Transcript of If Someone You Love Is Having a Hard Time, Listen to This

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. One of the hardest things in life is to watch somebody that you care about going through a really hard time. And I don't know about you, but in those moments I step in and I attempt to help and make things better. And then of course, what happens? My attempt to help just makes things worse. You know, you, you wanna help your kid, but they just barricade themselves in their room. Your partner's depressed. Your friend is drinking too much. You're worried. You ask questions because you're anxious about it. You give advice because you can see how this might turn into some disaster. I used to do that too, but oftentimes I wasn't helping. In fact, I was making things worse, which is why today I've asked one of the world's leading psychologists, to teach you and me how to help someone you love without panicking, controlling, turning the situation into a fight, or making the situation even worse. You're gonna learn the exact words to use when someone shuts down, pushes you away, or is making choices that truly scare you. This episode is an extraordinary resource for you because I know you want to be supportive.

I know you want to see this person who's struggling truly thrive. And what you're about to learn today will show you exactly how to do that. Did you know that the average American only gets 13 grams of protein for breakfast? Now, the medical experts are recommending that I get at least 100 grams. If you're only doing 13 grams for breakfast, you're already losing out of the gate. And that's exactly why I got involved and became a co-founder in a company called Pure Genius Protein. As soon as you twist the cap and throw this sucker down, you got 23 grams of high-quality protein handled. Plus, it's sugar-free, fat-free, has no artificial flavors or sweeteners, and it's only 100 calories. Use code MEL10 at Pure Genius Protein for 10% off. 23 grams of protein in 3 seconds for under $3 a shot. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm really excited that you're here with me today. It's It's always an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener, or you're here because somebody shared this with you, I just wanna take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.

Today, we are gonna talk about 3 questions to ask when someone you love is struggling. And one of the reasons why I wanted to share this conversation with you is because for the past several months, someone in my life has been really struggling, and my husband Chris and I, we have been really worried about them. So about a week ago, I went digging back through our library of episodes. I looked at over 400 episodes and I found this particular interview that I've never forgotten. It's one that I did with clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour. In it, she talks about 3 questions you need to ask somebody in your life that's struggling. And these are questions that really give you a roadmap for how to truly offer support that helps. Now, my husband and I listened to this a couple days ago, and we found it so incredibly helpful in guiding us in how to provide support that's effective for this person that we love who's struggling. And after I was done listening, I thought, you know what, I should really share this with you, because I bet you have somebody in your life who's struggling too.

So let me tell you a little bit about this extraordinary expert that you're about to spend some time with. Her name is Dr. Lisa Damour. She's a clinical psychologist, 3-time New York Times bestselling author of the books Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. Dr. Damour hosts the Ask Lisa podcast. She works in collaboration with UNICEF, is a regular contributor to CBS News. She served as a consultant to Pixar on the movie Inside Out 2. She's also a senior advisor to the Shubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University. And today she is here teaching you the 3 questions that you should ask anyone in your life who is struggling. I truly hope you will not only enjoy listening to this episode from our archives, I hope it's helpful. When my husband and I listened to this a few days ago, it was exactly the support and the 3 questions that we needed so we can help the person that we love who's struggling right now. Dr. Lisa Damour, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

Oh, Mel, thanks so much for having me.

I'm so excited. I have so much I want to talk to you about. I do have a confession. You were a tow rope that dragged me up the hill of parenting teenage daughters because I was an avid motherlode reader and disciple. So thank you for your work. Um, you have no idea what a difference it made. And when I saw that you were releasing yet another book, your latest book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, I thought, oh wow, what was it that made you want to write this latest book, Lisa?

So the way we talk about mental health as a culture does not square with how we as psychologists understand it. And what I mean by that is that so much of the discourse about mental health suggests that being mentally healthy means feeling good or calm or relaxed or at ease. And those are all good things, but those do not actually factor into how psychologists assess mental health. When we're looking at it, we're looking for two things: do the feelings fit the circumstance? And are they managed well? So we expect to see distress. You know, if somebody gets dumped in a romance, we expect sadness. We expect them to be really, you know, heartbroken and maybe bitter and a little angry. Like, those are all appropriate emotions. What we're really interested in is what does the kid do next, right? Do they weep? Do they talk to their friends? Do they get their ice cream? Like, do they do things to help themselves feel better? Or do they trash that kid online? Do they turn it against themselves? Do they smoke a ton of weed, right? Like, We only worry when we're in that second category of unhealthy coping.

That's what we're most interested in.

Well, what's immediately striking to me is that this applies to people of all ages, right? Absolutely. That what I have noticed is that people's ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions and the ups and downs in life have gotten way worse over time.

It's true. I think we have run into a situation where for far too many people, uncomfortable feels like unmanageable.

Yes.

That there's not a distinction between those two. And it's an important distinction because discomfort is part of life and teenagers are going to feel it. Adults are going to feel it. And it's important. And we want to care for people under those conditions, but we don't want to assume that discomfort means that everything must stop and it cannot be managed. Some people find themselves there, and then we have the full force of our clinical supports that we can bring to that. But those are two very different things. Yeah.

And just for the sake of this conversation, when you say teenager, what age group are you talking about?

It's a critically important question. So adolescence begins at 11, and this is something that psychologists have done a terrible job of getting out to the public. Most people think 13 because they hear teen at the end of that and they think teenager. We have always marked the onset of adolescence at age 11, and that is because adolescence begins when puberty is underway. And by 11, most kids, even if you can't see it on the outside, they are underway with puberty. And we mark the end of adolescence— you can push it as far as 24, 25. You can hear the asterisk in my voice on that. By and large, their brains are in great shape, very fully developed by 18, 19, 20. But their better reasoning is still more readily knocked offline until they're about 24, 25. So if they're very, very stirred up, young adults don't always handle things as well as they will, you know, after 24, 25. But I always get a little uncomfortable when people are like, "Oh, their brains are not developed till they're 24, 25." I'm like, "Well, but look at that." 'Look at that beautiful piece of art that kid made.

