79: Healing Your Inner Teenager: Why Beliefs from Your Teen Years are Still Impacting Your Life
It is so common for wounds and beliefs from your teen years to continue negatively impacting your adult life and relationships. In this episode, we learn about your inner teenager, the types of false beliefs that we create in our teenage years, and why the root of many of our adult problems are actually based on those untrue beliefs about life that we developed in our teen years. My intention for this episode is to assist you in connecting back with your inner teenager so that you can identify and heal your inner teenager and start living your best life.
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Timestamps ⏱️
Introduction: 00:14
Inner Teenager Discussion: 2:23
Outro: 34:18
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This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Castmagic. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:01]:
Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get started.
Hi, beautiful souls. My name is Amanda Durocher, and this is New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer guidance for the healing journey. It's not my intention to give you all the answers. I believe you have all the answers.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:27]:
You just may need a new view and a little help along the way. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode.
Today's episode is about healing your inner teenager and healing the wounds and beliefs from your teen years that may still be negatively impacting your life and relationships today and holding you back in the present. Our teen years are transformative, and I consider them Transitioning years, so we're transitioning from childhood to adulthood, and it's common that we let our beliefs as teenagers continue to impact our lives as adults. Like how so many of our beliefs about sex, alcohol, drugs, and relationships are actually from TV shows and movies we watched when we were 13. I know for me, I took on a lot of beliefs from shows like The OC, Wondery Hill, Gilmore Girls. I recently watched The Summer I Turned Pretty, and I could see how that show could have an impact on teenagers today. And so in this episode, we're going to learn about what your inner teenager is, some of the types of common beliefs that we create in our teenagers, and why the root of many of our adult problems are actually based on untrue beliefs created in our teen years based off of experiences we had when we were teenagers.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:33]:
My intention for this episode is to assist you in connecting back with your inner teenagers, so that you can heal and begin to identify where past beliefs may still be impacting you in the present. Healing beliefs from Your teenage years can be hard. I know this firsthand. I spent the last year looking deeply at my teen years. That's why I'm so passionate about this topic. But if you find that this episode resonates with you and you'd like some extra love and support on your healing journey, I offer 1 on 1 sessions that are a safe space for us to really Ask what you're going through and to assist you if you're feeling stuck, unsupported, unseen, or frustrated. I create a space for us to really dive deep on your healing journey together. So if you're interested, you can check out new view advice.com for more information.
Amanda Durocher [00:02:16]:
Now let's jump on in.
Inner Teenager Discussion & Teaching
So what is your inner teenager? Your inner teenager is similar to your inner child. And if you're new here and unfamiliar with the term inner child, simply put, your inner child is a metaphorical representation of yourself at different ages and events in your childhood. Therefore, we really have inner children. And because of this, our inner teenager is Really, that representation of us in our teenage years, I view it as the ages of 13 to 19. I have found it important on my own healing journey to really view my inner child, and my inner teenager separately because they both had unique experiences and unique personalities, really, that needed to be healed and looked at. And I've found that these strategies and techniques I use to connect with my inner child don't always work or need to be adjusted to connect with my inner teenager and vice versa. So I find that they both really needed their own individual healing journeys.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:18]:
So for example, I connect with myself through creativity. I find creativity to be an amazing resource for us on the healing journey. I find that through the act of creation, through creativity, it moves energy, and we're often able to heal. I think that's why art is so important. Ridden. It's such a powerful way for us to move trauma without necessarily having to Relive the trauma over and over again. Creativity can really help us to process difficult feelings, emotions, and experiences. So for me, I use creativity as one of my tools on the healing journey.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:54]:
So when I want to connect with my inner child and process something from My younger years, I often like to color with a Disney movie on. I like to do messy art projects. I like to color outside of the lines. That's really important for my inner child to not feel constricted and contained. She likes to be really expressive and loud, and she likes to use big and bold colors. When I am connecting with my inner teenager, though, it's different. So when I first was looking at some of this really hard trauma I experienced in my teenage years, I tried using those same This is. Right? I tried coloring, and I tried to color outside the lines.
