If you’ve listened to the podcast before today, you’ve probably heard snippets of my family’s struggles during our son’s adolescence.

Today, in our 10^th episode, I want to share an abbreviated version of our story.

How we went from parenting a “strong-willed” kid with ADHD and learning differences…to desperately fighting for his future…and finally arriving at a place of acceptance, peace, and hopefulness.

You’re listening to Speaking of Teens, a weekly show to help you better understand and parent your teen or tween. I’m Ann Coleman, and after surviving a couple of difficult years with my teenage son, I decided to make the leap from practicing law into the science of parenting teens and tweens. I want to make sure you have the skills I was sorely lacking.

When my husband and I married, he was divorced with 2 young kids, and I had babysat a total of 2 times in my life. I’d already decided I didn’t really want to have kids because I went through my entire adolescence with a younger brother who abused drugs, became an addict at an early age, put my parents through hell and died an addict just a few years ago. I saw what his behavior did to my parents and I’m not proud to say that I truly despised him for it.

In the back of my mind (or maybe the front), I just did not want to go through what they went through. But, after a few years of marriage I realized I did want kids with my sweet husband. And after finding out I would likely not be able to get pregnant, we immediately decided to adopt.

From the day we made that decision to the day we brought our baby boy home from the hospital was exactly 21 weeks - of excitement, anticipation, and fear that the birth mother might change her mind. And I really thought since I didn’t have to be pregnant and sick for 9 months, this new baby thing was going to be a breeze.

I walked in to that hospital on December 16^th 2000, in my powder blue twin set from Ann Taylor and collected the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life and took him home with me. Within hours of bringing our son from the hospital, any fantasy I had about this being easy, had vanished. My baby boy was a crier, not a sleeper.

He was beautiful and happy, but he was also strong-willed from day 1. I remember him screaming at me when I took the bottle out of his mouth to burp him!

As a toddler, he was very active - curious about everything, wanted to do everything, all the time. He could also throw some major tantrums when he was frustrated, during transitions or when plans changed suddenly.

And by the time he could talk, he was verbalizing what we thought might be anxiety (he would say he didn’t feel good and when I’d ask where, he’d say “tummy-throat”). I took him to the pediatrician, a gastroenterologist, allergist, and no one could find a physiological or medical reason he would be saying that. So, a friend, who also has anxiety, suggested maybe he’s describing that feeling you get in your chest and throat and tummy when you’re anxious; ”tummy, throat”. And that made sense. It certainly made sense to me because I have anxiety myself and I have that feeling all the time.

But he didn’t say it all the time. And when he did say it, he wasn’t pitching a fit or having a tantrum – he was quiet. So, I never associated his possible anxiety with his intense emotional behavior. He was sensitive about all creatures – ants, worms, and certainly other kids. He was such a deep thinker even when he was little. And he surprised us constantly with things he knew that we just couldn’t figure out how he knew (he wasn’t Googling it – this was the early 2000s and we didn’t even have smart phones!)

We did, however, suspect he had ADHD and in elementary school he was officially diagnosed…not only with ADHD but with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and slow processing speed (although they confirmed as we suspected, that he had a superior IQ which made it especially frustrating for him – que more anxiety).

I bought every book, read every blog, and was totally consumed with trying to help him through school – but really had no clue how to handle the anxiety (which he’d still not been officially diagnosed with) other than doctors were advising medication which we flatly refused.

We already had ongoing medication issues (ADHD meds make anxiety worse!). He complained about his tummy-throat even more. He never got in trouble at school other than forgetting to turn in homework. As a matter of fact, teachers at his “academically challenging” private Episcopal school couldn’t get him to participate in class. They expressed concern that he was depressed or sad. Well, yeah, having anxiety, ADHD, not being able to read well or write where teachers can read it and not being able to do “speed math” even though you tested at the top of the class in math, and receiving constant zeros for forgetting to turn in homework - that can be pretty depressing for a kid!

At the end of 8^th grade, we took him out of the private school he’d attended since kindergarten, because as a private school, they were just not in the business of providing accommodations or frankly, putting up with anyone who colored a little outside the lines. With his consent and buy-in, we enrolled him in public school – he’d attended with kids he knew from the neighborhood and Little League.