That's a developed brain.' But we're talking a big window here. I mean, 11 to 24, 25. I mean, those are very, very wide range of numbers and very different kinds of people filling in that space.

Yes. Okay, good. I'm so glad we started there because I also honestly would lump in adults that are emotionally immature and has never matured in terms of their emotional processing. But I'm glad that we're talking really the range of range of early middle school all the way through— you're through college. And what you're saying is that there's a difference between what you know clinically and what people believe is the baseline, that mental health does not mean be happy. What does it mean to be mentally well?

What it means is that the emotions you have are actually in concert with what's happening. In your world. And I think that mental health is often defined by experiencing distress, and that is 180 from where the culture is right now. So often mental health concerns and distress are treated as though they are one and the same. But I'll give you several examples. It's so easy of where the presence of distress is actually evidence of mental health, right? So if the kid gets dumped, we expect distress. The absence of it would be concerning. If a teenager has a huge test tomorrow and they have not started studying, we want to we see some anxiety. The absence of anxiety is more concerning than the presence of anxiety. If someone's really mean to you, right? If you're a teenager or you're an adult and someone's really mean to you, we expect to see hurt and then probably a self-protective anger. Those are all unpleasant emotions. Those are all unwanted emotions. Those are evidence that we work exactly as we should. And so to pathologize all of that means that people are spending their normal, healthy days feeling like there's something wrong with them, when in fact, that distress is proof that they work perfectly.

Lisa, you're a genius.

No.

I just had this huge breakthrough because you're right. We have just painted with such a broad stroke that, you know, guilt, fear, shame, anger, upset, heartbreak, that somehow that makes you weak. When what you're actually saying is no, no, no, no, no, no. If it's occurring, in reaction to the appropriate situation, that is a sign that you're mentally well.

Absolutely. And it's also data. That's the other way we think about all of our feelings, negative and positive. They tell us how things are going. So if every time you have lunch with somebody, you walk away feeling kind of stepped on and diminished, that's really good data. Don't have lunch with that person if you can help it, right? And if you go to a job interview and it feels just thrilling to be in the space, like, That's good data. Emotions— psychologists are surprisingly agnostic about them. Like, we don't really value positive ones over negative ones. It's just all information. And our job is to take it in.

I love this reframe. I absolutely love it. I would love to tease this out a little bit more because I think this applies to all of us.

It does.

So Lisa, What is a normal emotion and what's not? I guess what I mean by that question is, how do we tell the difference between something that is just an awful situation where you gotta ride the wave versus something that we should be concerned about?

So there's a few ways. I mean, part of it is there's no real right feeling, right? You have the feelings you have. And I think that I would never want to say, you know, we always expect to see this feeling under these circumstances, because of course our feelings are informed by who we are, our histories, you know, what's come before. So there's not always a perfect map of what we expect to see. And here again, psychologists can just usually just take a much more curious, like borderline anthropological stance towards emotion as opposed to judging or valuing. But here's what we don't wanna see. We don't wanna see emotions getting in the way of people's lives. That's where we start to be concerned. So we fully expect to see sadness under sad conditions. We don't expect to see depression, which is where mood becomes so low that it really, um, casts a pall over everything in a person's life. We fully expect to see anxiety if there's something wrong, right? If there's, danger around you or a lethal virus in the environment, right? We expect to see anxiety, but we don't expect anxiety to become paralyzing and get in the way of people's ability to do the things that really are safe or they can and should be able to do.

So for us, the index is really much more about functioning and do emotions undermine the ability to function well in the world? Because they should be supporting our ability to navigate our lives and deepen our relationships. They shouldn't be getting in the way.

So the real takeaway here for all of us is that distressing emotion, it is part of being mentally well. But when you start opting out of seeing friends and you stop the hygiene protocol of taking showers and exercising and eating, or you start overmedicating your feelings with alcohol or weed or whatever, That's the red flag.

That's right. I'm gonna even tease that apart a little bit more. So the emotions can either get in the way, right? So mood that actually disturbs the ability to live one's life, or, and you moved in this direction and such a critically important direction, what I would call costly coping. So people are coping with moods, but they're doing it in ways that come at a cost. So either abusing substances or being incredibly hard on the people around them, or turning it against themselves, whether, you know, they're running themselves down or even engaging in self-harm, those may be actually providing some relief. People only do things that actually work for them, but they come with a price tag. So that's the other thing we look for. So we look for a mood that gets in the way of the ability to live one's life, or coping that is a costly way to go about things. If not immediately, certainly over time. Those are the flags that we keep an eye out for.

I got it. Two flags: mood and costly coping. And I want to roleplay for a little bit, if that's cool. Sure. Because I love to leave our audience in action and empowered. So if you're in a situation where— let's just talk about the costly coping stuff that you talked about. How do you, as a parent or a friend or a partner of somebody, You see somebody smoking too much weed, playing video games for too long, those sort of coping mechanisms that, you're right, let you escape. How do you even begin to approach it? Because every time we would approach it in our household, you get the big shove back.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I think the first step is to really recognize that it is working for that person, that it is serving a purpose. And you described that, right? That substances can help numb distress. They're incredibly effective at that. That's the thing. That's the problem with them, right? Is that they work to make pain go away.

Oh my gosh. Hold on a second. Can I just stop there? I don't know that I've ever heard anybody ever hit the pause button and, and tell the truth that people engage in these behaviors because they work for them, which is why they become so damn defensive when you try to take them away from them.

Exactly. Wow! You know, this is where I just am so glad I got the training I did when I did, because the premise of my whole training is that humans are rational actors. They don't do things that don't serve a purpose. Even if those things outwardly end up causing so much trouble, there's always a rationale. And that's the— actually, the best part about my job is that when people come my way clinically, My job is to figure out, you know, you're doing this thing that is just damaging your life and getting in the way. We have to understand why so that you then can feel like you've got some choices. Wow.

