How to take care of your Mental Health: How to Heal Your Inner Teen

                    HOW TO HEAL YOUR INNER TEEN

Our teenage years was the Beginning of an End…

It was when we started to get an idea of what the world was like, It was when the words of other people started to have an impact on us.

We started to care more about our appearances; the way we looked and the way people looked at us.

 

Puberty hit and our bodies started to change, we developed our personalities from the movies we watched, the books we read, the environment we lived in and picked up different personality traits from other aspects of society.

As a teenager, for many of us the adults (parents, guardians, etc) in our lives were almost like gods.

Their word was Law.

Questioning them or disagreeing with them often felt like bringing a pillow to a gun fight

Everything seemed so… permanent.

We we’re not really allowed to Express Ourselves the way we wanted to

The piercing we wanted, the parties we wanted to attend, experimenting with our hair, playing with makeup, playing dress up and trying out different looks, those were privileges that were strictly prohibited.

Of course they were the lucky ones whose parents allowed them express themselves but for most of us that wasn’t the case.

And often times we felt so Invalidated, Suppressed and Oppressed.

We were conditioned to act and behave a certain way, which is why for many of us, the minute we left home or went off to college, we became a completely different version of ourselves

Identity Crisis Maybe?

VALIDATE & ACKNOWLEDGE

Often times I felt like I was living a double life; Imposter syndrome some may call it

I felt like I was doing something so bad and horrible and I was so scared of my parents finding out about the life I lived in college

The older I got the more I realized that I shouldn’t be ashamed for being who I am and the less I cared about what my parents thought

Allow yourself to be you

Don’t let anybody shame you for expressing yourself.

Full Book Here: https://kristieabbey.gumroad.com/l/bzvjf 

RECONNECT

“you need to know who you are and who you are not or the world will do it for you”

I always wanted that Romanticized Teenage High school life

You know, the kind you saw on TV

The sleepovers, the parties, the high school romance, the road trips with friends…. But I never got that.

Some people had their glory days in high school… not me, lol.

I wasn’t the hot girl or the IT girl

Quite contrary I was the girl nobody really liked

I developed horrible social skills and became a shell of myself

I tried to be what others deemed as acceptable

I wanted people to like me and I had a tragic case of people pleasing

Now, I’m a work in progress

I Try to give myself the experiences I wanted back in high school, in my adulthood

I try to not care and about what other people think

And so far… well like I stated earlier it’s a work in progress

I went many through many different phases and looks in my head, I imagined myself in several different scenarios

I wanted piercings, tattoos, I wanted to play with makeup and change my hair color

But my parents never allowed it

The minute I was sent off to college, I did all those things, excessively even; people often told me I was “doing too much”

But I didn’t care. It felt so good to ‘be in charge of my identity’

I was happy

I lived and I out-grew that phase

I’m definitely not that girl anymore but she played a major part in my life and I’m grateful I got to experience her.

 

Be in charge of your identity

Give yourself the chance to live and outlive the different phases you’ve had in your lifetime

Who did you want to be when you were a teenager? BE THAT

Don’t allow adulthood drain of you of your authenticity

 

Be that person your teenage self wanted to be like; even if it’s just for a fleeting moment…

Give your inner teen a chance to live out her fantasies.

LET GO

After reconnecting and finding my inner teen, still, I didn’t feel quite healed, why? One word; REGRET.

I was holding on to so many ‘what ifs’ and ‘what could haves’

I had to come to terms with the fact that I never made the best use of my teenage years and I didn’t live out my teenage dreams to the fullest.

I had to fully accept it and stop feeling like I wasted the best years of my life

It was hard, and honestly this was the toughest part of my healing journey.

But I had to let go of the REGRET, It was doing nothing for me but holding me back.

 

Journaling

Journaling is very therapeutic for me

Video diaries, voice recordings or just simply writing, these were the different ways I was able to journal and convey my emotions properly.

 

Journaling to me was like a Confession

 

Like I was pouring out my feelings and experiences to the one person who could truly understand the impact these experiences had on my life; ME

 

And listening/reading my journal entries after a few days, was extremely emotional and therapeutic for me.

Other ways of letting go; Therapy, Meditation, Self Care

BE YOUR TRUE AUTHENTIC SELF

Underneath all the layers of societal conditioning, of your parents telling you what to do, of spending a significant amount of your developmental years of trying to impress your friends, of trying to make other people like you, of all the personality traits you adapted over the years…

Strip yourself down and peel back the layers, Ask yourself who you are when the eyes stop watching and the camera stops rolling.

Become that person, and chase your dreams with reckless abandon.

 

                           “Be your true and Authentic self…

                        … life is too short to be anybody else

Full Book Here: https://kristieabbey.gumroad.com/l/bzvjf