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Ep. 73: How do parents cope when their teen is suicidal?
447 Plays1 year ago
Trigger warning: episode deals with suicidal ideation. Suzanne also briefly mentions the impact on her life of being raped.
My guest in this episode is Suzanne Alderson. When Suzanne’s 14 year old daughter Izzy became suicidal, following a period of sustained bullying, Suzanne found herself in a desperate place. While her daughter was immediately wrapped in professional care, Suzanne found that there was no support available to help her or her husband make sense of it all and give their child the best kind of care. One night on suicide watch, she decided if she ever got through this time, she would ensure no other family had to navigate this journey alone. Suzanne has since set up a digital community to try and help other families facing their child’s mental illness. Parenting Mental Health is now a registered charity that supports and connects parents of young people with poor mental health.
Her book ‘Never Let Go’ provides parents with the methods and knowledge they need to support, shield and strengthen their child as they progress towards recovery.
6:00 - Suzanne talks about the impact of sexual assault on her own teenage years. She mentions promiscuity, shame, low self-esteem, and how different life looked from the point of view of someone who experiences this at a young age.
9:00 - What are the unhealthy coping strategies we use when we have difficult feelings, and what would serve us better. The value of personal therapy and EMDR in processing and coming to terms with our emotions around what has happened to us.
16:00 - How emotions show up in the body and what to do about it. (See book, The Body Keeps the Score.)
23:30 - Why we can't fight our children's battles for them, and how to respect their autonomy.
30:00 - How it feels when your child is suicidal.
32:00 - What works, and how to cope as a parent of a suicidal teenager.
41:00 - Reframing your role as a parent as your child becomes an adult. "Partnering, not Parenting". What is Parenting Mental Health?
Useful Links:
- The Body Keeps the Score
- Parenting Mental Health
- Never Let Go
- What is EMDR?
*Some links are affiliate.
More teenage parenting from Helen Wills:
Helen wills is a teen mental health podcaster and blogger at Actually Mummy, a resource for midlife parents of teens. Thank you for listening! Subscribe to the Teenage Kicks podcast to hear new episodes. If you have a suggestion for the podcast or want to hear more on parenting teenagers contact me on Instagram and Twitter @iamhelenwills.
For information on your data privacy please visit Zencastr.
Please note that Helen Wills is not a medical expert, and nothing in the podcast should be taken as medical advice. If you're worried about yourself or a teenager, please seek support from a medical professional.
Podcast produced by James Ede at Be Heard production.
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Transcript
Teen Autonomy and Social Positioning
00:00:00
Speaker
When you've got a 14-year-old who demands actually autonomy because they're a human being and they have a right to that autonomy because that's how they build their self-worth and their self-esteem and they see their place in a social setting, how do we deal with that? Welcome to the Teenage Kicks podcast, where we take the fear out of parenting or becoming a teenager.
00:00:32
Speaker
I'm Helen Wills and every week I talk to someone who had a difficult time in the teenage years but came out the other side in a good place and has insight to offer to parents and young people who might be going through the same.
Trigger Warning and Episode Overview
00:00:53
Speaker
Today I've got a guest who will talk to us about suicidal ideation. It's a trigger for some people and so I want to just put that up front in case you want to scroll past this episode. But this episode is promising to be a really fascinating story with a really good outcome and something that is useful for
00:01:17
Speaker
The whole of the parenting society in the UK, I hope.
Suzanne's Personal Crisis and Advocacy
00:01:22
Speaker
When Suzanne's 14-year-old daughter became suicidal after some bullying, Suzanne was found herself in a really desperate place. While her daughter was immediately wrapped in professional care, Suzanne found that there was no support available to help her and her husband make sense of everything and give their child the best kind of care.
00:01:43
Speaker
One night on Suicide Watch, she decided that if she ever got through this, she would ensure that no other family had to navigate this unique journey alone. Suzanne has since set up a digital community to try and help other families facing their child's mental illness. Parenting Mental Health is a registered charity that supports and connects parents of young people with poor mental health.
00:02:09
Speaker
Her book, Never Let Go, provides parents with the methods and knowledge they need to support, shield and strengthen their child as they progress towards recovery. Suzanne, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Helen. It's lovely to be here.
Suzanne's Traumatic Past and Healing Journey
00:02:25
Speaker
Well, Suzanne, I really do want to get into the topic of
00:02:31
Speaker
our children having suicidal thoughts. I know it's a bigger issue than a lot of parents want to know about. It's a bigger issue than I really want to hear about, but that's
00:02:41
Speaker
probably why it needs to be talked about. And I'm guessing you're going to tell me quite a lot more about that. I don't want to bury my head in the sand when I know that this is a real thing for people. But before we get on to what happened with your daughter, I just want to ask, what were your own teenage years like? Wow. How long have we got? They were...
00:03:03
Speaker
They were chaotic, they were traumatic, and I think they defined how I parented a lot because I had an amazing single parent in my mum who worked three jobs and did everything she could to support me and give me everything that I needed, but I also had quite an abusive relationship with my father.
00:03:28
Speaker
And then when I was 15, I was raped. And that really was sort of a spiral down for me. So no emotional safety, no real grounding in myself.
00:03:47
Speaker
I ended up, I did my GCSEs. I was the first year actually, 51. So gosh, that's a long time ago. I did my GCSEs and then I basically stayed in bed for 18 months and turned up, did my A levels, passed a couple, but lost my university place. So then I ended up homeless in London. I mean, there's so much, Helen, we could talk all day probably about it, but I think what it did for me was,
00:04:13
Speaker
It gave me a sense that I needed to be a
Understanding Trauma and Emotions
00:04:18
Speaker
grounded parent if I had children. But also, I think it's taken me a long time to understand how trauma impacts on our behaviours, on our understanding of our self, our sense of self, that burgeoning sense of self we have in our teenage years. It's also taken me a long time to feel safe in my body. Obviously, sexual violence has ongoing impacts.
00:04:42
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, it's I think like any adversity, though, it's an opportunity. And I really try and look now at my teenage years, which were challenging. And I had some amazing times as well did crazy stuff with brilliant friends and all the rest of it. But I think the headlines really did impact on
00:04:59
Speaker
how I approached life, struggled hugely with anxiety, and also then impacted on how I wanted a parent, which was I wanted to be present, I wanted to give my children what I had not been given, not by my mother, but what had been taken away from me by I think the circumstances around it. I'm so sorry, Suzanne, that that happened to you.