We got him an IEP plan, and he was in a one-hour class each day where he and other kids were helped with homework, got extra time for tests, and caught up on classwork. That freshman year was great. He’d decided he didn’t want to play sports when he changed schools and I got that – it was a much larger school and I knew his anxiety was playing a role in that decision so, not knowing any better, we didn’t push it. In hindsight, that was a real mistake.

One of his new neighborhood friends had a basketball court in his backyard, and several of the boys would go down there and play basketball every day after school. And towards the end of that freshman year, we discovered he had been smoking weed with these after school friends all year…even though we checked up on them every day, several times in the afternoons, to make sure they were actually playing basketball. We just didn’t realize how good they could be at hiding this little secret until it was too late.

And let me just say, that even if you’ve talked to your kids since they were little (like I did) about drugs and the danger of drugs and how it messes up your life and has even messed up the lives of close family members…don’t assume for a minute they won’t try it. My son was determined to never smoke cigarettes, let alone weed. He was adamant about it. I know now, after having studied adolescent neurobiology and behavior - that doesn’t mean a lot. The pull of trying new and different things and the reward the brain gets when doing it with other kids their age, overpowers some of the most disciplined and determined kids.

And with additional factors like a genetic predisposition for addiction in his birth family, ADHD, anxiety, probably some low self-esteem and maybe even a little underlying depression, he was self-medicating like crazy. When I discovered he’d been smoking weed, I felt like my world was crashing down around me. I can’t even express my devastation…and I know that sounds dramatic but it’s the truth.

You can listen to episode #1 to hear more about how I panicked, went overboard, and put my foot down  to control him – and how that totally backfired. But to sum it up, I subconsciously saw my drug-addicted little brother in him, and I wasn’t having it. I brought the hammer down, tried to make darn sure he was not going to smoke weed. And I’ll have to say, his 10^th grade year was not horrible. He had a steady girlfriend and spent a lot of time with her and managed to hide his smoking weed for the most part. But at the end of 10^th grade, his girlfriend moved out of the country, and he was devastated. His anxiety escalated and he became extremely depressed. Not long after that he and his best friend down the street with the basketball court in the backyard got into a physical fight, which had never happened before with my son. Well, that didn’t sit well with all the boys in this friend group that my son was the newest member of. They began harassing him online, in texts, even driving by the house and yelling out their car windows. They totally shunned him.

He had no girlfriend and now no guy friends. He felt rejected, sad, hopeless…And he just came totally unglued. He was talking about “not wanting to be here anymore”, a lot. He threatened running away - would leave the house on foot and walk the neighborhood. He was physically ill a lot. His stomach ached, he threw up all the time, and he was sleeping too much during the day and couldn’t sleep at night. He was also angry all the time, everything we said, set him off. That summer between 10^th and 11^th grade was hell.

My anxiety was over the top. And my husband and I had never really agreed on everything regarding parenting, but now we were constantly fighting. We disagreed and accused the other of doing the wrong thing. We tried to keep it from him, but it was impossible for him not to feel it. Our home felt like it was on the verge of exploding every second of every day.

I’d been trying to get him in to see a psychologist, which, you may know, takes forever. He was already seeing a psychiatrist who was treated his ADHD. Finally, just a couple of days before he was to start 11^th grade, we got in for an evaluation. He was, of course, diagnosed with generalized anxiety and major depressive disorder. More medication.

And when school started a couple of days later, he woke up throwing up and refused to go. He really couldn’t go. He missed the first several days of 11^th grade. He knew when he went, he’d be harassed, have no one to sit with in the lunch room, have no one to talk to in class. Who could blame him, really?

So, instead of making him go, we let him stay home. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t force him to face that. The things he was saying about not feeling “normal” just broke my heart. But after a few days, we finally did manage to get him to go. And it was as bad as he thought.

So, he immediately started hanging out with a kid he knew from his educational support class. Bad news. Of course, I can’t totally blame it on this kid, but under the circumstances, he was the catalyst that brought my son even further down the road with drugs, unsavory people and even violence. He ended up being mugged at gunpoint at least a couple of times, was around people dealing – at least in weed – stealing – and we found out later he had moved up to experimenting with other drugs.

