from being a victim of Mom’s tendency to control, to her own tendency to avoid responsibilities. She could have helped Mom focus on helping Olive grow her ability to manage her responsibilities rather than trying to manage Olive. While adolescence is a time of increased youth independence, independence requires the skills to manage personal responsibilities and prepare for one’s future.

The moral of the story is to beware of any advice that undermines parental authority. Sure, help parents use their authority with greater skill. Help them focus on helping their youth grow and become more responsible. Help them shift responsibility for youth behavior from parent to youth. But in order for parents to take that step back, they need a sign that their youth is ready to step up.

Thanks for tuning in today listener and please, Take care of yourself, you need it, you deserve it, you’re worth it. Bye for now.

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