00:05:22
Speaker
I think you make a really good point that you're still living a life while all this trauma happens to you. When something really awful happens to a young person, it's easy to focus only on that. And I guess in between everything that surrounds that incident and the things that were happening to you, there's other things happening. You're living a
00:05:49
Speaker
in inverted commas normal life for all that anybody's life is normal. I think you're trying to. I think when you've been exposed to, I mean, obviously we all have mental health, it's a continuum, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. I think the challenge with traumatic events is that they change our perception of how we can show up in the world. So they should change our perception of our own emotional safety. So therefore you stop doing things in a certain way or you start doing things in a certain way. I was
00:06:19
Speaker
hugely promiscuous after I was raped, which is a natural response, ironically, to being sexually attacked. And so I think understanding the impact of trauma and how we look at behavior, I think we tend to look at behavior as judgments. Ah, you're not behaving in a way that's becoming of a whatever age you are, whatever type of person you are.
00:06:43
Speaker
And yet, actually, if we can look underneath the behavior and we can say, okay, what are you trying to communicate with me? And what I was trying to communicate was I was isolated, I was frightened, I was alone. I had so much shame, so much shame about what had happened to me over the years and what that meant for me in terms of my self-worth and my self-esteem, which was completely on the floor.
00:07:07
Speaker
But I think what we tend to do is we look and we say, ah, that happened to you, get over it, heal from it, move on. And yet I think part of that is because we don't like sitting with horrible, nasty, deep, challenging emotions. And that's what I really urge parents to try and do.
00:07:25
Speaker
But also there's this sense of judgment that we bring because we don't want to confront those parts of ourselves as well. So I think there's a huge amount that happens when you are traumatized in any way, big T or little T trauma.
00:07:41
Speaker
But I also think, like you say, there is a lot going on in your life. So for me, I don't have a huge amount of memories apart from, you know, I have a couple with a lovely friend of mine, Jill, who was always there and we went off and did things that were great. But actually, what the trauma did was me trying to keep myself emotionally and physically safe meant that actually all of my cognitive function went into doing that rather than laying down memories.
00:08:07
Speaker
happy times, all the rest of it. It is a balance and obviously we've all got a unique experience. Gosh, I could spend the whole episode talking about that and how you recovered from that. I would be interested to know what your process has been in terms of realising that because you're completely right.
00:08:30
Speaker
We, as a Western civilization, let's be that broad, don't like sitting with difficult feelings. We prefer to brush off and move on and cheer up. I often quote my mum, who when I was growing up, she would have all the stock answers, worst things at sea,
00:08:50
Speaker
somebody's got it worse than we have. Cheer up, chin up, just get on with it. Cheer yourself. Oh, and the worst one, let's bake something and eat lots of sugar, which set me up for life. And it's because we don't we try to distract and be cheerful because we don't like sitting with difficult emotions. And a lot of people, I think, still today would say,
00:09:18
Speaker
That's surely the best way, because why dwell on negative things? I know that you're going to say that it's not. Tell me how you came to that realisation and how you process things to recover. Well, I agree with your mum to a certain extent, because I think cake can solve a huge amount of problems. But anyway, actually, they didn't solve any of my problems, but I do love cake anyway.
00:09:45
Speaker
I think the challenge that we face as parents and as people is that we have this vision of what life should be like. It should be perfect, it should be glossy, technicolor, everything should be great. And when we veer off of those pathways down into those, you know, those pathways, those roads less traveled, as M. Scott Peck calls them, then we can feel that we're out of our own sense of kind of reality and our own sense of control.
00:10:09
Speaker
And so much of not sitting with difficult emotions is because we don't necessarily know where it's going to lead. We don't know what's going to happen. And for me, the exploration of what I'm feeling, if I think that all my behavior is communication, is essential for me to know myself better, for me to be at peace with who I am.
00:10:29
Speaker
And so for me, the journey to come to that was long, convoluted, very painful, spent many years in heightened anxiety states, always bouncing between fight, flight and freeze, you know, so one minute completely activated the next completely overwhelmed and shut down because
00:10:49
Speaker
effectively what my body was doing was storing the trauma memories. So the whole thing around the body keeps the score is very true. So, you know, I needed to be able to work through those memories in a way that was safe and that was controlled and was to a certain extent on my timeline. And so I've worked with an amazing therapist who has helped me to
00:11:16
Speaker
get to a place where I have nervous system regulation generally. I'm within my window of tolerance most of the time. And then through that, we've been able to
Inner Self and Behavior
00:11:24
Speaker
look at some of the memories, go back, use techniques like EMDR, which is a reprocessing modality in therapeutic circles, to be able to help me to release those memories. And that's been really important. But equally,
00:11:37
Speaker
You know, I could have done this on my own, but it would have probably consumed my whole life. So having those little windows each week or fortnight or whatever it's been, you know, to be able to go back in and say, look, actually, this is what happened then. Or this has come up this week. Can we explore it and to release it? Not only from our sort of conscious mind, but also from our physical body, our somatic response to what happened to us.
00:12:03
Speaker
And yeah, it's a wonderfully challenging, hard, difficult, nasty thing to do to go in and go into therapy. But actually, it's really liberating over time. But to say that, I think there's a load of practices that we as people can do to start to
00:12:20
Speaker
to sit with the things that don't feel right. How often, I mean I'm holding my hands up here now Helen, like cake and wine, how often do I sit with cake and wine quite regularly? I'm trying to do it less and less but they're the ways that I would overlook what I was feeling because the emotion felt just too big. I tell you what I'm going to do is I'm going to drink it away, I'm going to eat it away, I'm going to ignore it and
00:12:43
Speaker
In that moment, I am at peace. But that moment doesn't last for very long. So over the time, especially when what happened to my daughter, the work that I do with parents in parenting mental health, I really realized that actually not only do I have a responsibility to myself to have that peace,
00:13:02
Speaker
And I am the only person that can give me that piece, but I also have a responsibility to model that kind of behavior to my daughter, to my son, occasionally to my husband, but generally for my children. So yeah, so it is a choice. It's an active choice every day. But also it's something that I don't think we should shy away from. We can ease ourselves into it. We can boil the frog when it comes to becoming more accustomed, more attuned,
00:13:29
Speaker
and more comfortable with sitting with those big feelings and emotions. That's a great analogy to use in that one because it can be quite daunting to take your worst feelings, your worst fears, your worst memory, your biggest trauma, and decide out of the blue that you're going to sit and examine that.