My husband and I were at the end of our rope. My husband is much more passive and less emotional than I am so while he did more of the “calming down” I did more of the arguing, nagging, begging, lecturing, threatening. And my relationship with both my son and my husband was coming apart at the seams.

By this time, I had no empathy for my son…all I could see was my brother…ruining his life, turning into an addict, eventually going to prison or worse. But I didn’t actually realize at the time the connection between my thoughts, emotions, and behavior. And, as I know now, my over-the-top reactions and controlling behavior were having the exact opposite effect on my son – he was getting worse, not better.

Then about 2 months into 11^th grade, he and this new friend walked out of the school to the parking lot and were stopped coming back in, their backpacks were searched, and they discovered a small amount of weed in the bottom of my son’s backpack. He was nearly expelled. He was suspended and forced to go to “alternative school” down the street for 45 days, which was kind of a blessing because he was away from this other kid, and we managed to keep him away. He was also “arrested” for simple possession – not handcuffed and taken away but ticketed and put into a juvenile diversion program, including lots of meetings, jail visits, a few essays, and a drug program.

We were hopeful that maybe the arrest, removal from school, the program would help turn things around but, again, I know now, these exclusionary and tough-love tactics do not work, it just made it worse. By now his anxiety and depression were completely off the charts. We could barely talk to him. He was angry more than he wasn’t - everything was an argument, every word said by anyone, led to a blow up. And his tantrums were now full-blown rages – throwing, slamming, breaking things, screaming at us, foul language…it was like he hated us and that we’d ruined his life. But we could never figure out if this behavior was a result of drugs he was using, the anxiety, the depression, his ADHD, medicine side effects - we were clueless. I didn’t even want to be home alone with him because my anxiety was so bad, I just couldn’t take it. I would call my husband and have him run home at the first inkling of trouble. It was intolerable.

By now, I felt like the whole world, including friends and family, saw me as an unfit mother, judged me and my son. I felt like he hated me, that my husband blamed me, and that everything was crashing in on us. We were seeing a family therapist by now, to try to get a handle on what was going on with him – to try and figure out how to get through to him to turn things around. But it was all too “surface-level”. We never got to the heart of the matter and my husband, and I were still so clueless as to why he was acting the way he was acting and was so angry and irrational. He said he wanted to feel better, to feel “normal”, yet he refused to go to individual counseling or drug counseling. So, we did.

We met with a counselor who’d been through a similar thing with her own son. She gave us hope but she also made it clear that if he were not willing to go to counseling, and kept acting out the way he was, that he needed intensive inpatient treatment to get the help he needed for his mental health issues and the substance use. I can tell you that we really didn’t want to hear that.

But after a few more weeks with his behavior continuing to spiral out of control, his mental health going downhill and him going back and forth between begging for help and telling us to leave him alone and having these incidences of total off-the-hinges rage, both this counselor and his psychiatrist threw up their hands and said they didn’t know what else to suggest other than inpatient treatment (that meant a hospital or a residential treatment center). We knew we’d run out of options, but this was drastic. We were terrified of doing it and terrified that if we didn’t, we could lose him forever. Within days, he really made the decision for us.

It was likely me that said something to him that made him throw the chair, the golf bag full of clubs, the X-box controller and flip over the free-standing island in the kitchen with a 6-inch pine butcher block on top. So, that was it. Through tears, my husband told me to dial 911.

We’d been told we either had to get him to the ER ourselves or call the police and tell  them he was basically either threatening to hurt himself or someone else so they would get the ambulance there to take him to the ER. He would have never gone with us to the ER with us in that state of mind, so this was the only way. And after getting him to the ER, we then had to convince the clinicians there that he was a “danger to himself or others” so they would admit him to an adolescent psychiatric hospital. They did.

And because of the shortage of psychiatric beds for adolescents in our area, he ended up in a hospital and hour and a half from home. Unfortunately, during his brief 5-day stay, a kid who was apparently more homicidal than suicidal tried to kill him by choking him – the nurses couldn’t pull him off until my son had completely passed out.  So, he left there probably worse than he went in. Yet another notch in my belt as “mom of the year”. And we were just getting started - the hospital is just meant to stabilize.

