Supporting a young person who isn't ready to change

Watching someone you care about struggle can feel overwhelming, especially when they’re not ready to accept help. This is a situation many parents and families face, often while searching for ways to support a young person through difficult times.

Most of the time, the young person is vested in making positive changes and is completely on board with being open to learning skills and strategies to change problematic issues, behaviours and emotions. They all come having given consent, irrespective of age, yet with variable levels of investment in themselves.

Sometimes the young person isn't ready to make changes. For whatever reason, there is a reason for them to be anxious, depressed, self-harming, self-medicating or avoiding places like school, socialising, or other common challenges. Sometimes they don't feel quite ready but are open, and with careful coaching, start seeing the benefits of the work, and reluctance can gradually shift into engagement.

So what do you do when you realise that someone you care deeply about is struggling and needs help, but they either refuse it or resist the idea?

For parents, it can be utterly heartbreaking and can leave you feeling completely powerless as your beautiful child hits their version of a destruct button, and there seems to be nothing that you can do about it. Every attempt to help or support is met by a steel wall, the quick exit back to their lair or a torrential outburst designed to send you scattering to the four corners of the earth, ensuring that you will think twice before broaching the subject again anytime soon.

Or worse still, you are given false hope as they agree to seek help yet disengage with any of the ideas, strategies or support structures implemented that are all designed to help them out of the hole they are digging themselves deeper into.

For many, it is about timing

For parents, you may have to ride the storm with your child until they are ready to head for the safety of the port, then have the courage to show them the way by leading them. You may feel that all is lost and that you will surely all drown, but know one thing - this time will pass. The one thing that you can pretty much guarantee is that things will change.

Young people experience phenomenal changes in their physiology right up until the age of 25. Between the ages of 12 and 25, this change is more rapid than at any time since before they were born. It is no wonder that it can get a bit messy.

Think of a caterpillar and its journey to becoming a butterfly. As a caterpillar, it knows exactly what its purpose is: to eat and get plump, ready to metamorphose into a butterfly. But during the chrysalis stage, it turns into a gooey mess that has no definitive structure or purpose. Then it emerges as a beautiful butterfly, having transformed unrecognisably from its former state. Humans go through such a visible physical structural change, but change they do, and for some, it does get messy.

Be ready to just listen

If you like fixing things, sorting things out, and finding a solution, then the art of just listening might be a bit more difficult than it sounds. Active listening is a skill. For most of us, when we listen to someone else, we are usually relating what is being said to ourselves and often formulate a response before the person has even finished.

Sometimes we even jump ahead and predict or presume what the other person means. It might be that what is needed is for the young person to be heard. Without being judged, without you offering advice, your take on things or a solution. To sit with someone and truly listen, without placing your ideals on the conversation. It takes pure selflessness, patience, tolerance and putting aside your own needs. Active listening means focusing and paying attention solely to what the other person is saying.

Lead them, don't just tell them

As parents, we frequently step into parent mode and tell our children what they need to be doing rather than guiding them. It can be likened to walking hand in hand with them on a journey with an uncertain destination, rather than standing at the end of the road and pointing in the direction of a destination and telling them what directions they need to follow. You've probably lost them at the first 'go left.'

Understand that an adult brain thinks differently from a child’s brain. Your child is unlikely to see the world the same way that you do for many reasons. In the world of NLP, this is called 'map and territory.' Each individual has their own map of the world as they see it; to them, it is accurate. Each map collectively makes up the territory; your map is your map, and nobody is disputing it, but it isn't the territory.

The major differences in map and territory have been about values, perspective and cause and effect. 

Perspectives differ

What you might see as incredibly important may be of little consequence to your toddler, teen or anywhere in between. 

Five years in an adult’s life is very different to five years in a teenager’s life. Five years in a 15-year-old is 33%. Perspectives differ. As an adult, it is your responsibility to be more flexible in your thinking than your child is.

Imagine being a river that comes across an obstacle. What does a river do? It usually finds the easiest way around the obstacle or gently erodes the obstacle over time. What it doesn't do is stand its ground and insist that its way is the right way.

Offer the possibility of another way

If you do find yourself in the unenviable position of having someone that you love be in a tricky place and not open to changing, sow a seed. If you can plant a seed of possibility and allow it to grow at its own pace, nurturing and caring for it, there is a good chance the seed will grow, become strong and eventually blossom. Patience, understanding and acceptance are the key factors required to allow a seed to grow. Smothering the seed will only serve to suffocate it, and it is unlikely to grow.