Welcome to Igniting Hope Through Healing

My name is Jamiel Lotz and I am a LPC in the great state of Texas. I wanted to start this blog as an outreach to those who maybe struggling and not sure where to turn for help. My goal will be to post a new blog each week regarding different life struggles and offer some words of wisdom or tools that may help with those struggles.......or at the very least help normalize the struggles. The topics will vary each week and my hope is that someone will benefit from my blogs.

Understanding your teen!

It is no secret that parenting a teenager is not for weak! It is hard to create and maintain a space where they feel safe to talk to parents without punishment or judgement. I am not at all saying there is not a place for punishment, but judgement needs to be set aside. Teenagers get enough judgement from their peers and from themselves, parents need to be a safe place. I say this not from a stance of judgement, but from a place of understanding. I am a parent myself and I have worked with many kiddos over the years and the thing I hear the most from kids is that they don't feel that their parents understand them and to many kids that equates to my parents judge me and don't love me because they don't understand me. I am not here to tell you how to parent, but I am here to share with you some insight into what your child might be thinking and dealing with. My hope is that if you are reading this it is because you are trying to find ways to better understand your child and work on the parent-child relationship.

Kids are under so much pressure these days and they do not know how to articulate that or even understand how that affects their behaviors. It is really easy as a parent to think, "I went through high school and I survived", or these kids have it so easy, "we didn't even have the internet back then." While this is true there are a lot of things we may not be taking into consideration. I was bullied in high school, but things were very different back then. When I got home I could shut the world out. If I didn't want to give people access to me I unplugged the phone. Kids now have 24 hrs access to each other and even if we take the phone away, as soon as they get it back they can scroll back through and see what all was said in their absence. It is a constant pressure and not really something that we think too much about, but it is a very real problem in today's society.

Most of us parents today did not have to think about active shooters either, and that is something that these kids deal with everyday.....the fear and forethought of what if???? I can honestly say that I didn't realize how much this becomes a norm for students and for people working in schools. It is not something your child is going to tell you they think about because it has become so normal in their thinking patterns that they do not realize how it affects them. I recently tried a new church and was so surprised when as soon as worship ended and I went to take my seat I all the sudden felt overwhelming anxiety. I realized that my thoughts were if a shooter came in I had no where to hide. The church was a large one and had arena seating and I realized that if I needed to try to duck behind a chair, I would not be able to because there were too many people in my row. I realized that day how much planning as escape route had become a normal part of my day to day life working in schools. A couple weeks later I had a high schooler bring up similar thoughts in a group meeting and realized that these poor kids have been dealing with the same thoughts since before they were in middle school. It had become the norm for them to know a plan for each space of the school they occupied. I asked why they never said anything about how they felt and they said, "why this is normal, no reason to talk about what EVERYONE is feeling and no one can change!" WOW I had been working with kids for over 5 years and I had never realized what a huge weight they carried. As a parent I never took that into consideration when trying to help my kids understand their feelings or the pressures they were under. I don't say any of this to scare anyone, or to make excuses for our children, but I do think that understanding a little about the pressures they carry can go along way in understanding some of their behaviors!

Time to preach vs. time to listen

There is absolutely a time when wisdom and parental lecturing (nagging to a kid) is needed in a teen's life, but there are also times when they need an ear to hear them and safe place for them to be vulnerable. Take a moment the next time your teen is sharing something with you to decide what is needed in that moment :)

Tune in next week for ......How to talk to your teens!

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