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Troubled Teen...A Story of Denial

 

Best Christian Therapeutic Boarding Schools and Programs

Christian Therapeutic Boarding Schools - Boys


(click on any link below for more info)

Promise Village

Agape Boarding School

Shepherds Hill Academy (coed wilderness pgm)

Arivaca Boys Ranch

Teen Challenge Ranch

Arivaca Boys Ranch

Safe Harbor Academy

Vero Beach Boys Ranch

Gateway Military Academy

Prayer Mountain Academy

Christian Therapeutic Boarding Schools - Girls


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Columbus School for Girls

Lakeland Grace Academy

Shepherds Hill Academy (coed)

Wings of Faith Academy

Boise Girls Academy

depressed teenOne of the greatest portrayals that I saw of a family caught in this trap of denial and numbness was when I visited a family in Santa Barbara, California, with the intent of interviewing them and their daughter, Heidi, to consider her involvement in a therapeutic program. The first night of spending the night at their home was chaotic and frenzied. The house was a free for all, everybody was ignoring and figuratively walking over each other. I felt like dinner meal was more like an Animal House fraternity party. The disregard for one another was amazing, and the selfishness by all was astonishing. The kids never went to bed, and we who did, never slept. And all the time my wife and I witnessed this fiasco, Heidi’s parents looked at us as if nothing was wrong, and everything was “normal”. My fear was that it was indeed “normal” for them.

 

Heidi was rebelling, depressed, shutting down, flunking out of school, was shut up in her room, wouldn’t talk to anyone, and was ready to explode. I felt the same after one night in their home.

 

We decided to go out to eat lunch the next day. So Heidi, her parents, and my wife, Jan, and I hopped in the car to go down to the beach to eat at a restaurant on the wharf. We arrived an hour early before we were to eat, so we decided to go down to the beachfront, and watch the thunderous waves roll in and pound against the sand. It was beautiful, and oddly, very calming after spending the night in a house full of turmoil. Then all of the sudden, Heidi looked at her mom and said that she was going swimming. Mom said “okay”. Well, the odd thing was that none of us brought swim suits. So, Heidi started walking into the surf, fully dressed, and Mom and Dad sat there with us as if it was just perfectly normal to have your teen fully clothed deciding to take a swim in the raging surf while we were waiting for our lunch reservation. I thought to myself, “I knew California was different, but this is a little too weird for me”.

 

The former lifeguard in me started to come out (I swam competitively for 12 years), so I walked into the water a little over knee deep to watch Heidi, as she was now over her head in the waves, bobbing up and down, like “Hey, this is normal.” As I was standing in the water, a lifeguard on their pier saw me and I motioned to him to watch our little fully clothed “bobber.” Giving me the “okay” sign, he stood watching as I stood there getting drenched waiting for lunch. After 20 minutes or so, Heidi decided to start walking back in, passed me, so I followed her to the table to get her Mom and Dad, and we then walked up the stairs, into the restaurant and started to sit down. Not a word was said. Jan and I just looked at each other thinking that we were both in the Twilight Zone, and I just happened to get wet on my trip there.

 

The waitress came up and asked Heidi if she wanted a blanket, as we were sitting outside on the patio of this wharf side cafe; all as if it was totally normal to have fully clothed young ladies dripping all over the carpet with their Mom and Dad eating in a restaurant. And all the while, not a word was said about the “Heidi in the Surf” event.

 

That night, as I sat with her Dad eating Sushi (my first time) and downing California roles, I asked him if he saw anything “kinda weird” that day. His answer, ”No, did you?” I thought, “You gotta be kidding me”. So I answered, “Yeah, just about the whole day.” As we sat and I tried to convince this kind man what I had seen, and how abnormal everything was, and how concerned I was, thinking that he might need to be also. He responded that he didn’t think his teen really needed to be “sent off” and thought that she was just a normal teen. I left the next day and returned home from “LaLa Land” only to be called two weeks later when this man’s daughter ran away from home, attempted suicide. They then enrolled her in a program.

 

Denial? You think? Could be. But sometimes situations ease into “weirdness” and because people are so close to the situation, they don’t ever see the change, but just transition with it. In retrospect, Heidi’s parents now marvel at how crazy things were, and they didn’t even know it.

 

So, the question to you would be this. In your heart of hearts, are you in denial of where your teen really is? Are you in denial of what is really happening in your family? Have you become numb to what is really happening with your teen? Are you justifying what your teen is doing? And, of course, the final question. What’s it going to take to convince you that your teen needs something, and needs something now?

 

It’s never too early to act, but I have seen many (too many) times where it was too late.

 

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