I'm just letting the profound nature of what you're asking us to do, because I can think of several friends who had daughters in particular self-harm, cutting, very self-destructive behavior. And from the outside, you look at it and you panic, and then you make it wrong, and you wanna do anything because you love this person to stop it. But I think it means that we're missing this critical step in connecting, which helps us lead to the problem solving. So why is it so important, even though it's terrifying when your kid is hurting themselves, or they're clearly escaping and addicted, why is it so important to say to yourself, this is a coping mechanism that's working for my kid and I actually have to start there?

Here's why it's so important, because the alternative is a dead end. And what I mean by that is that if you come at a kid or anyone saying, you need to stop and then fill in the blank. What you're going to run into is the part of them that is like, "You don't get why this is working for me." And now you have a conflict. If you go the route of saying, "You're a smart kid. You wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't working for you at some level." The conflict ends up in the kid or the adult that you're trying to help between the part of them that doesn't wanna be cutting or abusing substances or, you know, playing video games 8 hours a day.

Or running around and sleeping with the wrong people, or, which is what I was doing in high school, but okay.

Yeah, right? I mean, whatever it takes to help yourself feel better. So there's a part of them that doesn't wanna be doing those things, and there's a part of them that is doing those things. And the job of the helpful outsider is to try to get a conflict going between those two parts of the person who is doing the thing and to stick up for the side that wants to be healthier. I'll tell you the language that I remember when I learned this as a clinician around if a, if a client comes in and is talking about suicide, right? Which is of course terrifying. And I remember the day I learned the language from a senior clinician to say to someone, listen, Clearly, part of you is really thinking about hurting yourself, but part of you wants help. And that's the part that's telling me that you're having those thoughts. I'm gonna stick up for the part of you that wants help. And that's how you don't turn it into a fight.

That's incredible. There's a part of you that is really considering this, or there's a part of you that is in so much pain that you're resorting to cutting to feel alive. Or you're in so much pain that you're smoking dope so that you can just numb out and forget about it. But there's a part of you that wants help. And that's the part of you that I'm speaking to. Did I get that right?

Yeah. You just say you wouldn't be letting me know if you didn't want help. There's a part of you that wants help.

What do you do if they didn't tell you or you don't— you know what I mean? Because a lot of times, particularly With these behaviors, people hide them.

It's true. So eventually you find out, or you smell the weed coming out of their room, or you, you know, notice that a young person has harmed themself. So I think the first thing we want to do as sort of the helpful people who are trying to step in is to get to a place with ourselves where we feel a bit centered. Reacting strongly in those moments does not go well. But then I think it does sometimes happen that you have to confront a person about their behavior. And again, I think teaming up with them and teaming up with what I know all teenagers have and all adults have, which is that growth-giving, health-seeking side, is the way to go. So I think, um, you know, let's just use marijuana as an example, and you can smell it.

I'll be the kid.

Okay.

Ooh, I can't wait for this. I want to hear a quick word from our sponsors. I can already feel you, Dr. Lisa, outside the door, and I'm the kid in the bedroom rolling up the joint. Okay. But we're going to take a quick break. Our sponsors bring us all of this at zero cost to you. So I want to give them your time and attention. And when we come back, Dr. Lisa is going to be knocking on my door while I light up a doobie. Don't go anywhere. Welcome back. I'm with New York Times bestselling author Dr. Lisa Damour, and we're about to roleplay here. Me, I'm the weed-smoking teen sitting in my bedroom, no clue that Mom's standing outside. And Dr. Lisa, she is going to play the role of the calm, centered parent and walk us through step by step how you and I are supposed to handle these kinds of stressful situations. Here we go. Okay, so I'm sitting in my room. I'm teenage Mel. I'm rolling up a big doobie. I'm lighting it up. I'm puffing away. I don't even know my mom's outside. I'm listening to music. I'm texting my friends.

I got my headphones on. I don't know that you're home because I didn't even hear the garage doors open. So there I am.

Okay. And here I come. So knock, knock, knock on the door, no answer. So I let myself in, right? And I say, oh buddy, oh buddy, you and I both know that smoking weed like this is gonna get in the way of the kind of life you wanna lead. We gotta figure out what's getting in the way of you making different choices.

Whoa. Like, you just spoke to a different part of me.

That's the goal, right? That's the goal.

Now, do you leave the room? Do you just drop it like a grenade and then let that kind of settle for them? Or do you sit down on the bed? Like, because I think we just don't know what to do. And then we get so emotional, Lisa, that we react, which makes it worse.

Well, I think I'd see what the kid does. I mean, I'd sort of take the cue from them. I mean, because he just did say something. I think we also have to give kids room to come to where we are, right? I mean, I think it's so hard in parenting so often, and I have two teenagers myself, right? So often in parenting, we have a full head of steam. They walk in the door, we're like, "We need to talk about..." Boom, right? And the kid's like, "Whoa, like, I was gonna go get a snack, right? I was not ready for this conversation." So I think—

Plus, now I'm high, Mom, and my tongue feels like it's filled my mouth. I can't have a conversation with you.

So then I think, let's just say for the sake of argument, like, this isn't a great time to have the conversation because the kid is not entirely available to it. And then I think you say, you know, we're gonna have to have a conversation about what's happening here. And my favorite phrase, and I also remember the moment I learned this in my training, is, 'Cause what we're doing isn't working.' What you're doing isn't working, right? And that's the thing about substances. They do get to a place where they start to undermine a person's life. You know, that they're not showing up at school or they're underfunctioning academically, or they aren't actually maintaining friendships, or they're, You know, not contributing to the home or the community. And so that becomes the thing, like, you can't keep doing this because what you're doing isn't working. We have to come up with something else. So if you're in so much pain that you're doing this, we're gonna find another way for you to address that pain. But the, the goal, and you can hear this in every approach, is to not turn it into a showdown between the person who's trying to help and the person they wanna help.