Based on the counselor’s recommendation, he would need to go straight from the hospital to a residential treatment center where he would stay for weeks or months - he needed much more than stabilization. I searched the entire time he was in the hospital for a residential treatment center that accepted our insurance and focused on mental health as much as substance misuse. And by the time he was discharged, I’d found a place, in California, but it would be another 2 weeks before they had an opening. During that time, we tried talking him into going voluntarily but he wouldn’t commit, and we knew we’d never get him on a plane, with a layover, all the way to California by ourselves without his buy-in.

Once again, without other options we had to do something drastic. We had him transported to the treatment center in California, without his consent. The kids call it being “gooned”. They show up at your house before daybreak, you wake your kid up, tell him you love him, walk out of their room and in steps two total strangers to give them the bad news that they’re taking them (kicking and screaming if necessary) to some unknown location for more strangers to help them get better.

That was, without a doubt, the most excruciating pain I’ve ever felt - the hardest thing either my husband or I have ever had to do in our lives. But, if we hadn’t taken that step, the pain would have been much worse and much longer lasting. Of course, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t, once again, feel like the worst mother on earth (and to be honest, I still deal with that guilt). My husband and I cried for days. And when we eventually got to talk to him it was not a pleasant conversation, and it did nothing to ease our guilt. But we felt like he was in the best place possible to get the help he’d needed. He attended individual counseling, group therapy, experiential therapy, drug and alcohol counseling, even school. And he was evaluated and medicated and slowly accepted that he needed to make the best of it and work on himself.

We also attended weekly family therapy with him via Skype (this was 2018). And while I loved the counselor, I simply could not understand how he wanted me to communication with my son. Before our son would enter the office, he would give us a quick overview of where he was and how he was doing and counsel us on how to talk to him. It was an amazingly difficult situation because all our son was doing at first was complaining about being there, how awful it was and just being completely uncooperative.

I remember him saying something about “acknowledging his feelings” and “trying to connect with him” but to “maintain my boundaries” and to reiterate that he’s there to get better. I was completely lost – I didn’t even understand what he meant by “acknowledge his feelings”. Instead, I was apologizing and explaining why the people there were doing what they were doing, trying to convince him he shouldn’t feel that way, trying to make him feel better, telling him everything was going to be fine. Do you see the problem yet? I certainly didn’t. I felt guilty and horrible that he was there - I wanted him to be okay. I didn’t want him to be upset or anxious or angry or hate me. His discomfort made me so uncomfortable! So, I think the family counselor finally got frustrated trying to get through to me that he told me I needed to go buy a copy of No Drama Discipline (a book by Dr. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson) and read Chapter 4. (don’t worry, I’ll link to it in the show notes). Well, I ran out immediately after the session, bought the book and began reading Chapter 4, as I always do, with a colored pen and highlighter in hand, and well you can see a few photos in the show notes from my book. I highlighted and made notes as quickly as I could read. And as it sunk in, I literally started to cry. The book was written for parents of young kids, and I was just that minute realizing how wrong I’d gotten it for years.

I never instinctively acknowledged how he felt when he was frustrated, angry, anxious, or depressed…instead, I just tried to fix it, or make him feel better, distract him, or walk away until he calmed down, or I just told him to calm down. And when he got older and still had a hard time managing negative emotions, I let my own emotions rule my reactions to him - my own fears and anxiety. Especially when he started smoking weed and experimenting with other drugs, my fear of not being strict enough, of him turning out like my brother, completely overtook me. My fears caused me to be so controlling with him that it drove him in the opposite direction.

So, I read this chapter 4 and then started at the beginning of the book and read it all the way through in one sitting. It finally clicked with me, how my thoughts and emotions and his thoughts and emotions were driving our out-of-control behavior. How neither of us were aware of what we were feeling or what the other person was feeling and certainly neither of us could manage our emotions and behavior. I just couldn’t believe how much sense it made now…how clear I could suddenly see this whole emotions thing! I’ll come back to this in a minute.

