BLOG POST TAKEOVER featuring current troubled teenš
We have a special edition of our blog today! For the first time ever, weāre doing a BLOG POST TAKEOVER, where one of our clients writes this weekās blog post for us š
Iāve lived and worked with Addison in Spain for the last eight weeks. Itās been a life-changing experience for both of us, and itās hard to find the right words to describe just how much weāve both grown through this time. Today was our last day working together full-time, and it almost feels a little bit like the end of summer camp š
The best gift she could have given me was to offer to write the newsletter for me this week. Iām sure Iāll write about what Iāve learned in the coming weeks, but for now, youāll hear from Addie.
Former troubled teen lives with current troubled teen for 8 weeks. And they donāt end up killing each other!
They actually became better human beings because of it.
By Addison C.
As some of you may heard I have been living with Hayley for the past two months, but it took a lot for her to get here.
Iām 18 years old and, in some ways, could be considered a ātroubled teen.ā
I have always suffered from severe anxiety, especially social, and that has gotten in the way of my ability to basically function in everyday life. Eventually, in sixth grade, my parents and I decided it would be best for me to start therapy to try and pretty much figure out what was going on with me.
Growing up, I never really had many friends, and I remember in fourth grade, my teacher was my only friend, so I would stay inside from recess to read and talk with him instead of spending time with my classmates. I had many years where I would eat lunch alone and I always just got so frustrated with myself for not having the ability to make friends.
Anyways, back to therapy. It was evident that I had anxiety and depression almost immediately, so I continued to go once a week, and I improved a bit, but then when I got to seventh grade, I became extremely depressed and started to self-harm. This continued probably for the next three or four years and I used it as an outlet for all my frustration I had with myself and confusion on why I couldnāt be like everyone else.
Once I got into eighth grade, though, I found this girl who quickly became my best friend. We were inseparable and spent as much time as we could together. The only issue was my parents hated her and saw her as a ābad influenceā because when I was with her, I started experimenting with weed and alcohol, which in hindsight, Iād be pissed if my 13-year-old was smoking weed too.
During this friendship was when Covid hit so I was stuck inside with my family like everyone else. Now this was when I was a moody teenager - I still am, but not nearly as much as then - and I genuinely resented my parents so much and fought with them almost every day, and my self-harm started to increase. Every night I would take liquor from the liquor cabinet and get drunk by myself just to try and get away from my mind and basically numb myself from all of the things I clearly had to work on.
Now, I was going into my freshman year of high school and was officially banned from seeing my best friend. I was told that I would be transferring from the public school to the private catholic school in my city where I knew not a single person. So I went to the Catholic school and again had to eat lunch alone with no friends. I was still incredibly depressed and my anxiety had worsened throughout the school year. By the winter, I had made one friend who I got very close with, and she was honestly the reason why I was able to make it through the year, so Iām really grateful to her for that, and weāre not as close now, but we still keep in touch.
Anyways, the winter of my freshman year, I met this girl on the school bus, and we quickly became friends, and then we started dating. This was my first relationship, and to me, it was amazing. I had stopped self-harming, and I was genuinely in love, but it was extremely codependent, and everyone on the outside was telling me it wasnāt good for me, and I ignored them.
Six months later, I was cheated on, and that was extremely hard to go through because it made me realize how dependent I became on someone else for happiness, and that made me feel really shitty about myself. So that summer, I reconnected with a lot of my friends that I had stopped talking to because I was so absorbed with my relationship, and thankfully, many of them forgave me, and we were able to rekindle our relationships.
My sophomore year of high school was really uneventful, besides starting family DBT (which did more for our relationship than I ever thought, so I am so grateful for that) and getting suspended from school for vaping in the bathrooms.
The summer of my sophomore year my dad found something called a semester school for me to go to where I would be hiking and rafting in Idaho for a semester with 40 other kids. To me, this sounded amazing, and I really couldnāt wait to go, but once I got there once again, I had an extremely hard time making connections with the other students, and I became extremely paranoid that everyone hated me. It got to a point so bad that I relapsed into self-harm. The staff had noticed, and I was then taken to the hospital and put under a 24-hour watch, and the next day, they informed me they didnāt have enough mental health resources for me, and I was sent back home.
Once I was back home I went back to my Catholic school and started smoking weed daily, even while in school. After the āincidentā at the semester school, my parents thought it would be best for me to get a psychological evaluation, so I went and got one.
The results took me way off guard because I was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, social anxiety, and autism. I literally had no idea that it was even a possibility for me to have autism, and it took me a while to accept it because there is so much stigma around it, but eventually, I came around to the idea, and it made a lot more in my life make sense. I started going to social skills classes and seeing an autism specialist to help me work on skills for basically everyday life, and it was really helpful.
Then, in April of my junior year, I was expelled from my school for possession of vapes and weed, which really set me back, especially with my relationship and trust with my parents. So I went to the public school and made it through the end of my junior year but my parents knew that I needed a change.
They got an educational consultant and were looking at many possible therapeutic boarding schools for me to go to for my senior year of high school. They also decided that it would be best for me not to be home for the summer, so they found a life coaching program in Spain for me to go to and then go to treatment once I came back.
The summer went really well, and the heads of the program thought that a boarding school was not needed for me, so they found an American high school for me to go to instead, and my parents agreed.
That fall I went back to Spain and started going to school there. It was all going well, and then, with five weeks left of school, I was kicked out of the program for smoking too much weed and being a ābad influenceā, and thatās when Hayley came in.
Both of us really had no idea what was happening, and almost everyone in my life doubted that I would be able to graduate high school, but these past eight weeks, I had the ability to explore what I actually wanted and not what others expected from me. Now Iām graduating high school on the honor roll and attending Sarah Lawrence College in the fall.
And nowā¦ā¦our vibes this weekš®
š What weāre reading
How Twitch streamers could shape the 2024 elections, wired
Rejection therapy is going viral on TikTok, screenshot
š¶ What weāre listening to
THANKS FOR READING!
If you found this valuable, this is your signāļø to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings weāre having this week so we can make sure they know theyāre not alone. Sharing is caring š
Weāre in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:
If youāre a parent who has a child in treatment, weāre happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!
If youāre passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.