Amanda Durocher [00:04:30]:
My inner teenager is not like that. My inner teenager wants to use creativity, but she wants to do more of an adult creativity. When I was a teenager, I wasn't able to tie dye. It was never something I really got to do. So over this past year, I have probably tie dyed everything because my inner teenager wanted to tie dye. She wanted to do something creative and messy, but she wanted something she could have. She wanted to tie dye because it was something she was told she couldn't do. So I embrace tie dye over the past year.
Amanda Durocher [00:04:57]:
She also likes to do more complicated art projects. She really likes to paint and learn through painting rather than paint and it be messy. That's It's really my inner child. My inner teen is trying to really get better at painting. I mentioned that because it's a slight different, But what it symbolizes is really getting to know myself at these different ages and allowing them to be exactly who they want to be and not trying to put them in a box. And this has been really important for me because when I was younger, I very often felt like people were trying to always put me in a box. They were always trying to define me. So part of my healing journey has been allowing myself to show up and express myself in different ways without judgment, and really getting to know myself deeply has been understanding that my inner child and my inner teenager wanna be treated differently.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:43]:
And doesn't that make sense? Because when we become teenagers, we no longer want to be children. We wanna start being treated like adults. So through my healing journey, I had to also adjust myself and begin to show up differently for my inner teenager. Another differentiation I like to make when healing these aspects of myself, the inner child versus the inner teenager, is that when we're healing the inner child, I really believe we're becoming the parent we always wanted and needed throughout our lives. And when we're healing the inner teenager, We're also the parent we always needed, but we're also becoming the person or the role model who our inner teenager would have looked up to. So we're becoming that version of ourselves who are inner teen aspired to be and would be inspired by. Oftentimes, when we talk about our inner child, we talk about how our inner child holds many of our beliefs about the world, our families, and ourselves. Many of our core beliefs about ourself in the world are created at very young ages.
Amanda Durocher [00:06:39]:
This is very true. I know for me, my deep rooted feelings of not being good enough, of Feeling wrong and bad were created in my youth. But when I became a teenager, I thought that becoming an adult would Fix a lot of my child problems, and this was not the case. Instead, I actually created more beliefs about myself in the world. And One I find in the teenage years, our childhood beliefs are cemented even more. They're just reaffirmed, but we also end up creating new beliefs as well because we're creating new beliefs about adulthood as we are transitioning into adulthood. So some things that our inner teenager is likely to create Least around include sex, romantic partnerships, body image, alcohol, drugs, friendships, responsibility, and what it means to be an adult. You may be thinking, well, I created beliefs around these topics in my childhood, and you definitely could've.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:35]:
I know that I created beliefs around these topics in my childhood as well, but I also created more about them in my teen years, especially because I started to experiment with alcohol. So new beliefs were created. The shows I watch showed alcohol and drugs and sex, so I started to create more beliefs around it. Right? The more we We're beginning to understand these new topics, these adult topics, these more taboo topics. We began to create more beliefs about them, which Leads me into the question, why is it important to heal the inner teenager? It's important to heal the inner teenager because it's important to heal the core wounds and negative beliefs that were created in your teenage years because it's important to heal all aspects of us. I believe the healing journey is a journey of coming home to ourselves. It's a journey of remembering our worthiness, our lovability, and a journey of falling in love with ourselves. The healing journey is about self love, and I think Self love is just such a complicated topic.
