There is a certain type of child that I have seen in my psychotherapy practice over the years. He is often a boy who is between the ages of twelve and seventeen. He can be an only child or have siblings. His physical health is good, and he has many excellent qualities. However, his parents complain that he is unmotivated in school and is an underachiever. They think he seems depressed, has oscillating moods, is labile, angry, sad, and this causes them a great deal of anxiety. They say he appears stuck, and school doesn’t seem particularly concerned about him. He might have one or two teacher-allies, but he has little ongoing contact with them.

I usually ask the parents to come in so I can take a history and begin my evaluation. The parents describe their son in glowing terms and yet with much frustration and apprehension. I’m told that this boy is very bright and yet has been inconsistent with his grades. With the beginning of each trimester, he is hopeful and appears eager to get a fresh and productive start with his classes. But this is often followed by a pattern of declining grades approaching the mid-semester mark usually due to a lack of completing and/or not turning in homework. When his parents attempt to monitor homework, offer help, or apply pressure, they are rebuffed, and this often leads to an angry confrontation.

The parents continue describing their son as creative and yet not productive. Perhaps he was an excellent illustrator but then lost all of his interest in drawing. Whereas he used to be socially involved with two to three close friends, he has ceased to initiate contact outside of school and mostly keeps to himself. He is quiet or brooding at home and keeps to himself in his room playing video games or lying on the family-room sofa watching TV. He might have been an avid reader at one time, but this passion also waned. When he was younger, he would often play by himself and be happily absorbed in lego design and construction for long periods. But this pattern of hyperfocusing has lapsed as well.

My sessions with the parents seem to shift from their being hopeful and positive to being doubtful and anxiously concerned. They talk about their son’s wonderful sense of humor, how comfortable and charming he can be with adults, his love of travel with the family, and his strong capacity for empathy. They say he can be genuinely remorseful and quick to apologize for a hurtful comment, and he can be supportive, gentle and kind with animals, children with problems and disabilities, and close friends.

They add that he has highly attuned social radar enabling him to be very perceptive when it comes to others’ feelings or thoughts. And yet this child who is so capable of being loving and compassionate is also exquisitely sensitive to frustration and criticism. He is thin-skinned and easily wounded psychologically taking many sarcastic or off-colored comments personally. He believes the world should treat people fairly and is indignant when it does not. He can be quick to assume that others regard him as less than adequate and possibly see him as troubled, soft, overly emotional and unmasculine.

His questionable self-esteem and lack of confidence cause him to be fraught with shame and fear (which aren’t always so obvious). There appears to be disappointment about letting his parents down, self-criticism for not forcing or motivating himself to practice at homework, athletics or piano. He cannot get to bed at a reasonable time and being a night owl, he is often up late trying to make up homework or playing video games. Beside having difficulty slowing his thoughts down and falling asleep, he is usually a restless and light sleeper as well. A sleep deficit is usually present no matter how much he tries to nap in the afternoons or sleep-in on the weekends, and getting up in the morning for school is nearly impossible. Parents sometimes resort to screaming and throwing cold water to get him out of bed. This can easily develop into another confrontation.

Cognitively, there appears to be an executive functioning deficit. There is a lack of planning and organization regarding time, money, and belongings. Short-term memory problems and distractability exist. Procrastination prevails and getting started is very difficult. Focus is entirely on the present. Parents’ emphasis on preparation for the future falls on deaf ears. The boys often become defiant and oppositional when frustrated parents make any attempt to appeal to reason or to help. These boys are easily bored, and jump from one thing to the next. And they refuse to ask for help. They give the appearance of being very independent, and some insist that they have no need for electronics or other creature comforts. However, this counter-phobic façade belies strong dependency longings and magical feelings of entitlement.

It’s painful to want academic success more than your son wants it. Parents suffer watching their children struggle this way. They also grow to feel helpless, and angry as their fear intensifies. But these boys’ fears also intensify when they cannot uphold the family tradition of excellence. They can feel like the black sheep of the family who cannot compete with any siblings or their parents.

The task of psychotherapy is to help parents and their sons recognize that what is happening is non-pathologic. These children are not abnormal or failures. The enemy is the boys’ shame and the parents’ guilt. These boys are in no hurry to grow up! They want to enjoy life, to feel alive. They want to play. They are passionate individuals who want to develop and feel alive while doing so. They often experience their parents as going through the motions to become successful and accomplished. They see them as being so serious. They would rather see their parents as happy, playful, spontaneous and loving.

Psychotherapy is a wonderful means of attaining many of these family and individual goals. If a family history of depression and/or anxiety exists, this will be factored into the clinical picture. Attentional problems and depression have many overlapping signs and symptoms, and all of this needs to be sorted out in order to make an intelligent diagnosis with useful recommendations.

