You know it’s a theme of mine, and it’s not easy to put it down.  Every child has that moment of reckoning, lost innocence, an epiphany that the world isn’t all that safe a place, and it is because they are hurting.

All I ask is that as adults, we put that moment off as long as we can, we protect our children.  I realize that it is virtually impossible, that we aren’t to blame when our children get into trouble.  But if we see them getting dark and cranky, we should get them help somehow.  We shouldn’t assume it will pass.

An increasingly more common story:

It is that time of year, winter break (spring and summer breaks are good for this, too).  College kids are checking in for therapy. Sometimes it is because they miss me, but really, often they are first timers.  So I try to hang around town.   (That’s one of the reasons to stay in Chicago through New Years if you are a therapy doc).

Parents can see that their kids aren’t doing very well, the pony tails just don’t look right. Or they’ve flunked out of school. Notices come in the mail.

They will tell me about social traumas they’ve suffered away from home, watching others get raped in residence halls, fraternities; being raped themselves.  Waking up clueless about the night before, disheveled, naked. Just like on TV.

Because rape education is a big thing on campus now (government funding), kids are looking back and remembering previous sexual experiences, too, pre-college liaisons, memories they can’t let go of, flashes of baby sitters, cousins, boyfriends of girlfriends.  The older brothers of friends are especially intriguing.

They realize in their late teens or young adulthood (in large part due to rape education on campuses nationwide in the United States) that as minors they were victimized.  And sometimes they feel ambivalent. It might have felt good .  Sometimes predators are particularly seductive, sexually inquisitive, and gentle, exploring.  They’ll take their time.

And some victims of rape really wanted to have sex.  It does look attractive, all of that intense intimacy, on television.

Many young people will tell me that they were getting high at thirteen, fourteen, even younger, and they wanted to lose their virginity, wanted it all, sex, drugs and rock roll.  In therapy we get to the idea that there are a multitude of reasons for wanting this, only one of these being a need to differentiate from unhappy, sober parents.  Hence the statistic that 80% of addicts either come from addicted families or families who drink no alcohol at all.

Some of these kids grow up to be the kind of people who need a lot of excitement.  We all do, when we find good excitement; we want more.  But it doesn’t always bode well for the future, needing this much excitement.  And as older, perhaps wiser adolescents (or as adults who are in recovery) they see themselves at that young, reckless age, as having been irrational.  Crazy.  Stupid.  Having these thoughts as a college student, feeling stupid for having wanted destructive sex, can be very frightening.

Some of these kids, according to the National Association for Mental Health, have been raped multiple times before the age of 24.  This can be very damaging to self-esteem.  (See my post at Everyone Needs Therapy).

So advocates at school are passing around fliers that say: “Get therapy”.*

This winter break phenomenon, parents setting up appointments for kids who aren’t looking all that good, is the kind of thing that reminds me why I got into this therapy business.  As a young therapy doc all of this emotion, these feelings, all of this action, was so much closer to me than it is now.  It was fresh.  I was there, in the residence halls as an adviser, paying my way through school as a state employee, holding hands with the young and broken-hearted.  With no training.  It isn’t an easy job.

Fast forward thirty years and the schools are doing a much better job on awareness, on helping kids, teachers, and auxiliary staff identify acquaintance rape.  It is treated as a social issue, too, systemically, with workshops not just for students, but for residence hall advisers and sorority mothers.  Professionally organized programs are training peer counselors to tell everyone on campus,

Make sure that at least a third of the girls going to the bar or to the party, are sober.

We say this because there is a strong association with substance abuse and acquaintance rape.  If you can’t walk without feeling the ground, it is unlikely that you can give a new hottie informed consent for sex.  So even if you say Yes, the law says that if you were inebriated or under the influence of any drug, your Yes doesn’t count.

Informed consent is much more than No means No, which is also the law.

If they’re coming in for therapy with those moments of awakening, then the system  is working, if not yet truly denting the magnitude of this problem.  There will be more research, but six years ago, when I studied acquaintance rape on campus, one woman out of three was acquaintance raped or almost raped by the age of 24.

We’re getting familiar, mental health professionals, with having these discussions with older adolescents.  They want to talk about their early teen-age years, the much earlier traumas that lowered self-esteem.  One trauma leads to another, unfortunately, or it can, when it comes to rape.

Young, omnipotent people can’t avoid that explosion of abstract thinking in the brain.  And out of control, teens barely out of training bras, are flirting with alcohol and boys, just dying to lose their virginity.  So trauma can happen, perhaps even maybe more-so now than ever before.  Television (still a babysitter) and the web, glamorize sexual relationships, and sex does seem wonderful.  It can be, of course, but the message to youth is that even “mature adults” simply must find a way toward enhancement.

Add to that glamorization the desire of young men withunstoppable erections (we have to be honest, late adolescent, young adulthood is one long erection for a healthy male), and a young, come and get it female, and she will be tapped by someone, some older boy, some friend of her older brother who is technically an adults at 18, who can read it on her, that she is ready and willing to have sex, ready and willing to get high. And he will give it all to her.

We call it rape.

Wanting it is immaterial, legally, for minors, for a girl of fifteen. Inebriated and under-aged, we call it rape. It is rape in the majority of our fifty states of America, if not all over the world. Not a good feeling, putting that one together, that you’ve been raped, having that epiphany while sitting in psychology class, watching a captivating powerpoint video.

These videos are very good, by the way, and emphasize the association between alcohol and rape. I have a couple of them at home because of the research I did on the problem, even presented a few years ago at the annual meeting of the Council for Social Work Education (CSWE).**

We like to blame alcohol, and we’re correct, there is an association, and we do blame individuation, normal psychological development, that cloak of omnipotence, the sense of power that gathers strength with hormonal changes, mood shifts, and cognitive growth and abstraction.  Kids flirt with danger and intoxication at thirteen, just like in the movie, Thirteen.

Compared to that excitement, parents are dolts.

Although we shouldn’t be.  The point here, really, for we could go on and on, and will in later posts, is that if your kid (if you) doesn’t look so hot on winter break?  Get Therapy.

therapydoc

*Get Therapy* (the license plate I’ve always coveted, but couldn’t afford to plunk down the bucks for).

**Not that I want to brag, just want to establish some authenticity here, and to tell you that if you are going to get a PhD and have to do some research, find a topic that can keep your interest.