Amanda Durocher [00:08:34]:
It can seem so simple. Yes. We should all love ourselves, but the journey home to self shows us how complicated, and how disconnected from ourselves so many of us have become. And many times, our teenage years is a part of this disconnection. So our teenage years are a transitionary period. So we're transitioning from childhood to adulthood. And like most transitions, this was never meant to be smooth. It's messy and involves a lot of mistakes and hard feelings, and this is okay.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:04]:
But what I don't think is okay is that teenagers really aren't supported through this time and are expected to just understand adulthood and oftentimes are not guided, supported, or mentored through this time. And because of this, a lot of pain and trauma can happen during these years. For example, many teenagers experience sexual assault and rape. They have suicidal ideation. They experiment with alcohol and drugs in unhealthy and unsafe environments and more. This happens because many times teenagers are afraid of their parents. They are punished by their parents. They're criticized by their parents.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:39]:
They're looking to be adults, but they aren't offered a safe space to begin to explore adulthood. They're not offered safe spaces for difficult conversations, so this can lead to a lot of pain and trauma throughout these years. As I mentioned, transition periods are messy. They're meant to be messy. I believe that it's so important to have guidance through these times because transitions are messy and hard, and the teenage years are no different. An example of a different kind of transition for me in my life that reminds me of the teenage years was when I got my first Job out of college. I worked in marketing at an architecture firm. And my 1st week at this new job, I had no idea what I was doing.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:20]:
Zero idea. I was so confused. I felt so lost, and I felt so anxious all the time. I literally cried in the bathroom every single day for a week. And I remember thinking that I could just walk out of that job, and I didn't have to add it to my resume. I could find a new one and just never look back. I could leave, and no one would ever have to know that that I worked there. And why did I feel this way? It's because my new job was really hard.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:44]:
There was no other marketing people at my office, so there was no one who could tell me how to do my job. Everyone wanted me to just figure it out. It was sink or swim, and I was sinking. It was incredibly stressful, incredibly hard, and could have been easier with more guidance and support. And I feel the same way about the teenage years. They are often incredibly hard. They're stressful, and they could be easier with more guidance and support. So I spent the Last year of my life healing my inner teenager, being with my inner teenager, connecting with my inner teenager, and I found it a lot harder to connect with my inner teenager than with my inner child because I had a lot more judgments about my teenage self.
Amanda Durocher [00:11:27]:
It was much easier for me to view my child self with compassion. When I look at a 5 year old, it's so easy for me to see that they don't deserve the trauma, the yelling, the criticism, the cruelties they experience. But I found when I began to connect with my teenage self, I was much more critical of her. I thought she should have known better, and I kept saying she was so difficult. And I realized this was because those were the messages I received from adults during my teenage years. And I was so desperate to be an adult in my teenage years that I just wanted to be an adult, but I see now that I wasn't. I was very much still a child in many ways. I was honestly more a child than an adult because I was really sheltered from the adult world as a child, yet I was expected to know adult things, and this was really, really confusing for me.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:17]:
And so I mentioned this because this was true for me that I found it harder to connect with my inner teen Then my inner child, I remember at one of my 1st horse therapy sessions last year. That's a technique I use to really connect with my inner teenager, and I'll Talk a little bit more about that later. But during my 1st session, my therapist asked, why is it so hard for you to connect with your teen self? I just kept saying because she's so difficult. She's so difficult. She has so many feelings. And why I felt that way so deeply was because that was what I experienced at that age. I was told over and over again that I was so difficult and that I had so many feelings. But my experience was real at that time.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:56]:
I experienced some immense trauma at that age. I was raped and sexually assaulted by a group of my peers, and that was devastating for me. Of course, I was difficult. Of course, I had difficult feelings. But I didn't share that experience with adults at the time because I didn't have a safe space, because I was criticized, and I was yelled at. And I experienced all this judgment, and what I really needed at that time was to be understood. And so for you, You may also find it hard to connect with your inner teenager, or maybe it's the opposite, and you have a harder time connecting with your inner child. I find that sometimes we have an easier time connecting with Our child self or with our teen self, this often does with the amount of trauma we experienced at different ages.
Amanda Durocher [00:13:36]:
So for me, my most extreme traumas We're in my teen years, so those were the years that were harder for me to connect with. So what kind of beliefs are created in our teenage years? In our teenage years, we begin to dive into adult activities, including romantic relationships, sex, money, alcohol, and drugs. And because of this, we We create many beliefs around these experiences, and we carry those beliefs into adulthood. Unfortunately, many of our parents, teachers, and adult caregivers are I'm comfortable discussing these topics, so we're forced to learn about them from other teenagers or like me from TV and movies. Unfortunately, the topics of sex, money, alcohol, drugs, they're very taboo still. And so when we're needing the most guidance on these topics, Oftentimes, the adults around us are still triggered or about these topics or they're uncomfortable having tough conversations, and so we're left up to our own devices and to really learn about these topics on our own. So because we're learning about these from other Teenagers and we're learning about these from TV and movies and from situations we're experiencing. We end up creating a lot of unrealistic beliefs about these topics.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:48]:
And, unfortunately, these beliefs can be carried into adulthood. So an example of this would be that I started drinking in my teen years, And so I created a lot of beliefs around alcohol in my teen years. For example, I was cool when I drank. People liked me when I drank. I was funny when I drank. Drinking made my life easier. Those all were created in my teenage years, and I Carried those beliefs about alcohol into adulthood, and they stopped serving me because alcohol stopped serving me. And it took me looking at these beliefs and where my drinking patterns began to see that a lot of this was created in my teenage years.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:25]:
In our teenagers, we're also beginning to take on more responsibility. It's part of that transitioning from childhood to adulthood. And as teenagers, we often are in such a rush to grow up, but we really want the adulthood and the adult experiences without Out the responsibility. I know for me, I didn't quite understand the responsibility that came with adulthood, so I ended up putting myself in a lot of dangerous situations. I honestly was very naive in my early teen years, and this is a word that has come up in many of my 1 on 1 sessions with women I have worked with and specifically women I've worked with who have experienced sexual assault was that in early teenage years, this feeling of being naive. And so many of us, so many of us humans, can relate to this feeling of being naive. No one prepared us for the world, And I'm not sure our parents can fully prepare us for the world. I think there's a lot that we each have to learn individually on our own path.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:20]:
But I think that For so many teenagers, there is compassion missing and safety missing and the ability to have a place to have difficult conversations. And because of that, it can cause a lot of pain and trauma within the teen years. I know that I work with a lot of people in my sessions who have experienced trauma in their teen years. And trauma can be sexual assault. It can be rape. It can be losing a parent in the teen years and losing a primary caregiver who is no longer there to help you transition into adulthood. That can be extremely traumatizing. Losing a parent at any age can be extremely traumatizing.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:59]:
Other examples include drinking patterns, drugs, experiencing bullying in the teenage years, experiencing violence. I know this is also something that happens for a lot of people in teen years experiencing any kind of violence. And so I wanted to share a belief that I recently realized I internalized in my Teenage years that I wanted to share because I thought maybe it would resonate for someone else. And this is the belief that when I try to be an adult, I am punished and unsupported, so it is safer to act like a child. When I was a teenager, I began to dabble in adult situations as one does as a teenager. And when I entered my teenage years, it's really when I entered high school, I believed that adults had freedom, and I craved freedom. I felt so confined and controlled as a child. I never did anything right.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:44]:
I thought that adulthood would fix this problem. This was naive, but it was a true belief of mine. I had zeroed guidance from adults as I entered my teenage years. Many of the topics that I've mentioned, sex, money, Romantic partnerships, female friendships, drugs, alcohol, those were taboo in my household. I wasn't allowed to talk about them, and if I did, I felt like I was punished and not a healthy dialogue was opened. So I began to internalize beliefs I saw on shows like the OC, One Tree Hill. I began to really take the truth of what other teenage girls were saying. So there were other teenage girls having sex, and I was learning about sex from them.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:23]:
And this created a lot of unhealthy beliefs for me around sex because they had unhealthy relationships with sex, and I was just absorbing all the information around me about these topics that felt really taboo. And so because of this, I wasn't always making the smartest decisions, but what I really needed at this time was love, support, and guidance. I was transitioning from childhood to adulthood. This is a messy period as I mentioned. This is filled with growing pains. It's not supposed to be easy, but it could be easier with guidance. And we're learning that, yes, adulthood may offer more freedom, but that there's also consequences to actions. Every action has a consequence.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:01]:
Consequences are neutral. I think we use the word consequence many times in a negative sense, but, really, consequences are neutral, and every action has a consequence. And this is something we start to learn in our teenage years. What happened for me was that anytime I tried to step into adulthood, I was punished. I was yelled at. I was criticized for my choices and my actions. This was incredibly difficult for me. I felt Unsupported, and this was not a feeling I had to such a degree in my childhood.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:30]:
So I experienced trauma in my childhood. I was raped by a friend's father, And this was really traumatic for me, so I had a lot of beliefs in my life created from this event, also created from the way my parents parented me, also created based off of where I grew up, Lot of beliefs created in childhood. But at this time in my childhood, I really felt like my mother showed up for me. So I mentioned this because I felt supported in my childhood, not so much by my father, but I had a support system in my mother, and that was so important for me in my childhood. But this changed in my teenage years. I was always in trouble. I was always being punished. I was always being yelled at specifically by my mother who was my safe space and who was no longer safe because there was no compassion.