It just had this visual of kind of that— you're right, it is a showdown. The knock on the door, the screaming, the shame, the this. And now you're like putting your 40 or 50-year-old angst about this onto your 16-year-old, and it just compounds everything that they're trying to escape anyway. If you can center yourself and realize you're trying to get on the same page with the part of them that wants to do better, Instead of pounding on the door, of literally like putting your arm around them. You know, like, buddy, I love that you're like, hey, buddy, you know, and I love this. I wish I had talked to you 2 years ago because that what you're doing isn't working. When my husband's depression came to a head, I was the bitch on the door knocking. I was trying to say what you're doing isn't working. And instead, of course, I'm like, you know, thank God you're doing yoga and all this stuff because you'd probably be dead if you weren't. But you got to start that, that you're like, you got to get in therapy and you got I take, 'cause, but what I wish I would've known and what I hope everybody's taking away is that phrase, "What you're doing isn't working." Mm-hmm.

We gotta do something else. And I'll tell you, Mel, so when I was in training, I had a really brilliant and terrifying supervisor. And she said to me, "You get 8 words in an utterance. When you're listening and sitting with a client, they can say as much as they wanna say. You can't go past 8 words." And the reason for this is as soon as you're past 8 words, you're into somebody's head. You've bypassed their heart, right? But if you can keep it tight and if you can go to the core of it in 8 words or fewer, it lands. And so what's interesting is that discipline of needing to find just the arrow, the end, and the through line. That's how I've ended up actually being able to translate over into writing and podcasting and, you know, all of the other forms of work I do. Because if you're doing good clinical work, you're just going for the, the central message as cleanly and as easily understood as possible.

I love how you simplified this for us. You You have highlighted the notion that distress is a really important part of being mentally well. And it's only when it becomes destructive to your mood and your daily functioning, or you start having costly coping mechanisms, that we gotta sound the alarm, so to speak, because what they're doing is working for them to escape or cope. But it's not helping. And you are like an arrow hitting the target, Lisa. Like, this is your genius, that your job is to appeal to the greater part of them. What you're doing isn't working, and I'm here to help you figure out what could work.

Exactly.

Wow. You also write in your bestseller, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, that there is a difference with how the different genders cope with stress. Can you walk us through that?

Sure. Let me say a whole bunch of caveats first. Um, anytime we're looking at gender findings, we're looking at huge numbers. There's tremendous overlap between the genders. And then of course, we've only really studied conventional genders, male, female. We are slow to the table to study kids who do not. Don't fit into one of the traditional categories. So everything I'm saying needs to sort of be couched in that broader understanding of how we do the research and what we've studied. So having said that, when we look at traditional gender categories, a pretty consistent broad finding is that when they are in distress, girls are more likely to discuss and boys are more likely to distract. And these are both acceptable forms of managing emotions. There's actually nothing wrong with either. But where we see trouble is if you veer to the extreme or you use that strategy all the time.

Can you give us an example of what you mean by discuss or distract so we kind of have a knowing and then also what's sort of within range of, of helpful coping? and what gets to be on the fringe.

Absolutely. So let's say a girl, um, someone's mean to her at school, and she goes and finds her best friend, and she's like, "Ah, you're not gonna believe what so-and-so just did. She was so, you know, such a jerk to me." And her friend says, "Oh man, she is such a jerk, and I love you, and you're fine, and you're cool." Okay, yay. Like, good outcome. We like that. We could also have a boy where someone's a jerk to him at school. and he's upset by it and he doesn't wanna talk about it, but he goes home and he, um, plays basketball for a little while, blows off steam, gets it out of his system, gets past it, lets it go, moves on. Those are two perfectly reasonable outcomes of those two different strategies. What we don't wanna see is girls who then, um, they discuss it with their friend, and then they end up in a 3-hour conversation discussing it with their friend. And then they are doing the, you know, like, critical analysis of the text thread with the girl who was mean. And then 4 other girls hop in on this. There's 2 problems with this.

One is girls are more likely than boys to engage in vicarious distress, meaning if my friend's upset, now I'm upset too. So it has this, like, widening, you know, swath of distress. The other thing is that it threatens to turn into what psychologists call rumination. Though it's kind of gross, it's a really helpful metaphor. It's like picking at an emotional wound, right? The more you talk about it, the worse it gets. It's not healing up. Better to just leave it alone. So we don't wanna see that extreme. And if we go down the boy stereotype, what we don't wanna see is that, you know, every time this kid has something that feels bad, he just shuts down, goes plays basketball or hops on his video game and just stays in this distracted place until the feeling dies down enough that he can tolerate it. Because the cost to him is, number one, he's not getting the kind of social support he deserves, right? Nobody knows he's in pain. Number two, he's not actually developing the fluency in verbalizing emotions that we'd like to see. That part of what happens if we go down these boy-girl paths is that girls get better and better and better at talking about feelings because they practice it all the time.

And boys can get worse and worse and worse at talking about feelings because they're not practicing it. Discussing it with one another, especially. So the ideal management is somewhere in between: a little discussing, a little distracting, or any variety of other strategies that help to tame or express emotions. We just don't wanna see anybody leaning too hard on one strategy.

These are so relatable. And I know so many people in our family and also friends whose— we're gonna start with the kind of rumination side. And I'm sure this goes for adults too. You have those people in your life that can't let it go. They're still talking about the divorce and it's been final for 3 years. They're still complaining about the, uh, what happened when mom died and who got what and like just holding on to it. How do you approach that with somebody?

So I think that— let me do the girl example version and then let's think bigger. Yes.

Let's go rumination.

Let's just go right down the rumination road. So what I encourage parents and also peers to do if they're caring for a teenager who is really spinning their wheels, spinning their wheels, is to say to them, listen, talking about feelings usually helps, but what I'm noticing is the more we're talking, the worse you feel. So let's do this. Let's put a pin in this. Let's make a plan to talk about it tomorrow. What time do you have? What time do I have? We'll, we'll, we'll like schedule it. We're coming back to it. But between now and then, let's just do something else. Let's go think about something else. Let's just take a mental vacation from this situation. And, and what is extraordinary is that so often when you do that, when I've met with that kid the next day or talked to the person the next day, they're like, yeah, I don't know what I was so upset about. Like just the space alone, the time alone. Alone brings it down to size. And they've— they're no longer dumping stress hormones into their bloodstream, you know, for that 24 hours they're not thinking about it.