When it was time, a couple of months later to retrieve our son from residential treatment, my husband and I made a pretty radical decision. We didn’t want to take him back to our home in South Carolina, where all the negative behavior, negative influences, trauma, and bad memories from the past couple of years would be right there waiting for him. So, we decided to stay with my elderly mother in Alabama. She was not doing great living alone anyway and was excited for us to be there. We didn’t have a specific long-term plan; we just knew he needed to be in a different environment until we could see how he was doing and start healing as a family. It was an opportunity to solidify the skills all of us had been learning in counseling and for my husband and I to try out the new emotional skills we learned in this book. Really, my husband already had most of these skills, it was me that needed the practice becoming aware of my own emotions, regulating those emotions to stay calm.

It was so hard for a while because it was just so foreign to me. It was a major mind shift. I was accepting that I had been incorrect in my approach with him - that I had allowed my own backstory to cloud my responses and take my parenting off track. It was a big pill to swallow. And I literally had to refer to this book over and over to remind myself of what I should be working on, and the reasoning behind it. But I wanted a better relationship with my son. I wanted his anxiety to diminish. I wanted my anxiety to diminish. I wanted our interactions to be calmer and more productive. I wanted him to learn to recognize and express his emotions and to feel that someone was actually listening, so he wouldn’t have to act out in anger to feel heard and I didn’t want him to feel like he had to self-medicate.

So, I learned to channel my empathy for him in a different way rather than trying to make everything okay, I learned to accept that he had these really intense emotions that he was unable to recognize and articulate - that he needed me to help him understand what it was he was feeling – to put a label on it – that was the only way he would be able to calm down.

I learned to let go of the thoughts that “he should be able to handle this”, “he should be able to manage his emotions”, “he should be able to hear the word ‘no’ and be okay with it”. I learned to really listen to him, to become curious about why he would do or say certain things rather than making assumptions. I learned to really try to get into his head and understand the emotion behind his behavior. I learned to recognize my own emotions, in the moment - that fear that had always caused me to react immediately with lectures, arguing, yelling, punishments and general control. I learned to set see it for what it was and let it go. I finally learned to parent the son I had right there in that moment without the past or the future entering into it.

Even in the  beginning, with my clumsy attempts, I could see the difference it made with both of us. Gradually, I could see major changes in his demeanor, his attitude, his overall outlook. We still had our moments in that first handful of months in Alabama. When he got frustrated or angry, he still threw up our “gooning him to California” and bringing him to Alabama, away from his girlfriend and everything he knew. But over the next year, with visits from his girlfriend and meeting a few people in Alabama, we could see him releasing a lot of that anger. His anxiety had eased up (back down to the usual amount he’d always had) and he was smiling a lot more, laughing and enjoying himself, we were finally seeing our sweet, curious, passionate, son again. We were all doing so much better. It was a positive, loving and much calmer environment.

As soon as I started seeing our family transforming, I had this overpowering sense of responsibility to help other families understand more about parenting their teens and how to avoid the mistakes I’d made. So, I continued to read and study (emotional intelligence, emotions theory and emotion coaching, the adolescent brain – neurobiology and neuropsychology). I read scores of scientific journal articles and studies, books by world-renowned experts, kept meticulous notes, began writing and adding citations. For almost 3 years I continued this course of self-study.

And in the meantime, our son finished high school online and on time in 2019 and continued counseling in Alabama while we practiced being a whole family again.

I was still hopeful he would go to college (as he’d planned since he was little). I’d researched colleges and universities that had programs to help students with learning and organizational issues and had decided he could go to community college near us in Alabama until he had the grades and test scores to get in. I was ready to move mountains to make it happen. I was truly in denial. He’d hated school – or at least he hated reading, writing, and doing homework and studying for tests. ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, slow processing speed - it all made him feel “less than” and the anxiety about all of it had soured his entire school experience from elementary school on.

So, instead of forcing the issue, we acknowledged his negative feelings about school and listened when he told us what he really wanted to do. What he was really feeling drawn to do was to move to Colorado and be a snowboard instructor. I know, I had the same reaction at first. But he’s been on the snow since he was 2 years old, and he’s actually said for several years that he wanted to be a professional snowboarder. And we decided, after all he’s been through, after all the progress he’s made, we decided to support his decision. So, at 19, a year after he came home from treatment, he enrolled in Snow Trainers Snowboard Instructor Training at Copper Mountain Colorado.

