</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
Rio_ said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but am I that teen?

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">Yes! Rio, thank you for responding here and presenting the fullness of your story, as my recollection wasn't the best. I hope you are doing OK now and hold the memories of your T in your heart. I remember feeling very sad for you when you were going through that.

Yesterday, my husband and I spent a session with our family therapist talking about our 13 y.o. daughter, who is in therapy, and what to do to best support her and communicate better with her, and what to do about her therapy situation. I think our T feels a little responsible as the referral to my daughter's therapist came from him, and he said last night it would have been better if he had referred her to a family therapist. We are trying hard to know what to do about her therapy situation as she is very angry at her therapist right now and tells me this. I don't want to seem ignoring of her concerns, and I don't want to "force" her to see this therapist, and I'm not sure she wants to quit, but maybe she does. (Our T and her T sometimes consult with each other, as he is a family systems therapist and has the big picture of the whole family, which can be useful information for my daughter's T.)

Originally, one of the reasons I wanted her to go to therapy was because she is very angry and hostile all the time. To me her anger meant she wasn't happy. I had tried everything I could think of to help and I had no idea why she was like that, but she had been that way since very early in childhood (not just a teenager thing). So in a way, the fact that she is now angry at her therapist might be a good thing, something the T can try to work with now that it is manifest in her office. I don't know. Plus, maybe they are working on other things. As has been written in this thread, there are concerns a parent might have for a child (that she is angry and unhappy, in my case) and concerns the child herself might want to work on in therapy.

Our therapist recommended that we have my daughter continue with therapy for now (at least another month, he said), to try to resolve the bumps in the relationship with her therapist. This is, after all, what therapy is all about--learning to have a healthy relationship through interacting with the therapist. Maybe if my daughter can work through her anger at her therapist, it will be helpful to her with that overarching anger she feels in her life. And maybe she can learn to tell us how we can help and meet her needs better. (Our T says anger is always a sign of unmet needs.) And our T can provide advice on how we can make it easier for her to tell us, and concrete things we can do to promote communication.

dubya, I wish you luck with your situation. Sorry if I wrote too much here about my own stuff. It seemed to have a lot of overlap with yours. I have benefited also from the varied responses here. The ones from people about their own therapy experiences as teens have been very powerful.