So it helps people to find their feet. So that's a short-term, you know, something that just popped up. I think there's probably a different answer for those bigger questions around, you know, people who are struggling to let go of a painful divorce or struggling to let go of how things went down in the family in the wake of a parent's death. And my hunch is for that, there's just a lot of meaning to what occurred that has not really been examined or resolved. Yeah.

Yeah. What about with the boys? How do you approach that? You know, where— or any behavior of just distraction and kind of literally losing yourself in something so you don't have to face the pain. Of the situation and the emotions that you're feeling.

So it's interesting, distraction can end up as costly coping, right? We can go right back to that category, which is, you know, so say a boy's had a really rough day and his strategy is to play video games for 8 hours. Okay, well, he may have gotten past the rough day, but now he has a new problem because he hasn't done his homework and he needs to go to bed, right? I mean, it creates its own, you know, side effects. So one way to take it up is just from that side of saying, look, I get it that you may have had a rough day and playing some video games helps you to get through it. You can't be doing this so much that you now have a new situation to deal with. Is there another way you could help yourself feel better?

Hmm.

Now the thing here about boys and expression, right? Like that's really what's underneath this is getting kids, but boys in particular, to talk about feelings is that there's a lot caught up in why they don't talk about feelings. And, um, And I would say it's one of the hardest things in parenting that I hear about is parents of adolescent boys in particular who become very, very sphinx-like and very, very reserved. And I think that's its own fascinating and complex universe to make sense of.

I think that's its whole 45-minute conversation, don't you?

It's a big one. It's a big one, and it's an important one, and it can be done. But I'll just, for now, I'll just say, Expression of emotion takes a lot of forms, and it's not always in language. And what I've really become much better at is honoring that there are healthy ways that boys express emotion, but it's not always in words. Though I also wish they were more often talking about what they were feeling.

Yeah. And I want to hear a quick word from our sponsors because they're bringing us this incredible information at zero cost. But when we return, Dr. Lisa, I have a question for you. How do you know when it's just a normal normal upsetting or distressing emotion versus something that you actually should be concerned about? We're going to answer that when we return. Don't go anywhere. Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins, and I am here with Dr. Lisa Damour, one of the world's leading experts in parenting, education, childhood development, stress, and anxiety. And we are getting a master class in how to deal with distressing emotions, how to know when things are a real problem. And we're about to dive into the tools, tactics, and scripts that you can use to help somebody that you love who's struggling. One of the things that I learned in this book that was just life-changing I wish I had known this 10 years ago. It's a word that explained my entire experience of raising teenage daughters, which is externalization. And the fact that— and it still happens today. I, I, we joke in our family, Lisa, and you may have, as you're hearing me explain this, you probably have somebody in your life who does this.

They emotionally dump on me. So So I've realized that when our daughters wanna chat, they call my husband and they have wonderful conversations about their life and what's going on in their relationships and what they need help with and ba ba ba ba ba. When there is any kind of upsetting or distressing situation, I will get 3 FaceTime calls in a row until I pick up. I get the tears, the venting, the frustration, the world is ending, da da da da da da. And then it's all done. They go back to their life, and I feel like somebody has thrown a bucket of slime on top of me. And now, of course, I'm all worked up. And your research shows that this is normal and it has a name. This is normal behavior?

In teenagers. It's actually one of the very few things that is especially organized around adolescence is the use of the— we call it the defense of externalization. And Mel, I have a story. I have such a vivid memory of being a freshman in college myself. And I grew up in Colorado and I went to college in Connecticut. And I remember doing this to my mom. Like, I remember getting her on the phone. Yeah, you did too, right? And so, and I remember like calling her and being like, I don't know, I don't really like it here. I don't really have any friends. I'm not sure I'm going to make it. I don't know. Then like, then I see my roommate, I'm like, I gotta go, right? So I hang up the phone, I go out with my roommate, have a super good time. And I remember my mom called me the next day and she's like, She's like, "Are you okay?" And I'm like, "Yeah. Like, I don't know what your problem is, but I'm fine." And my dad told me later, like, she'd been up all night. I mean, she was getting ready to, like, pack the cooler and drive across the plains to retrieve me.

So this is not a new maneuver. Teenagers have forever and always done this. It's not a fun maneuver for parents, for sure. But it is also really hard to be a teenager. And they have a lot of big, powerful emotions. And I think sometimes the way they get through their day is to conveniently dump them, treat them like emotional trash on the people who love them and are willing to collect their trash. And having discarded the trash, what we often find as parents is the kids don't want to talk about it. They're like, "No, no, no, I've dumped the trash. Like, don't ask me about it. I'm not going to answer your texts. I'm not going to pick up your phone calls. Like, just take the trash and make it go away." That's unbelievable.

You're exactly right. Because on the receiving end of it, I feel like they've dumped the trash on me. I'm weighted down. I'm worried about it. I'm thinking about it. I just had a sleepless night the other night because of something that one of our daughters is going through. And then I spoke to her in the morning. She's like, oh, what? That's fine. I mean, I don't know. And it's as if nothing happened. I'm like, excuse me? I should have taped the conversation so you heard the DEFCON 10 bomb that you dropped on me. And I should probably apologize, Lisa, to my mom because I would call her every day from the payphone in my dorm hallway at Dartmouth, collect, to cry and complain. I don't like it here. I don't know anybody here. Everybody always has their friends here. And it got so bad after 2 weeks of this that my mom said, you either hang up the fucking phone and don't call me again and get out there and make some friends, or I'm coming to pick you up the next time you call "and you will come back home and you'll go to the community college and that'll be that." I never called her again.

Hmm. But then our daughters, both that same scenario, the first couple of weeks of school, just processing the hard emotion. But it's so liberating to hear that it's normal. And so should we just kind of let the trash fly and kind of step out of the way and not feel like we have to collect it? Just let them litter?