By then his anxiety was much better and we thought this would be a great thing for him to meet new people with the same interests, test the waters of independence, and do what he loved. At the very least, it would be a good gap year sort of thing (I was still telling myself). The course started in late January 2020 and would wrap up in April and he’d have his level 1 and 2 certification to teach snowboarding anywhere in the world.

A few weeks in, he broke his knee, but he stayed in the condo with all the friends from Snow Trainers, and then just weeks after that, well, we all know what happened in March of 2020. So, back to Alabama and another year of hanging out together, practicing our new skills, doing teletherapy and physical therapy. And in January 2021, he went back to finish up the course and has been there ever since.

Just like everything else I’ve learned over the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve finally gotten to a point where I accept and support my son as the unique, loving, brilliant, opinionated, and passionate human being he is.

He still has his moments of anxiety; he still calls me when he needs me to listen and guide him through it. But he’s not on any medication at all (he was once on meds for anxiety, depression, PTSD, nightmares, to sleep, ADHD…it was crazy). Now, he is 21, living in Colorado, and working at Copper Mountain – at the Woodward Barn, this crazy indoor action sports training center. He has a ton of great friends, lives in a beautiful (and clean) condo in Silverthorne with his girlfriend and 2 other friends, has met people from all over the world, spends every waking hour either working his dream job, snowboarding, hiking, trail riding, snowmobiling…he eats clean and organic, has taught himself to prepare gourmet meals…he’s absolutely loving life.

And for someone who claims to hate “reading and studying books” he studies and reads online constantly. He’s a deep thinker and is very well read. He invests his money, has major entrepreneurial ambitions, and is planning to start a business in his 20s.

He no longer experiments with drugs. He was never really a drinker and even at 21 doesn’t go to bars and only occasionally has a beer!

Now, in full disclosure, he does still like to smoke weed. But he’s no longer obsessed with it or enamored by it and doesn’t smoke anywhere near the same amount (yes, we talk about it, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes). And the big difference is that he’s now 21, he lives where it’s legal, it doesn’t interfere with his life, work, or relationships. He knows where he’s been and he’s not going back.

I am so proud of him. Proud of the person he’s always been and of the man he’s becoming.

And here’s what I want you to know: becoming more emotionally aware, learning to regulate my own emotions, and figuring out how to communicate with my son in a way that improved his emotional intelligence - changed our world.

I believe residential treatment was the catalyst – it was the needed “shock to the system”, for him and for us. It was the drastic change of environment and the mirror held up to him that allowed him to actually see where he was. It was the counseling and nurturing there that allowed him to see the direction he could go - that planted the seeds that slowly blossomed over time as he continued counseling after leaving there. It was the direction we received there that led to our learning to change our behavior. Then bringing him to Alabama and keeping him away from the negatives in South Carolina gave us the space we all needed for everything to coalesce.

If you have teenager, you may be going through a tiny taste of what we went through, or you could be going through much worse. But no matter the struggle with your teen - how insignificant or serious it may be, the very foundation of your relationship and of their mental health and wellbeing, depends on your understanding their emotional world, on your ability to keep your own emotions in check, to parent with them empathy and respect, and to firmly but kindly enforce the boundaries they require.

If you want to learn more about some of the skills I mentioned in this episode, please go to neurogility.com/herewego to find all of our free parenting guides and e-books.

 

Speaking of Teens is the official podcast of neurogility.com, an organization I started to educate other moms and adolescents about emotional intelligence.

You can go to neurogility.com/10 for this episode’s show notes and transcript.

Thank you SO much for listening to our family’s story in this 10^th episode of Speaking of Teens.

My goal was to give you hope that even if your teen is having a hard time, things can and usually do get better. You can get through it.

Please share this episode with a friend who may really need that message and come back for new episodes every Tuesday.

If you have any questions for me, have an idea for a future show or suggestions for how to improve the podcast, please reach out to me at acoleman@neurogility.com – I’d really love to hear from you.

Follow me @neurogility on Instagram and Facebook!

And I’ll see you back here next week!