Amanda Durocher [00:20:15]:
There was no empathy. Thee, there was no trying to understand my situation. I felt like I was just being berated with anger, and this was really hard for me because I internalized a lot of beliefs around this, and I had lost my safe space. So I went from having a safe space to having no safe space, which caused a lot of harm in my life. But this was incredibly hard for me because I created the belief that I was safer if I acted like a child than as an adult. I felt loved by my mother when I acted like a kid, not when I acted like adult. And I share this because maybe some of you experienced a change in your relationships chips when you your parents when you became a teenager. And this can be really challenging, and we can create beliefs or we can find that at that age.
Amanda Durocher [00:21:01]:
We change ourselves in order to try and create that love that we had in childhood with that parent. This may not resonate for everybody, but I'm thinking somebody out there can probably relate to this experience. I know a lot of movies show that the teenage years could be tumultuous in households, and I know that was true in my case that I went from more of a peaceful household to a more hostile household is how it felt, and it was all because I was transitioning to adulthood. And, no, I wasn't the perfect teenager. I was what people would call a rebel, a bad kid probably. I bet people would label me with that. I wouldn't label myself with that, but I think people would label me as bad kid. I love to smoke cigarettes at the that age.
Amanda Durocher [00:21:42]:
Who are we kidding? And I just feel like that has that bad kid reputation. But I mentioned that because by not having compassion in my household, by not having empathy in my household, it sent me down a downward spiral. I internalized that all of this was my fault, And I craved the freedom of adulthood, but I missed the love of my parents. I was angry at the world because I thought that High school was gonna change my life, and instead, I ended up being more traumatized than ever before. I ended up more insecure than ever before. I ended up so wounded, So disconnected from myself, I was suicidal in my teen years, if I'm honest, and it breaks my heart to see that now. It breaks my heart that my teenage self had no love and support. I share this because I think many teenagers can relate to that.
Amanda Durocher [00:22:34]:
I think many teenagers are trying to just understand the world. They're craving freedom. They're craving adulthood. They're craving that responsibility. I think it's inherent in our DNA to want to grow up and find ourselves. I also think society really pushes us on it, but that's a conversation for another day. And I think that so many teenagers are whacked When they enter those teenage years and they're not supported and they're not offered compassion, instead, a lot of adults still live with their own Wounding from teenage years, they live with triggers. So their teenage child is triggering their trauma, triggering their fears around teenage years.
Amanda Durocher [00:23:15]:
And I also think many adults fear the mistakes their children could make. And when people are in fear, they often react from that fear rather than offer love. I know that was true in my case. I think my reckless behavior scared my parents. And instead of offering me more compassion, they just punished me more, which was not what I needed. I needed compassion. So part of healing our inner teenager is learning to offer ourselves that compassion. So that leads me into how do we connect with and heal the inner teenager? And so to connect with your inner teenager and to begin healing and embracing this part of you, I have 4 suggestions.
Amanda Durocher [00:23:53]:
So one is to do things you loved as a teenager. Maybe even do things that you always wanted to do as a teenager, but weren't allowed to do. 2 is to practice awareness and connecting with that part of you through different practices such as journaling and meditation. My 3rd suggestion is to release and clear any of these difficult feelings that you still have from your body, mind, and heart. And my 4th suggestion is to be kind to yourself. So I'm just gonna dive into each of one of these a little deeper. So one is do things you loved as a teenager, maybe even do things that you always wanted to do as a teenager but weren't allowed to do. So as I talked about earlier with my example of creativity, that my teenage Self wanted to express creativity in a different way than my child self.
Amanda Durocher [00:24:37]:
She also loves to write poetry, my teenage self, So I wrote a lot of poetry over the last year, and it was messy and vulnerable and raw just like my teenage golf. So that was a really helpful way for me to connect with my teenage self. I also began horse therapy over this last year, and that was something that my inner teenager really wanted to do because You always want to ride horses as a teenager. A lot of my friends rode horses, but I wasn't allowed to do that. So I was able to offer myself that, and it was incredibly healing to be the adult that my teenage self wanted. I was able to show up in a way that inspired my teen self as that role model she always needed and wanted. I found horse therapy really helpful for connecting with my teen self. I also think horse therapy is super helpful for anybody who has trouble talking about what maybe They survived or what they've been through or their trauma.