00:13:51
Speaker
But you're right that just little bits of, you know what, today, I'm not going to numb this away with a glass of wine. I'm not going to cheer myself up with some sugar and avoid it. I'm going to just be with myself for five minutes and feel sad or feel scared or feel vulnerable or whatever it is that we're feeling that we're not enjoying.
00:14:19
Speaker
For people who've not heard it and are interested, I will put the links in the show notes, but you just mentioned, Suzanne, a book called The Body Keeps the Score. I'll link to it. That was a massive turning point for me in how I approach my feelings and my history.
00:14:36
Speaker
because I have chronic pain, fibromyalgia. It's almost miraculous how much understanding that my physical pain is linked to previous emotional trauma that I'm
00:14:51
Speaker
literally holding onto inside my body rather than allowing and processing. It's quite astonishing. I could be a bit evangelical about it, but this is not me. I think you should be evangelical about that, actually, because I think that's a truth that most people don't know or aren't aware of. And I think the barrier to us changing the outcomes in our own lives, which are within our
00:15:21
Speaker
Within our gift is a it's knowledge so it is things like that But be it's then starting to dig into the blockers to doing it and shame and guilt and blame and judgment and all those things Exist and we're really good at holding on to them and they're the blockers that stop us from moving towards a healed state But I also think what education has is a place to really accelerate that for us So best of under cults work is you know seminal work in explaining that actually this isn't a choice
00:15:51
Speaker
And I think there's a lot of work around nervous system regulation as well that's really important. Irene Lyon does a load of great work on that. There's lots of amazing trauma therapists that do phenomenal work too around it. But understanding that this isn't actually a choice. What happened to me was not my fault. It was not my choice. And what goes on in my body is not my active conscious choice. It is a response to what happened.
00:16:16
Speaker
And I think if we can then start to look at the facts of this and look at how our nervous system responds, how we can expand our window of tolerance so that we're not bouncing out of fight, flight and freeze the whole time. And we can start to be owners of our stories and owners of our healing. And that's really powerful. It's really powerful as a person. It's massively powerful as a parent as well. And that is something that is a gift. You know, as I said before, it's a gift to you, but it's also a gift to your child and your family.
00:16:45
Speaker
As I understand it, the things that, those natural things that are happening in your body, the natural responses to trauma, they are there for a really good reason. And I think a lot of us, I did for a very long time, push them away. God, I'm feeling anxious again. Why can't I get a grip? I need to sort this out. This is bad. And it wasn't until a therapist explained to me that
00:17:08
Speaker
My anxiety is there for a really good reason. It's there to protect me. It's there to say, this happened to you once. I want to make sure that never happens to you again. I'm looking out for you. I care about you. And I needed to accept that part of me, the anxious part of me, as a really useful part of my system.
00:17:31
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think you've touched on parts there. There's all parts of us that are driving behaviours and beliefs and blocking access to change. And so obviously our brains keep us safe. That's what they're there to do. They've been developed over millennia to do that. And they do it brilliantly at times generally. But then other times they don't do it brilliantly. So we're stuck in that
00:17:53
Speaker
activated state. But then, equally, there are other parts of us. There's that inner child that needs to be heard. You know, there's eight-year-old Suzanne, who has memories that I'm not going to go into now. How long have we got, Helen? Honestly, this week-long podcast. It has to come out for another episode.
00:18:11
Speaker
But then there's that eight year old self. And sometimes I have to look, you know, over the last decade, I've looked at my behavior and thought, actually, that was me in the moment as a 40 year old something, you know, adult talking and it wasn't it was my eight year old self responding, the thing, the part of me that wasn't heard the part of me that wasn't seen the protector within me, you know, the defender, all of these parts of us,
00:18:35
Speaker
And internal family systems is a great therapeutic modality that talks about this. But just understanding that actually what you're thinking and feeling now isn't necessarily just your conscious thought as however old you are as that person. It could be those earlier parts of you that maybe weren't seen and heard and validated that come back up and remind you that actually you do have needs and you do have a right to feel how you feel. And maybe you need to make some changes to adjust to that.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah. And we, with our best will and our worst things that see chin up, pull your bootstraps up, get on with it, are also not hearing those parts of
Izzy's Struggles and Parental Response
00:19:14
Speaker
us. We're not listening to the eight-year-old child who just wants to be heard. And you're speaking my language. I totally understand it. So I'm going to put, you've mentioned a few things there as well, the EMDR and internal family systems. I'm going to put links to that for anybody who really wants to dig down a little bit in the show notes.
00:19:32
Speaker
So Suzanne, tell us a little bit about your daughter, what her childhood was like. I'm sorry, I've forgotten her name as well. You'll have to remind me. And when did you first realize that something wasn't working for her? So Izzy was the most delightful
00:19:51
Speaker
quirky, creative, funny, outgoing, just wondrous child. There's seven years difference between her and my son. And so it was kind of like bringing up two separate children. And my son's really laid back, really chilled. And so Zizi, but she was also highly creative, very much like my husband, visually creative, making things, always in the garden, gardening, growing stuff. We had hens and pets and whatever. And she was she was just
00:20:21
Speaker
always busy. She loved life. She loved the things that made her come alive and she was very clear on what they were.
00:20:32
Speaker
and we'd actually moved her into a quite an academic school when she was 10 so that she didn't have to pass the entrance exam if I'm brutally honest there that's probably where we did it. Not that she's not highly intelligent because she actually is really intelligent and but it was just one of those things we thought oh actually if we move her now then we won't have to do the entrance exam and off we go and there we are and it was clear probably quite
00:20:58
Speaker
probably within about 18 months. And I'm going to be honest with you, Helen, you know, I put my head in the sand for a long time. So a lot of these reflections are from me now going, Oh, actually, yes, it wasn't working. Oh, actually, no, it wasn't the right thing. But at the time, I think my hopes for her
00:21:16
Speaker
were that if we got her into this school, which was, as I say, highly academic, then everything would be OK. And if I'm brutally honest, as I think for many of us parents, there's a little element of making good on your own experiences. So for me, it was like, oh, I'm going to get her a great education because I loved learning. I was really academic.