Pathologizing, however, is not a part of this approach. These boys are wonderfully gifted, bright, normal, passionate, affectionate, and genuine people who need help restoring faith in themselves. They are navigating the developmental phase which Erik Erikson called “Identity vs. Role Confusion.” The task of this adolescent phase is to discover who we are as individuals and to begin developing a philosophy of life. They need to connect with, learn to trust, and respect themselves as valued members and future contributors to our society and culture.

 Few of us are conscious of being immediate or present as we are speaking, listening or moving about in our daily lives.  Most are not looking three to four feet ahead of us as we move along.  Instead we are planning, preparing, imagining, wishing, reflecting, or anticipating with fear rather than being mindful of what we are experiencing at any given moment. 

Being fearful is a good example of how we get in our own way.  While fear is a natural warning system that serves us well, it’s easy to feel frightened when there is no danger.  David Kessler and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross discuss the impact of fear.  Kubler-Ross states, “Much of what life hands us comes without the prelude of fear and worry. Our fears don’t stop death, they stop life…Fear is a shadow that blocks everything: our love, our true feelings, our happiness, our very being.”  Kessler writes that when you peel away the various layers of fear, the bottom layer is the fear of death.  He adds, “All of our invented fears involve either the past or the future; only love is in the present…Now is the only real moment we have, and love is the only real emotion because it’s the only one that occurs in the present moment.” Getting out of your own way means choosing to be in the place of kindness and not in the place of fear. 

 Accepting that our lives are ordered by impermanence and living in the present, however, is no easy task.  We want guarantees.  We want predictability.  Yet everything keeps changing and eventually going away.  We try to hold on, but we never succeed.  We attach to ideas and beliefs, some centuries old, hoping to be less anxious and more certain about how things are going to be.  Charlotte Joko Beck writes that our personal drive is to find a way to endure in our “unchanging” lives.  “We don’t really see life at all.  Our attention is elsewhere.  We are engaged in an unending battle with our fears about ourselves and our existence.”  She adds, “We’re only interested in preserving ourselves forever.”  We want others to treat us as though we are safe and secure in this life, that we are wonderful, deserving, lovable and are entitled to the happiness we want.

I have asked people if they believe that God put a specific person on this earth with the purpose of making them happy.  The answer is an unequivocal “No.”  They most often agree with the idea that “my happiness is my responsibility, and your happiness is yours.” This sounds reasonable enough. But our fears prevent us from really accepting this.   Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell talk about our stories.  These stories are “untested, uninvestigated theories” that make us believe our thoughts are true. 

So believing that someone should make us happy by giving us what we want is a story that we attach to and believe is true.  This person might be a spouse, friend, son or daughter.  It could be anyone.  We want others to behave in a way that will make us happy and agreeing with us is one such way.  In doing so they affirm the truth of our story. We can, however, learn to get out of our own way and connect with that part of us which is most true, unique and authentic. And by believing we know what is right for us, we can trust ourselves to act with humility and kindness. We have then forsaken fear, and we have made a commitment to be in the place of kindness.

In a book titled “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott, the author quoted E.L. Doctorow as saying that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Lamott added, “You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.” In addition to writing, this is also a useful way to think about living our lives.

So many of us are trying to see as much as possible as we move throughout our day. And in doing so we are also attempting the impossible. We are looking behind us at the past often thinking “if only I did that differently, or hadn’t said or done something.” Or we are attempting to look ahead into the future often anxiously thinking “what if I don’t perform well, don’t get the job I want, or can’t meet my deadline.” We unconsciously carry the “if only’s” and “what if’s” with us throughout our daily lives, and the weight of this becomes exhausting and quite depleting. Actually, we really can’t see what’s just around the corner. Yet we continue carrying this very burdensome load.`

People who see me in psychotherapy do not initially complain about what I call the “monkey chatter” in their minds. They don’t complain about not focusing on themselves in the present or about the distractions of the past and future. They often complain about someone in their life, someone they’re unhappy with, someone they can’t change. What we begin looking at is what is most immediate or present in their lives. So when someone comes in with a great deal of emotional pain and fear related to their discovery of love for someone outside the marriage, we attempt to locate and access their “true feelings,” what they really want for themselves, and then how to trust those feelings. This is really challenging, because most of us have mixed or ambivalent feelings, and “we want our cake and eat it too.” So we have to work through these internal conflicts, these confusing feelings that we haven’t been clearly conscious or mindful of, and this kind of work is new to us, slow-going, frustrating, and painful in its own right.