Amanda Durocher [00:25:29]:
Horses have this magical way of grounding us into our bodies and Healing together without words. It's kinda hard to describe horse magic, but it's so real. And I just highly recommend finding different techniques that work for you. Another suggestion is to listen to music you liked as a teenager as a way to connect with your teenage self. Maybe dress how you wanted to dress as a teenager. Maybe you were told not to dress or wear certain things, and now you can allow yourself to dress and wear those things. These are different ways you can begin connecting with that inner teenager and creating safety for them to maybe make some of these beliefs or experiences more known to your awareness. This leads me into my 2nd suggestion, which is to practice awareness and connecting through different practices.
Amanda Durocher [00:26:17]:
I always suggest journaling. I think journaling is one of the best ways we can connect with ourselves. I have a bunch of free journal prompts on my website, Different topics, but I think that journaling is a great way to connect back to ourselves. When you begin journaling with your inner teenager, I want you to begin to identify and really hone in on some of the old wounds and beliefs, and how you can do this is to just allow space for it. So ask yourself if there's a memory from your teenage years that still feels charged. And what I mean by charged is, Is there a memory that comes up when you think of your teenage years that makes your body tight or anger arises or you feel like crying or you feel shame arise? This would mean that it's still emotionally charged, and there's something there to be processed. It's not about judging it. It's about honoring it, and it's about allowing it up.
Amanda Durocher [00:27:07]:
It's okay to allow these difficult feelings up. You are safe now. If you are in a place where you have the ability to heal, then you have created safety for yourself. I really believe that in order to heal, we have to feel safe within ourselves. And so you'll know when it's the right time to dive into your teenage years. And I trust that when you do, you'll really be able to begin pulling back the layers and looking at how your teenage years may be still impacting you today. So I'll add some journal prompts to my website for this topic as well, But some other journal prompts I suggest are, what are your beliefs about sex? What are your beliefs about romantic partnerships? What TV shows did you watch When you were a teenager, do you see how these shows may have impacted you? What are your beliefs about money? Did you have your 1st romantic relationship in your teen years? What was that relationship like? What was that experience like? And I want you to begin to really connect with this to teenage self by journaling about your experiences, your feelings, and how you may be seeing similar experiences or feelings or beliefs playing out in your day to day. And, again, I'll put journal prompts on my website to assist you with this, and you can find those at newviewadvice.com/seventy 9.
Amanda Durocher [00:28:19]:
I also suggest meditating. I think meditating is a beautiful way to connect with ourselves by creating a safe space within us, by Coming into our heart space, that's what I do. I like to sit with my heart space. It allows feelings to come up, beliefs to come up, images to come up. It allows that next step in your healing to come up. That's what meditation does. It gives us space to see what's present with us, and oftentimes, what is Present with us right now is something that is impacting us today from the past. I have some meditations on to that can help guide you into connecting back with yourself as well.
Amanda Durocher [00:28:56]:
My 3rd suggestion is to release any difficult feelings that you still have around your teen years. If you find journaling or meditating or doing things as a teenager is bringing up difficult feelings, allow yourself to process those feelings. I have a feeling a lot of people have anger that they have not processed from their teen years. I think a lot of teenagers experience anger because They feel that life can be unfair. I think that when you realize you were naive, you can be angry about that. I think when you're trying Transition from childhood to adulthood and you feel unsupported, you can be angry about that. I think if you're traumatized in your teen years, you're gonna have anger around that. I think when you experience adults treating you like a child, when you're trying to be an adult, you're gonna be angry about that.
Amanda Durocher [00:29:39]:
So I think there's a lot of anger Not processed from teen years, and I think that's very much played out in today's world. But I think that it's so important to process anger. You might have sadness. You might have shame. I think Shame and humiliation, I know for me, I felt humiliated many times in my teen years, and that has been so difficult to sit with. But it was so important for me to allow those feelings up and to release them in different ways. I have a podcast episode on releasing anger, and that can help you to process your anger. For humiliation and embarrassment, I've found it's really allowing that feeling up and giving yourself that love and compassion that you weren't offered in that moment and helping yourself to feel safe now and to see how that humiliation might be keeping you small in the present.