00:21:40
Speaker
And then I obviously had a bit of a breakdown and I'm like, right, OK, this is what we're going to do. That is so sorry to interrupt your flow, but that is so true. I think if we're all honest as parents and our kids would hate to hear it. But I think we have to be open about it. We do try to recreate the things that we didn't think we got right as kids in our own children. It's it's it's a.
00:22:10
Speaker
a big thing to own. But I think it's really natural, even though it's not necessarily the right way to do things. Yeah, completely. I think there's a sense that if I can make good on what didn't quite work for me, then for many of us, the parenting that we display is a reflection of the parenting that we've been given. Absolutely. So therefore, you can see why these patterns perpetuate, why there is generational trauma, why there is generational patterns, or why there are generational patterns of behaviors.
00:22:40
Speaker
But I think she was probably about 12 when we first started to see changes in her. But I have to say, I was with your mum. I was like, big slab of Victoria sponge and it'll all be okay. It's all right. You're great. We love you. It'll all be all right.
00:22:56
Speaker
And that was, I think that was naivety on my part, because I did really believe that as a family, if we were all in it together, then absolutely, it would all be okay. But she started to shift and change.
00:23:11
Speaker
I don't think this is just you. You could look at a load of reasons why. You can look at hormones, you can look at the environment, what's going on in school, what's going on at home. But actually, I think it was the case that she was starting to recognize that the things that she valued were not the same as the people around her and she couldn't find her people. Right. And so she started being bullied by two pupils and she'd come home and she'd say, gosh, I've had such a hard day. They've done this, they've done that. And I'd be like, well, come on, let's go into the school. And she'd be like, come.
00:23:41
Speaker
Whoa, stop right there. You are not going into the school. You know, if you go into school, it will make it worse. And if you go into school, I will never trust you again. And for me, you know, we had a really collaborative relationship. We had a very, I think I was a very well.
00:23:57
Speaker
I was. I was a compassionate parent. I felt, you know, I'd always put my children first. I tried to sort of recreate some of the better times of my own childhood. You know, I put them at the heart of everything and yet
00:24:13
Speaker
I overlook this and I'll hold my hands up. I'm not proud of it, but I think it's important to share it because if any parent is listening and thinking, you know, I know best, then maybe you don't know best. We have to believe our children. We have to listen to them and properly actively listen to everything they say. I don't mean the whole time when they're, you know, rambling on about a football match or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
00:24:37
Speaker
But I think when they tell us things that are important to them in their life and their emotional safety, we have an obligation and a duty and a responsibility as a parent to listen to that. And it's hard. I'm not saying it's easy. And I'm not saying just because I didn't do it, you've got to do it. But I think in that gap where I didn't listen,
00:24:55
Speaker
But I still felt that I was present and caring and loving and trying, then that is where we started to slip. Actually, in my book, there is a curve that we developed, which shows there's no prescriptive timeline for mental health, obviously, or mental health recovery because we're all individuals and it's not an on-off switch. But in there, it shows there's a slow descent. She was in that slow descent phase for probably around 12-14 months.
00:25:24
Speaker
And then one day, you know, we just started to see her light going out, basically. She'd stopped seeing her friends. My husband said to me, this is ridiculous. Come on, you've got to do something. And we're still quite, you know, there are certain things that he parents really well and there are certain things that I parent really well.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah. And he said, look, this is ridiculous. I know you're all compassionate and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because that's kind of the distinction, I suppose, between us. He's very compassionate, but he thinks I'm a bit kind of, you know, too emotional or whatever. Anyway, he's action oriented. He's a fixer. Yeah.
00:25:58
Speaker
and I'm a listener or an empathizer. So he said to me, we can't have this anymore. So I'm going to go in and speak to the school. And he did. And after he'd done it, he came, he took his ear out and he said, listen, I've actually I know you won't trust mum. That's why she hasn't done it. But I couldn't stand by. And she was so grateful. Thanks so much, dad. What did they say? Well, after the summer holidays, they're going to move them out of your class. It's all going to be over. It's great. But
00:26:26
Speaker
The point is that even though we changed that, too much damage had been done. And so we went into the summer holidays. She couldn't go on a plane. She couldn't go to a hotel. So we ended up in a little jeet in the middle of deepest darkest France. Nobody around. We didn't see anybody for the week we were there. And she spent all the time in her room apart from one meal.
00:26:51
Speaker
And this is because of anxiety. She didn't want to travel. She couldn't cope with the uncertainty of what was going to happen with people. So she was in absolute, activated, her sympathetic nervous system was switched completely on and she couldn't calm herself at all. So that was where she was at then.
00:27:10
Speaker
So, but we went back to school in the September and I remember vividly in the car taking her to school with her sitting there like with her clenched fist going, Mum, I've got this, I've got this. She was really stealing herself that she had got this now.
00:27:25
Speaker
And then later that day, and I really hoped, I went off to work and it was one of those days where, you know, they do like assemblies in the afternoon and what kind of stuff you select, I don't know, clubs in the morning and whatever. So it was only at three o'clock when she'd actually got into her form room to see who was in her class.
00:27:43
Speaker
And I got a really distressed phone call from her screaming down the phone at me. They're in my class. They're in my class. And the school had forgotten to move the bullies and they were not only in her class, but they actually had seated them either side of her. Oh my God. I know. So basically she'd gone into this thinking I can trust, I can believe it's going to be okay.
00:28:08
Speaker
So for me, you know, looking at her then, that was just a really seminal time. And how old is she at this point? 14. Right. Yeah. So I took her to CRGP and he referred her to CAMS, which is the Child Adolescent Mental Health Service, with about 9 to 12 weeks we were told we would have to wait. And I know that if anybody's listening that's got any
00:28:34
Speaker
uh uh dealings with cams that that is really unusual now uh because waiting this is so long but at the time i couldn't understand how i was going to get through the next nine to twelve days let alone nine to twelve hours sometimes so uh the doctor said come back next week and see me every week until you get the referral through and the first time we went in there is he said is it okay if i go in on my own mum and i was like
00:28:59
Speaker
hmm okay that's fine uh i can come with you if you need it she's like no no no i need to go in on my own okay that's fine so the doctor came out and said would you go home please i'm going to give you a ring and i can still feel
00:29:15
Speaker
the grain of the bookcase that I was holding onto as I picked the phone up because it's one of those times in your life that you will never forget because it changes everything. And he told me that she had a plan to end her life imminently. And if we hadn't have gone, I found out later that day to see him, she would have acted on it that night.