Yes. And I think that if you're worried in this interaction, you can say to your kid, "Do you want my help or do you just need to vent?" And that is often— if they say, "I just need to vent," which is overwhelmingly what they are looking for, what I would say is visualize yourself opening an emotional garbage bag, right? And just let them unload all of that garbage into the bag. And then when the call is over, dispose of it, right? Don't carry it around. Don't take it to bed with you. Right? Just be like, "That was a garbage collection moment, and the kid needed a place to dump the garbage. And I am, as the loving person in their life, willing to collect their garbage." But yeah, you don't need to then go through the trash yourself.

You could have saved me years in marriage counseling, because I feel like a lot of the times that my husband and I then are at odds about, is my stress about what the kids have just externalized by handing me their emotional garbage, and his ability to just either not be bothered by it, not worried about it. Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing about that. When do you know it's time to get a therapist involved, and how do you look for one?

One?

The right one?

So I think we would go back to the, what we're doing isn't working.

Okay.

And we're not able to find another way, you know, that the things we're trying aren't helping, right? Because nobody starts at a therapist, right? They try at home to make things better.

Yeah.

And so I think if you feel like we've thought of everything we can, what we're doing isn't working, our kid is not better enough, our kid is still suffering, that's when it's a great time to get help. And, and I think that's really critically important. I think one thing when we talk about teenagers and therapy, one thing that I always like to remember, teenagers worry that there's something wrong with them. Almost universally, this is a worry that teenagers carry. And it's because being a teenager is a very dysregulating and very disorganizing experience. Their emotions become very intense. The way their brain works changes. And so I think it's true that a lot of teenagers harbor a secret concern that there's something wrong with them. And so when it comes time to suggest that they should be in therapy, we have to do it carefully because I think if you just say, like, "You know what? You need to talk to a pro," right? Then the kid's like, "Oh my gosh, like, this is exactly, like, my secret concern is now, you know, confirmed." So I always am very careful about how I approach it, even when I know it's the right recommendation.

And I will tend to say to teenagers, "Listen, for what you are up against, "you deserve way more support than you have, and we need to get someone who actually knows what they're doing to help support you through this." That is just a tiny shift that can make an enormous difference. Then there's the issue of finding somebody. And this is hard. And part of what's hard about it is there's just not a lot of clinicians who specialize in caring for teenagers. What I would say is, in my experience, pediatricians are actually a really good resource. They know your kid, They know the local talent in terms of psychotherapy. They are often good at doing a good match, you know, between your kid and who they know in the community. They can sometimes help facilitate making an appointment happen. And so that's usually my generic advice is ask your pediatrician who they like.

That is so hopeful and so accessible. And I really appreciate that answer because it's something anybody can do and it makes a lot of sense. Let's pivot to this accelerating mental health crisis that we are reading about, we are experiencing. Lisa, I don't have a single friend who doesn't have a family member who is spiraling. It feels like there is something that's been bubbling underneath the surface. It feels like everybody is very tender.

So we had talked about suicidality. Let's just hit it head on because there's— yeah, it's the scariest thing. So it is true now that thoughts of suicide are actually not rare. That I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but I know that when we've looked, you know, before 2000, you know, we would take surveys of adolescents and the frequency with which they know the thought had crossed their mind. And it's not rare. And I remember being a teenager and like one time my mom and I were in a fight and I was like, oh, wouldn't she, couldn't, if I I hurt myself right now. She'd feel so bad, right? So did I think about it? Yes. Was I, was I myself close to doing it? No. Right? So I do want people to know that if you have a worry about a teenager or anybody in your life around questions of whether they are suicidal, what we recommend as psychologists is you just have to ask. You have to ask. And, and here's how I would have you do I would say to the person, listen, I need to ask you a question, and this may feel out of the blue, you know, something like that.

But because of, and then you tell them why, right? You don't just ask randomly. You say, because you've been in your room for a day and a half, or you have not seemed like yourself, or you were so upset about that thing, I need to ask, have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life? And the reason we're reluctant to do this is we're afraid we're gonna give the person the idea. Ah, that's a concern. We know that's not a concern. What we do know when we have researched adolescents is if a teenager is thinking about suicide, they're glad you asked. So I think we start with the scariest thing and how to address the scariest thing. And then we can go think down the line of, um, of more manageable concerns. But that is the one we just have to address very directly.

Thank you. And it was very reassuring to hear the research that teenagers are just glad you asked.

They're glad you asked.

Yeah, we did an episode with our son where he disclosed to me on the episode, I did not know that this was the case, that he had had big scary thoughts like that freshman year. And I had no idea. Yeah. And so one of the things that was interesting about it is he was pretty surprised to learn that it is frequent and normal to have a thought like that. And there's a big difference between having a thought thought and actually wanting it to happen, and that they do come and go and they do go away, and it doesn't mean you're at the end of the end. But even just talking about it made him feel better. And so I love that you just gave us permission based on the research to just ask, and they will feel better even if the thought hadn't even crossed our mind. Thank you for checking in.

Yeah. But the things I worry about, I worry about increased isolation People spend more time away from one another. I worry about eating disorders in kids of all genders. We have traditionally attached these to girls. That's not actually how it works. And I worry about, you know, we haven't talked about social media. It's a big topic. And I feel very, I feel like it's way more complicated than just, you know, all good or all bad. I worry about the norms in digital environments where kids hang out. And what I mean by that is that one thing I feel that we definitely saw between March 2020 and then the subsequent years was the kids who were stuck at home who felt like they were gonna use that time to get in shape, right? And improve themselves. So they start searching online for fitness, diet, exercise, anything like that. The algorithms that drive social media pick this up and start to flood their feed with image after image after image of ultra thin or ultra fit, and then how to lose weight, and here's an advertisement for it. Teenagers are vulnerable to norms. They are more vulnerable to norms than kids are.

They are more vulnerable to norms than adults are. And I— it's hard because we can't prove this with the data, but I will just go out on a limb and say I am convinced if you are looking at 4,000 images a day of ultra fit, ultra thin people, That impacts real-world behavior and that changes how you eat and that changes how you exercise. And we did see an explosion of eating disorders. So what I would say is we gotta watch where kids are online now and forever because the norms are powerful.