That's what I found through Experience of being humiliated was that it's kept me small in my adult life because I was so afraid of being humiliated again because that can create feelings of ostracization, of feeling ostracized and exiled and shamed. So shame is also a hard feeling to process. I think there's a lot of shame in our teenage years because of these taboo topics. And so, really, shame is healed through awareness, compassion, and bringing these secrets to the light. So shame really lives in secrecy and silence. So by allowing yourself to even witness these experiences that might feel shameful, you are already beginning to heal your shame. I find that releasing difficult feelings can be hard, especially for people at the beginning of their healing journey. So I do offer 1 on 1 sessions, as I mentioned at the beginning, or I invite you to find a coach or a therapist or somebody to work with or a group environment.
Amanda Durocher [00:31:17]:
There's support groups depending on what you're struggling with to assist you with releasing these feelings. I think it's really important to find different Practices to assist you in processing your feelings. I also think journaling. If you have shame arise, humiliation, anger, sadness, grief arise, Just start journaling about it. Just rewrite all your thoughts. Don't pick up your pen. Keep going, and just allow That feeling out onto the page, that will help you to move the energy. It really does.
Amanda Durocher [00:31:46]:
Keep it in it in your head keeps it stuck. Allowing your pen to process that feeling, allowing your pen to move, and allowing that feeling up and out will help you to process your pain. My 4th suggestion is to be kind to yourself. I don't think people are very kind to teenagers. I think teenagers trigger a lot of people. Teenagers get a lot of flack. They don't always get love and support, and so it's really important for you to be kind to yourself when connecting with your inner teenager because it is likely that most Adults weren't kind to your inner teenager AKU during your teen years. I think that Compassion is what is needed in teenagers.
Teenagers can be angry, and so they can lash out at adults and adults can get triggered. And what teenagers are really looking for in that moment is to feel seen and heard. They're looking to know that they can have these difficult feelings and still be loved. But many times in the teenage years, they are not taught that lesson. They lash out, and they're punished. And they learn that those hard feelings that they're having Sometimes for the 1st time are not safe to have, so they can bottle up that anger. They can bottle up that rage. They can bottle up those hard feelings, or they continue to lash out begging somebody to see them, and they can be continually met with people who don't see them because those people, those adults who did not see you as a teenager likely do not see themselves.
They likely have not looked at their own inner teen wounding. I think that the inner teenager is really running around in a lot of people in adulthood. The more I've healed my inner teenager, the more I can see the inner teenage wounds and how they're playing out in other people's lives. And I mentioned this because The most important thing to do when healing is to create safety within yourself in order to heal because we need safety to heal. And One of the most important things you can do to create safety is to be kind and compassionate with yourself, to give yourself The kindness that I am so sorry the world has not given you or that you did not experience in your teen years or maybe in your childhood. I believe that everyone deserves compassion. No matter what you have done, no matter the mistakes you have made, you deserve love and compassion. But, unfortunately, many times we will not get that compassion outside of us, so it is extremely important to learn how to be compassionate with yourself.
Amanda Durocher [00:34:09]:
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. I hope something was helpful.
Outro
Thanks again for joining me for another episode of new view advice. Today, we talked about healing our inner teenager, why it's so important, and how to connect and begin healing the inner teenager. My recommendations for connecting with yourself, as a reminder, are to do things you loved as a teenager, to practice awareness and connecting with yourself through different practices, including journaling and meditating to begin releasing any of those difficult feelings that you still have and to be kind to yourself. Again, if you'd like some additional support and love on your healing journey, I offer 1 on 1 sessions, but I also invite you to find another mental health professional. When living through some really difficult times, it's important that you feel supported through this time. It's important that you create a safe environment for yourself, which which will include surrounding yourself with people who love, support you, and create safety for you.
Amanda Durocher [00:35:08]:
It's okay for you to take care of you right now. It's essential. I just invite you to explore how you can do that for yourself. And I just wanna thank you again for listening to this episode. If you found this episode helpful, Hit the follow button, the subscribe button, whatever it is on your podcasting app so that you never miss an episode. The more followers and subscribers, the Higher my podcast is ranked on these podcasting apps, and that really helps me. If there's one thing you can do to support me and my podcast, it's really subscribing and following like you have to own your podcasting app. It really, really helps me to reach more people.
Amanda Durocher [00:35:42]:
So if you enjoyed this episode, I invite you to do that. Thank you again for tuning in to another So the new view advice, as always, I am so grateful to be here with you and to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Sending you all my love. See you next time.