00:29:37
Speaker
And that really kind of changed everything for us because the focus then became on how do we keep her alive. She was seen the next day by a psychiatrist and medicated and put through a program of psychotherapy. But as you said in your introduction as parents, we just didn't know what to do. We were completely isolated. I felt so ashamed because good parents don't have suicidal children.
00:30:07
Speaker
But they absolutely do. I felt really, I just didn't know quite what to do next. I didn't know what to do for the right, you know, for her benefit. And I couldn't deal with all of the emotions that were coming up. And I remember that night sitting on her floor just thinking, I can't be the only parent who is sitting on their teenager's floor willing them
00:30:31
Speaker
to want to live and watching them breathe and thinking, you know, ridiculously, but is this the last breath? Is this it? Because it just it just comes from left field, you just never consider that your child is going to want to end their life. Yeah. And so for me, it was a turning point. And I just thought, if we get through this, and at the time, I didn't know how we were going to get through it.
00:30:56
Speaker
then I'm going to make it my mission to make sure that nobody feels like this. Because I used to sit in Cam's waiting rooms looking at people, trying to make eye contact, trying to connect with people, thinking, if we could just go for a coffee together, if we could just have each other's phones, so we could just say, it's really hard at the moment, how are you doing? Then it would have just helped me. And I felt if I could help myself, then maybe I could help her because I couldn't fix this. And that was one of the early things that I learned.
00:31:25
Speaker
but nobody wanted to connect over it because we don't talk enough about young people's mental health issues in terms of, we talk about them in terms of facts and waiting lists and all the rest of it, we don't talk about the reality. So the other day, one of the parents in Parenting Mental Health said that they'd taken their child to A&E for severe self-harm and they'd been told that they would get an appointment from cams through. And we're now in May and they were in A&E in September last year.
00:31:54
Speaker
So in between September and May, what's happened, that family, that parent and that young person have had to live with all of the emotional distress that the young person is feeling enough to want to harm themselves to need to release the buildup, that overwhelming sense of out of control, this big emotions, all the rest of it. And for me, that's where the challenge comes is that, you know, we look to medical professionals rightly so for medical pathways.
00:32:24
Speaker
And yet actually so much of the change that happens in young people happens in the home. It happens through parents being there 24-7. It happens through changing our behavior. It happens through listening more. It happens through building that emotional safety that so often I think society has
00:32:42
Speaker
enabled us to strip away from our lives. So working too much, not being present, you know, having these high levels of what you should be doing and, you know, I've got to do book club this week and I've got to prep all of our meals from scratch and I've got to work full time. And I'm meant to listen to my teenager who's dealing with things that are heavy and hard while having a relationship with myself and my partner and
Evolving Parenting Roles
00:33:03
Speaker
my family. Yeah, it's too much.
00:33:04
Speaker
There's so much going on. There's a big ask on parents. And when your child's mental health declines, I think it's a wake-up call. And it was definitely a wake-up call for me. And I think the reason that I want to share, and I'm quite happy to say all the things I did wrong, because there are myriad things I did wrong, is because maybe somebody might look and go, actually, do you know what? When my child gets in the car and I ask them a question and they shut down,
00:33:33
Speaker
then maybe they just need a bit of time or maybe if I asked a different question at a different time they might open up or maybe if I took care of myself and showed them that this is how you take care of yourself and that might shift something. Lots of tiny shifts over time and that was where
00:33:49
Speaker
The partnering not parenting approach came from because that was really me looking at this and saying, I can't fix her because every time I try, she went on to attempt suicide several times. And every time I try to fix her, I negate her experience, I validate her emotions, and I basically push her towards the only way out that she feels that she has at the moment, and that was suicide and self-harm.
00:34:16
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm just going to stop you there because you've said it a couple of times. It was a couple of things you've said have resonated with me, and it's been one of my biggest learning curves as my children became teenagers is. And something that I completely got wrong before they were teenagers is we have to listen to what they're actually saying and telling us rather than fix.
00:34:44
Speaker
And that's been something, in fact, my daughter has said it to me overtly. Look, I actually don't want you to tell me what to do right now. I'm not looking for a solution. I just want to offload my shit and have it heard. Not in those words, but, you know, if she'd been a therapist, she was using the right language. I just want to be heard completely.
00:35:07
Speaker
And that I think, and a lot of parents contact me about their fears over parenting teenagers and what they say or a real theme that I get from them is that they don't know what to do, they don't know how to fix things for their child in the way they used to when their child was little and wanted it fixed. They feel redundant, but powerless. And like when you said,
00:35:34
Speaker
you were ready to wade into the school and talk to them about the bullies. And your daughter said, no, I hate you to do that. It's really disempowering for a parent to be told by their child that the thing that they know how to do is no longer needed. And neither the parent nor the child knows in that moment what the thing that's needed now is. I've kind of waffled a little bit in saying that, but it's
00:36:04
Speaker
There comes a point, I think, for every parent of teenagers when we just go off, I don't know what to do now, and I'm lost. And the story you're telling me sounds like a really extreme version of what all of us go through in terms of not knowing how to support our children.
00:36:26
Speaker
I'm guessing that while she was getting the support she was getting, it was confidential and they didn't want to tell you too much about what the therapy she was having. So you were completely alone. Yeah, we had some very good friends that supported us on the level that they could support us in terms of being there for us, you know, whatever. But in terms of understanding, I think we had no frame of reference.