I can't agree more. In fact, uh, it happened to our daughter.

Mm-hmm.

And I remember when she got into treatment for disordered eating, she ended up deleting her Instagram. And she said, like, "My entire feed is basically models and waist trainers and puppies. And it makes me feel terrible. And I keep looking at these images, and it makes me feel like I'm—" I, like, need to get like that. And I know, I know that these are fake. I know there are filters, but I still can't help it. I want to be like that. And so it drove all of this obsessive behavior. Is there also a connection with the spike in eating disorders because it is typically something driven by this need to control? It's interesting.

I wrote a piece for The Times I think it came out in April 2021 about the spike in eating disorders. And there's a variety of reasons that, that can come into it. So some is everything feels out of control. Here's one thing I can control. That can be really powerful. But I do also just think if all you're looking at are ultra thin, ultra fit bodies, your sense of what bodies look like changes and your view of your own body changes.

I wanna ask you a very specific question on this topic, because I think there's also this kind of cultural obsession with being in shape and being healthy and being good looking. And if you've got a kid that suddenly goes on a health kick and now they're exercising and they get positive reinforcement because they're looking great and they're now gonna run the 5K and now they're gonna get in triathlons or now, you know, everyone's like, Oh, you look great in that bathing suit. Where is the line where it's a healthy thing versus this is now something that's scary? Because I miss the signs. Yeah. And kids are also remarkable at just kind of, oh, it's fine. Yeah, I'm just— and then because it's in this lane of, but they look better, but they say they're going for a run. How do I— Insert myself here. How do you do that?

It's tricky and it is easy to miss. Um, so some framing stuff. One is teenagers shouldn't be losing weight. And usually they're gaining weight in, in the course of typical development and post-late, later puberty, you know, that they're gaining weight and they're gaining strength. So if you notice that your teenager has lost weight, you should be attentive to that. It's just an unusual thing for teenagers to do. Huh. And it's not all bad. I mean, you can talk with your pediatrician and, you know, there are some teenagers who the pediatrician may say, you know, you're— this weight is not in a healthy place. You know, losing some weight would be a healthier thing to do. Then you can do that with a nutritionist and the pediatrician and do it in a controlled and careful way. But one thing I've learned from my colleagues in the eating disorder world is by the time a teenager is losing weight, something's usually up. And wow, I think that's just a valuable, you know, marker to have. The other thing that we want to watch out for is dropping entire food categories. So I'll put it this way: not everybody who becomes a vegetarian goes on to develop an eating disorder.

Everybody who goes on to developing an eating disorder drops a food category.

Oh my God, our daughter, the one who did have disordered eating, did a research paper in college about— I don't even remember the name of it, but that there's a lot of people in her age group that are gluten-free or vegan or dairy-free or this, and it is a socially acceptable and praised way to have disordered eating. It's not actually an allergy. It's literally a, it's crossed a line. Is that what you're talking about?

It's a flag. It's a flag. And one of the ways I sometimes assess that flag is I'll sometimes care for teenagers who are like, "I don't eat sugar." And I'll be like, "Hmm," right? And my eyebrows will go up. But if I also know that they don't eat sugar unless somebody brings in some really good cupcakes, I don't worry about it too much. Okay. So there's like what people say and what people do And what we want fundamentally is to see that food is a pleasure, that it is a wonderful source of energy, that there's variety in a young person's diet, in any of our diets. So those are some flags to keep an eye out for. And then I would say if concerns really start to rise, we can actually go back to where we started around people having two sides. And it's the job of all of us, and teenagers are developing in their capacity to take good care of ourselves. That's our job. And so if a teenager is suddenly eating nothing but celery and running, you know, a lot, that kid is not taking good care of themselves. And so before it gets to that extreme, I would want the loving person in their life to say, hey, you know, I see that you're getting pretty fit, but I'm not so sure you're taking good care of yourself.

Are you taking good care of yourself? Are you eating the kind of variety of nutrition? Are you being gentle enough on your body? Like, exercise, yeah, but not to the point of injury, you know, to use that as a guardrail that fundamentally that's the goal is for the teenager to be doing a really, really excellent job of caring for themselves.

Beautiful. I worry a lot about how we seem to have a parenting crisis of parents who can't tolerate their kids' anxiety. Anxiety and are allowing their kids' anxiety to run the house. Can you give us some advice, especially given that teenagers are so— such emotional beings to begin with? How do you give space for the normal emotion without letting a teenager's emotion run your house or dictate what they do?

Well, thank you for bringing up this— I mean, it's a huge topic. Um, and actually between Untangled and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, I've published a book called Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. But what I hear all the time is 80% applies to kids of all genders, which I am sure is true. And in that book, I actually make at the outset a case for healthy anxiety and a case for healthy stress. We have always, as psychologists, recognized that healthy anxiety is the anxiety that alerts us when something's wrong. It is not on its own pathological. And we have not helped the situation by using the same word to describe healthy anxiety and something that we diagnose. Um, it's sort of better— we have the word sadness and we have depression for the diagnosis, but we use anxiety, you know, in both categories. So that doesn't help as much. And same with stress. Stress is actually the human experience of adaptation. We experience stress anytime things change, anytime we have to adapt to a new condition. And it can be a wonderful condition or a lousy condition, but we always experience stress under changed conditions.

And we only consider stress pathological if it is chronic or traumatic. But all other stress, we just tuck into the, you know, helping you grow, doesn't always feel good category. Um, What I will tell you is that the most important thing for people to know about anxiety is that avoidance feeds anxiety. And this is one of the, again, most critical findings in psychology and one that we have done a completely terrible job of getting out to the public. And here's how it works. If I, let's say, have some social avoidance, some social anxiety, and there's a party that I've been invited to, and it's a good party to go to, right? It's a rational, like, should be fun, friend of mine's party. But say I feel anxious and say I agree to go to the party, but then the day of, my anxiety is starting to really accelerate. And then I'm thinking, I don't think I should go. I don't wanna go. And say my parent is like, eh, it's just a party. You don't have to go, right? Here's what happens. The first thing that happens is I feel so much better, right? My anxiety was cresting, and then I get to avoid and it immediately plummets.

