When a young adult enters into our transitional living program, our fundamental task is to grow adaptive and sustainable independent functioning. While this seems like a global goal that would fit everyone, the actual pragmatic vision for independence varies significantly between clients, parents, and treatment providers. These differing visions for the future can cause tension and even result in ruptures to family or treatment relationships. Terms such as ‘expectation’ and ‘potential’ take on emotional weight for the clients and occasionally threaten the epistemic trust within the system. This leads to the challenge of managing these interpersonal connections while still making space for our young people to step into their autonomy.
A mentor used to remind me that ‘the successes and failures of our clients are not ours to own.’ This wisdom is admittedly more easily stated than practiced by clinicians and family members. Nevertheless, we must all take care to observe the boundary between the emotional experiences, expectations, and aspirations of young people and those that exist within us. This is a very difficult task as parents and clinicians often feel the gravitational pull of wanting to ‘fix’ the problems of young people. The care we have for young people is so potent that it can blur the boundary between their pain and our pain. But we must keep in mind that by rescuing our young people from the obstacles and struggles that they face in life then we are also robbing them of the opportunity to develop the resilience and life experiences that they will need to make independent decisions.
With this in mind, I would recommend that when our young people face challenges and obstacles we focus on the crucially important task of facilitating their individuation. Making the right or wrong decision is actually not as important as aiding young people to make a decision, to forge a path, to become an adult. Individuation can evoke feelings of anxiety in clients and parents. ‘Do I have to do this by myself now?’ ‘Do I have to watch my child suffer without helping them?’ Of course, the answer to both of these questions is ‘no.’ Rather, it means assisting our children in making their own decisions and living with those decisions. This is what it means to be an adult.
While our young adult children are individuating, parents are tasked with an adjacent practice: differentiation. In pragmatic terms, this means distinguishing between the stress our children feel and the stress we feel about the stress our children feel. An example of this practice is giving intentional distance while our children are doing difficult things. This can be a very difficult experience as it is instinctual to rush towards a young person when they are struggling or suffering. However, it's important that we allow young adults the space to discover what they're capable of and to learn those lessons from the most difficult teacher: life.
Whether we’re parents, coaches, or therapists, joining young adults who are practicing individuation in our own parallel practice of differentiation conveys to our children and clients that they aren’t alone in their journey.
Written by Jacob Gelles