00:36:55
Speaker
I didn't know anybody whose childhood attempted suicide. I didn't know anybody whose child self-harmed. I didn't know anybody else who'd taken their child out of school. I didn't know anybody whose childhood laid in bed for two years to heal. I didn't know anybody who worried when they heard the daughter paddling around at night. You know, we lived, we had a three sort of, she lived in the attic kind of,
00:37:20
Speaker
rooms, and I could hear her padding around, what did that mean? Has she just collected something to harm herself? Well, you're hypervigilant, and then no wonder. Completely. But I think the lack of context actually fuels that hypervigilance, and it fuels the fear. And that fear then fuels our behaviors that aren't helpful, that they are fixer behaviors, we do have a fixed mindset. And as parents, that's something
00:37:46
Speaker
I think there's some really interesting work that Steve Biddelph did, I think he's a psychologist, but he talks about nought to seven is about mum, seven to 14 is about dad and 14 to 21 is about a mentor. And I think that's not prescriptive of course, but actually at those times you can see that that sociological, physiological, psychological shift
00:38:07
Speaker
that we need to make and I don't think we talk enough about what are the shifts that we as parents need to make we've now started talking about emptiness syndrome and all the rest of it but actually when you've got a 14 year old who has you know who demands actually autonomy because they're a human being and they have a right to that autonomy because that's how they
00:38:25
Speaker
build their self-worth and their self-esteem, and they see their place in a social setting, how do we deal with that? And it's very, very difficult, I think, for parents to deal with that. But I think we need to talk about it, and we need to skill parents up to say, actually, it's OK. And this comes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, Helen, around sitting with difficult emotions. We don't have to fix everything because life is not perfect. And actually, the things that your child is going to go through, even though, I mean,
00:38:54
Speaker
People often ask me, would you change anything? And there's a part of me that says, a large part of me that says, 99% of me says, no, I wouldn't change any of this because we have a relationship now that is stronger than anything I could have ever imagined. She is the most self-aware young person that I know. I know I'm her mom, I'm definitely biased, but she is because she's had to learn about her own emotional responses and what she needs.
00:39:24
Speaker
And we as a family are in a completely different place. This charity wouldn't exist. I wouldn't have written a book, loads of different things, which are probably facile on the surface. But actually, this kind of adversity, when your child's behavior changes, if we can see it as an opportunity, if we can be curious about what that's going to tell us, if we can be really, I suppose, grounded and present with how we respond to that,
00:39:51
Speaker
then we will learn. And I think one of the things that I've always had as a parent, which is quite unusual, I suppose, based on my experiences in my own teenage years, is the sense that we're in this together. And we're in this together for the long haul. So I'm not trying to race through your teenage years, so that you can leave home and I can get on with a life that I want to live.
00:40:13
Speaker
You are my life. You're not my life, but you are in my life. This is my life. And I think understanding that can give us as parents a bit more capacity to be able to be present and to be able to say, okay, it's still okay. I'm not saying you've got to be perfect sitting there, you know, with sort of, you know, musing at what your child's saying to you, trying to understand it from a therapeutic perspective.
00:40:35
Speaker
But basically just being present is enough and knowing that things are going to trigger you. They are going to make you feel, you know, sad. They are going to make you feel frustrated and that's okay. That's part of being a human being. We have this amazing whole spread, tapestry of emotions that we feel. And I think, you know,
00:40:53
Speaker
understanding realistically what our role is as a parent, which is to nurture, to care for, but then to prepare for the world, that can sometimes help us a little bit more when things go a little bit less standard, a little bit less like we expect them to.
00:41:10
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just written down while you were talking that what you said about Steve Biddel. He's the guy that wrote the famous parenting books. I read the one about raising boys, I think it's called. But a mentor, that's exactly how I frame it, but I've never found the right word. But that's exactly it. Because people talk to me about how
00:41:37
Speaker
When their kids are teenagers, they don't respond anymore to, let's use the word control, because we have controlled their whole lives up until the point where they start to say, hang on, I want that autonomy that you talked about. Then we find ourselves in a bit of a no-man's land. We don't really know how to behave. Some people will say,
00:41:59
Speaker
my 16 year old is my best friend. And then the whole argument begins, oh, your children should never be your friends. You're always their parent. But we've given no framework for how to parent a teenager.
00:42:15
Speaker
And so we automatically shift to more of either we stay in bossy mode and it backfires on us, or we shift to a more friend mode. And that also backfires on it and leaves the child with, without the boundaries that they do still need, even though they don't think they, they don't want them, but they do need them. That word mentor is exactly it.
00:42:38
Speaker
Well, I actually call it partner from partnering, not parenting. Yeah, because about that, because you say that within your, what do you do for the parents in your community with your charity work and explain how you encourage them to be that partner?
Partnering, Not Parenting Philosophy
00:42:55
Speaker
So the charity, Parenting Mental Health, exists to improve the experience of parenting a child through poor mental health. So we do that in a number of ways. We offer a 24-7 peer support community. We offer courses in partnering, not parenting.
00:43:10
Speaker
We offer a range of support mechanisms like drop-in sessions with trained facilitators. We've got lots of guides. There's loads of information on our website, which is parentingmentalhealth.org. Really what we're there to do is to say, very much like I was in 2015, trying to make eye contact with people, you don't have to try so hard. You can come and be with people that understand, but you can also be with people who've been through this.
00:43:36
Speaker
So this is all about using the power of lived experience to improve the experience for the parents coming behind us. And so that's really important for us. And there's around 40,000 parents now that we support in that piece. But the
00:43:51
Speaker
Partnering, not parenting approach, really, for me, is an active choice. It's not just about, like you say, some middle ground. Well, you didn't say it, but when you said about, you know, either being a mentor or a friend, you know, it's not some middle ground where you just sort of like, oh, you know, you do what you like, darling. Actually, it's a really conscious choice for us as parents, and it's nothing to do with our child. It's all to do with us.
00:44:11
Speaker
And there are three parts to partnering, which is the first one is step down. And that's stepping down from our emotional responses, from our judgment, from our experiences, but also from our autonomy, because sorry, authority, because what happens is, is we tend to think we know best
00:44:31
Speaker
We've done best or we would do better and we know everything. And what that does when your child's mental health declines, their emotional safety is low to zero. That just says the person that I'm meant to be supported and nurtured and loved by, and let's be clear here, we all do continue to support and nurture and love, but we might not show it.
00:44:50
Speaker
This person doesn't get me. They're not listening and they don't understand and that can often that's what happened with Izzy at the beginning, you know it basically my behavior in an attempt to try and fix and love more and make it all okay and Gloss over it actually invalidated her experience. Yeah. Yeah, so so that first stage is a really important shift for parents and
00:45:13
Speaker
Next, it's standing beside your child. That means around building trust, changing your communication actively and appropriately listening to them and believing them. That might be advocating for them. That might be saying to school that they can't come in. That might be battling to get access to support. Or it might be saying, do you know what? As a family, like we did, we're going to make a decision and it's going to be hard and we're going to feel like we're isolated by it, but we're going to do it for your best interests over the longer term. That was obviously to take Izzy out of school for two years.