Like what we call reinforcement, instantly relief. And so the upshot of that is next time I feel anxious, I know what helps me feel better. It's avoidance. So that's the first problem. The second problem is that I never go to the party and check out how it is, right? So whatever I have daydreamed about how terrifying this party is or how to, you know, like how cruel everyone will be at the party, that is now sealed in amber. And I continue to believe it 'cause I have no counter evidence. Whereas if I go to the party, I'm like, "Oh wait, it's not so bad." But if I don't go— so it actually entrenches anxiety to avoid the things we fear. Now, if a kid is avoiding school, there's a third issue, which is the minute you don't show up at school, you are outta the loop socially and you are outta the loop academically. So it's that much harder to get back in. So there's not a lot in psychology where there there is agreement across the entire field where there is zero controversy. But on this one, everyone's in agreement that avoidance feeds anxiety, and everyone is in agreement that exposure is the answer.

And what I mean by that is you have to get in. You know, you don't have to go to every party all the time, but you have to baby step your way in. You have to go check out the party. You cannot have the reinforcement of avoidance. You cannot have the daydream become the reality. And so if this is your kid and they're like, I can't go to school, I can't go to the party, I can't, you know, fill in the blank, you say, all right, here's the deal. You're gonna go to the party for 20 minutes, and then I'm gonna forget something and text you and see if, you know, you need me to pick you up. And if you need me to pick you up after 20 minutes, I'll get you. But if you can stay, that would be better. So you have to negotiate. You have to help them get in. Breathing is powerful for helping to control anxiety. Reframing is powerful for helping to control anxiety. But avoidance is is anxiety's best friend.

It's devastating because you're right. I think about the fact that I was homesick at every camp, so much so that I would just escalate it until the counselors got so tired, then my parents would show up because it works. It goes back to your original thing. We do these things because they work. They work. And when we allow our kid to keep transferring from one school to another because they can't handle it, we are locking in anxiety. As a coping mechanism and avoidance as a coping mechanism. Wow. You are so good. I wanna ask you one final question, which is if you had to bottom line it to make it really simple, because clearly it's very complicated to, um, have teenagers in your life. They're amazing and they're also incredibly challenging emotional beings. Going through a lot of change. If you had to bottom line the way you want us to think about your role in a teenager's life, what are we there to provide for them as parents, uncles, aunts, mentors, teachers, doctors? What— how do we show up in this cauldron of emotion and uncertainty?

I can say it in two words, but Mel, this is to be filed under easy to say, very hard to do. Our job is to try to be a steady presence.

Huh. What does that mean?

That means that when teenagers are having their big feelings, and their feelings are big, and they come our way with their big feelings, that we don't meet them where they are. We don't get as agitated as they are. That we can listen, be attentive, and offer empathy, which a huge percentage of the time is all they want. And there's two reasons why this is critically important. One is that when teenagers are bringing us their concerns, they're watching our reaction. And if they're having a really bad 15-year-old day and then they bring it to us and then we hit the ceiling, they can't help but think, "Oh my gosh, I thought this was like 15-year-old size bad. It turns out it's 52-year-old size bad," right? So that is not reassuring to them. And then the other thing is when we offer empathy as the response, so we're there, we're there and we're empathic with whatever their distress is. I think that is actually the all-time steady presence move because what you're doing is you're highly present. You are empathizing. You are saying, "That stinks. I am sorry. I wish that had not happened." So you are there for it, but you're incredibly steady.

You are not picking up the phone. You are not canceling plans. You are not becoming highly agitated. And so deep empathy and just listening goes so much further than we sometimes give it credit for. And even if there's more to be done, starting with empathy is never a bad move. And a huge percentage of the time gives teenagers everything that they want and need.

Wow. I, I love your phrase, "It stinks," because you're right. If there are big emotions, that's all you need to say. That stinks. I never really thought about it from the standpoint that if I get distressed, I magnify their distress. I just have to say, "It stinks." Wow. Because that's normal. And it's actually a sign that she's mentally well.

She's doing well. Oh my gosh.

It's exactly evidence of her perfect functioning. And the same is true with the adults in your life, that if the big feelings and the distress is related to a corresponding event that makes sense, they're mentally well. That is a revelation. A revelation. Everybody, you have got to pick up this book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. I cannot tell you helpful, hopeful, encouraging, empowering it is. I find your work so helpful because it is always grounded in a larger framing. And so the advice that sounds simple is suddenly so profound because you understand it in the context of the larger framing.

Thank you. I, I, I'm so glad I can be helpful. Oh my gosh. It's a hard time to be a person and it's a hard time to be raising teenagers. And here's what I want people to know. We have studied adolescent mental health for decades, and the single most powerful force for protecting teenage mental health is strong relationships with caring adults. Hmm. We're not gonna medicate or therapize our way out of this adolescent mental health crisis. It's gonna be about the adults around teenagers, parents, caregivers, Parents, caregivers, bosses, mentors, coaches, teachers being there for teenagers and being invested in their emotional lives. That's how we're gonna find our way through this.

Well, thank you for giving us the tools to be able to show up and do just that.

It's an honor to be here.

Well, it's incredible to talk to you. You are so cool. Whew. I got so much out of that conversation. Holy smokes. I wish she lived closer to me. Don't you wish she lived closer to you? I would love to have her on speed dial or as my walking buddy. You've got her on the Mel Robbins Podcast, and you've got me, and I've got you. And I'm so happy we're doing this thing called life together. In case nobody else tells you today, I wanted to be sure to remind you that I love you. I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to feel all those big emotions, to ride the wave, and to be a steady presence for the people in your life and for yourself. Because as we just learned, That's exactly what everybody needs from us. Alrighty, I'll talk to you in a few days. I love you. Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend.

I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.

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