00:45:43
Speaker
And then the final part is about travelling together because adversity offers an opportunity. So we can go on to do interesting, new, wonderful things and paths will open up that probably wouldn't have opened up because we'd have had our heads down, we wouldn't have understood what was going on or where change was needed.
00:46:02
Speaker
And so if we can be curious about that, we can offer our child not only the autonomy that we all need as human beings to feel empowered and to have good self-confidence and self-worth, but we can also offer them a chance to explore new choices. And in our experience, that meant that two years out of school led to two GCSEs, not 13, but then she did a BTEC and got the highest grades, and then she graduated from university doing an arts degree that she'd never ever have done.
00:46:32
Speaker
stayed on that path that we were on.
00:46:34
Speaker
Yeah, and you were talking to me a little bit before we started recording about that degree. And I assume it's and you said she's doing great. She's just graduated. That's that's something it's making me think because you were talking about her being really creative. When she was really young, it's making me think that she's kind of come full circle as does it feel a bit like that? I think it's I think it's the fact that she's connected to the parts of her that make her intrinsically easy.
00:47:04
Speaker
So that is about being creative, that it's about being able to express her own view of the world on her terms. And surely that's what we want for all of our children, however they think. Yeah, I was just going to say that's what every parent wants. It's just that we're fed the narrative that going to the best academic school and nailing all the grades in all of the exams is the way to be that. But
00:47:28
Speaker
So many parents know that that isn't the case for their children. For one reason or another, there's lots of different ways for kids to fulfill their potential. And the best way to do that is to be intrinsically, as you say, who they are. It's a brave act to do that, though, isn't it? To go against what is the well trodden path that we know, that what we say good parents do. It's really brave to stand up and say, actually, do you know what? I'm going to listen to my child.
00:47:53
Speaker
I'm going to take decisions now that they will benefit from in a decade's time, not in next summer when they get a certificate with all the exam results on. So I think we need braver parents and I think the Partnering Not Parenting approach definitely encourages that, that self-reflection.
Parental Self-Care and Gratitude
00:48:09
Speaker
Where are your drivers? Why is your behavior as it is? What are your expectations? What are the assumptions you're making? And how can you explore those for the benefit of everybody, not just yourself, not just your child, but your whole family? And I think over time, parents have such an important role to play when we look at poor mental health, not only because we are 24-7 carers, that's what we can become. Because the way that we act now is going to impact on our child and the way that they act with their children.
00:48:38
Speaker
So for me, parents, this generation of parents can be cycle breakers. We can change the narrative and we can ensure that our children not only understand their own mental health, but they're brave enough to say, actually, this way of life isn't for me. You know, I need to change this in my world and we can back them up and they know that we're going to do that.
00:48:58
Speaker
Yeah, I have one question when you were talking about your community and how you support people. I'm imagining that the way you've spoken, you try to help parents not only support their child, but support themselves. I know that's an important message of yours. How do parents take care of themselves when they're facing this overwhelming, compelling need to only support their child?
00:49:28
Speaker
And I'm imagining that you get a bit, do you get a bit of resistance from parents who say, well, I haven't got time to read a book and take a bath. I need to be there for my child 24 seven, as you say, how do you get that and how do you deal with it? Completely, we get that a lot. But parents' wellbeing is really at the core of a whole family's wellbeing. So for us, we have a wellbeing group that's only about the parents. It's not about young people. It's not about the child. You can't post about your child in there. It is about you.
00:49:57
Speaker
And I think the key is, this again is a little bit of training that we parents need because particularly moms, I think we sort of nail ourselves to that cross of martyrdom about doing everything. The emotional load that we carry anyway without our child having a mental health issue is huge. And we become lower and lower on the list. So for me, it's always been about how can we encourage parents to see that if they can fuel themselves and they have fuel to support their child.
00:50:26
Speaker
So there's a number of ways that we do it. But I think it's quite important that we look at the routine that we have. And that's all the basics. So you wouldn't not go out the house without brushing your teeth. So why are you dehydrated? Why are you eating too much sugar? I know your mum and her cake and me and my cake. But anyway, why are we eating too much sugar? What's our sleep like? Are we moving? All the basics that we need for literally our brain needs for our positive mental health.
00:50:55
Speaker
And then there's things like rituals, I call them rituals. And these are the things that we can build, help us to build our capacity. And they're things like meditation, mindfulness, but things like journaling, we have a gratitude challenge in our community. We've done it since 2018. And we ask parents to find three things that they're grateful for every day.
00:51:14
Speaker
And people come and they're like, I'm not going to bother with that. That's rubbish. I've got bigger problems than three, that three gratitudes are going to think that they're going to change that. They're not. No, they're not actually. But you have a choice. You have the opportunity in any moment to hold the heaviness in one hand and to hold lightness in another. And you can choose whether you focus only on the heaviness and you can choose whether you allow a little bit of the light in.
00:51:43
Speaker
And the more light we can let in, then the longer we can hold the heaviness for. And I also think that it's important that so many of us, I had to give up work for a time, so many of us lose so much through our child's mental health declining. So it's really a good opportunity to remind us that
00:52:03
Speaker
taking care of ourselves is not only fueling us so we can fuel our child, it's about modeling really positive behavior, but this is an opportunity. Many of us are in that midlife stage where there's lots of change going on anyway in our bodies, around us. So we are important and we do deserve to be taken care of, but we are modeling that to our children as well.
00:52:24
Speaker
And I know parents find it really hard and self-cares, you know, all avocados and bubble baths. It absolutely isn't. It can be as simple as taking 10 minutes to go and stand outside barefoot on the grass or have a cup of tea or read a magazine or play a game on your phone. Something that is a choice, an active choice that you take now to serve you. And we serve everybody else the whole time and we deserve to be served too.
00:52:49
Speaker
Oh, God. If we'd been having this conversation a couple of years ago, I probably wouldn't have resonated. Well, I'd have resonated, but there would have been a voice in the back of my head going, oh, yeah, but who's got time for gratitude? I'm a good example of this because I'm in a therapy group, and they all agreed that they were going to keep a gratitude diary every night for a week. And I was like, oh,
00:53:13
Speaker
It really just doesn't work for me. I haven't got time. I just want to go to sleep at the end of the day. Being the competitive, high-performing person that I am, I wasn't prepared to let everybody else do it and me be the only person that didn't do it. Every night I sat in bed and went,
00:53:30
Speaker
gratitude diary, gratitude diary. And by the end of the week, I really quite liked looking back on it. So I kept it going for a bit longer. And then it's been going about, I don't know, three months now. And I have noticed something really weird. Not that I can look at that, I don't even read it, I never look at it, other than when I'm writing in it.
00:53:55
Speaker
It's not that I look at it and go, oh yeah, I must remember to be grateful that I've got a car, that my legs both work, that I've got warm fluffy socks. Yes, I must remember that. It's not that. I'm just a bit lighter in general. And I do think it's because I've been writing that journal. Because as you say, instead of going to bed and going, oh my God, today was so hard and tomorrow I've got even more things to do.
00:54:21
Speaker
I've got, oh my God, today was so hard and tomorrow I've got even more things to do, but I've got fluffy socks. And it just makes, it just, it physically makes me a bit lighter and I would never have imagined myself
00:54:36
Speaker
addicted to my gratitude journal. I was not that kind of person. I'm a big cynic, but I'm totally there. It works. Well, you are a great example then, because actually this isn't about fluffy socks, but this is about our brain's ability to change itself and rewire itself. So after 21 days of three gratitudes, the neural pathways in your brain will rewire. So they'll go towards more positive things.
00:55:04
Speaker
They'll see fluffy socks more than they'll see. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And I see sunshine and blue sky and big clouds more often than I see.
00:55:13
Speaker
you know, dirt and worms and worms are beautiful too. She's listened to me. I see lovely things more often than I used to see lovely things because before I was just completely enveloped in my thoughts. I'm now looking for lovely things. Definitely. Even that I said to the counselor after the first week, so do you know what's really working? I'm not appreciating the journal, but what's really working is because I know I've got to fill it in. I'm really looking out for the things that I'm going to need to write in it. And she said, well, that's the whole point.
00:55:43
Speaker
It is it is the whole point because when we notice things we slow ourselves down we engage our parasympathetic nervous system we allow ourselves to relax a little bit more and That is just building out that capacity that we have and that's what all of those things those rituals are about It's about building our capacity not only for joy and wonder But also for the things that we talked about the beginning the hard stuff so the more you can do it the more measured you can be the more
00:56:11
Speaker
I suppose the more balanced you can be. And it's cumulative. It absolutely is cumulative. You can't do it for a couple of days and so it didn't work. Yeah, exactly. You have to keep going. It's cumulative and it's minute so you can't expect huge results but you can expect over a prolonged period of time to start feeling generally a bit better. Definitely, yeah definitely.
00:56:33
Speaker
Suzanne, I feel like we could make this a three-hour episode, but I'm going to have to stop at some point. Is there anywhere you'd particularly like to direct listeners to or anything you've not mentioned that you'd like to put in?
00:56:49
Speaker
I would love listeners if they resonate with what we've spoken about today to come and join Parenting Mental Health. So we're a UK registered charity that supports about 40,000 parents around the world and you can find us online. Our website is parentingmentalhealth.org. We also have a Facebook page and a Facebook community which is closed, judgment free and a wonderfully compassionate place to be. So search Parenting Mental Health on
00:57:16
Speaker
Facebook and also on Instagram or LinkedIn and you can find me on Instagram at Suzanne Alderson on Facebook on LinkedIn and I also am on Substack actually. I started a little daily ramble in January which is getting out. I haven't done it for the last week because I've not been very well but I do it every day. I just go out for literally it's a walk and talk so I ramble about inane stuff and it might be helpful but also my book
00:57:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's been great. I've really enjoyed it. And actually, when you were saying there about seeing the blue skies, that reminded me because I think I've had two days of rain since I started in January. So actually, it's quite interesting how you start to kind of find yourself being magnetized towards the good stuff.
00:58:03
Speaker
And then finally, my book, Never Let Go, how to parent your child through mental illness is available, audiobook, Kindle and in paperback on Amazon and in bookstores. But also I would say that if you are thinking, oh my goodness, my child doesn't have mental illness, that's okay. Actually, that's just the title. It's a really compassionate approach in there. It's also more about my story and other parents as well. Yeah. Well, it sounds like
00:58:28
Speaker
a great tool for parenting teenagers generally. And everybody in my audience is looking for that, that everybody, no one feels like they've got it sorted. And also re-parenting ourselves. I can imagine you've got, you know, that's part of the vibe as well, looking after ourselves. Absolutely. Suzanne, thank you so much. I'm going to go and join Substac. I've not been there. I'm going to go and look. That sounds like up my street.
00:58:54
Speaker
Thank you for talking to us today. I will put all of those links that Suzanne just mentioned and some others and everything we talked about. This is going to be a very rich set of show notes and I will attach a blog post to this episode as well.
00:59:12
Speaker
for everyone that's listening. Thank you for joining us. Go and join Suzanne's network. And I'm assuming, Suzanne, that you don't have to have a child who's suicidal before you join your community parenting mental health. Not at all. We support, you have to be a parent. We're really strict on that because we want to keep it a safe space. Of course. If your child is struggling with any form of mental health issue,
00:59:33
Speaker
Whether that's anxiety, all the way up to psychosis, suicide attempts, we have parents who, we've got specific subgroups for different types of challenges. So we have one for inpatients, so things like that. But yeah, we welcome everybody. As long as you're a parent and if you're in need, then we will be there for you. Safe space, no judgment, and loads of compassionate understanding and help. Amazing. Thank you so much. It's been great talking to you. Thank you.
01:00:07
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening. I really do appreciate it. Thank you too to everyone who's already rated and reviewed the podcast. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Amazon, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review. It really helps get the word out as well as making me very happy to read what you have to say. If this episode strikes a chord for you, please share it with anyone else you know who might be in the same boat and hit subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
01:00:35
Speaker
If you have a story or a suggestion for something you'd like to see covered on the podcast, you can email me at teenagekickspodcast at gmail.com or message me on Instagram. I am Helen Wills. I love hearing from all my listeners. It really makes a difference to me on this journey. See you next week when I'll be chatting to another brilliant guest about the highs and lows of parenting teens. Bye for now.