Recently, Ms. Li was upset about her daughter, who came back from school every day looking listless, her grades dropped, and said she didn’t want to go to school. “I later learned that she didn’t want to go to school because she didn’t know how to get along with her classmates. I just don’t understand why she is so affected by interpersonal problems at the age of middle school. Her grades have always been pretty good, how can I get her to settle down and study?” Ms. Li cannot hide her inner anxiety.
Teenage interpersonal relationship is one of the major causes of current teenage psychological problems. The director of the counseling center expressed a clear view on this, saying that after the age of four, individuals slowly move from family to society, and the biggest change in their lives is the beginning of the so-called “socialization”, that is, the beginning of relations with classmates and friends outside the family. During the adolescent stage, individuals begin to distance themselves from their parents and become closer to their friends, who become the most important interpersonal relationships during this period, and learn socialization experiences and skills that become the basis for adult relationships. If you miss this stage of adaptation, it will be relatively difficult to learn this later and you will be prone to socialization difficulties.
The main problems in adolescent interpersonal relationships can be grouped into three categories: submissive, confrontational, and avoidant. For different types of cases, there are different manifestations and targeted ways to cope with them.
Submissive]
Children who are overly dependent on their mothers are most likely to suffer from “separation anxiety” and will use deliberately pleasing ways to avoid separation.
Case 1: Xiao Fang is in her second year of junior high school and has been transferred from her home in the northeast to Shenzhen for nearly a semester. When she first arrived in Shenzhen, she tried to get along with her classmates, often taking the initiative to be nice to them, and share delicious food with everyone. “Dormitory students every time I offer to help with hygiene, despite my reluctance, I will do, however, when I ask them to help, they are not happy. The nicer I was to my classmates, the quicker they tended to leave me, and I felt angry. No one plays with me at school, I have nothing to say to them, school is meaningless, and I want to quit school.” Xiao Fang said.
In order to verify the situation, experts have to Xiaofang’s classmates to understand. Some of her classmates reflected that Fang is small-minded, and she is especially happy when everyone is around her, but if they don’t talk to her all the time, she thinks she has said something wrong. Sometimes it is clear that you want to say something, but you will feel afraid to say the wrong thing and do not dare to say it.
Xiao Fang’s father revealed that she had been brought by her mother after her birth and had never left her mother, who later resigned from her job to look after Xiao Fang at home. When she was young, Fang always cried and refused to go to kindergarten. In addition, her mother rarely took Fang downstairs to play with children.
Expert analysis: In this case, Fang did not know how to interact with her peers or friends because she lacked appropriate early socialization experiences during childhood.
In order to avoid the pain caused by separation, Fang unconsciously adopts a deliberately pleasing approach to avoid separation, apparently by being nice to her classmates, but in fact by asking them to return the same way. This becomes a kind of disguised control and domination, and therefore brings pressure to the classmates, but affects the interaction with them. Some teenagers fall in love early partly because they are looking for an alternative to emotional dependence on their families. The divorce rate in Shenzhen is relatively high, and single-parent families are more likely to be overprotective and dependent on their children because of the one-way parent-child relationship and the guilt parents often feel toward their children because of their divorce.
How to deal with: Human growth includes two aspects: one is the growth of the body, and the other is the change of emotional dependence to independence. The development of emotional independence begins with facing separation, not avoiding it. Fang can slowly experience that, in fact, even if her classmates treat her in an average manner, it will not bring her great influence and disadvantage, she will gradually become independent and form her own self, not caring too much about others’ opinions about her. At the same time, she will be comfortable to make her own requests without being too afraid of others rejecting her. On the other hand, she will also reject others’ requests more easily. When she has a bad relationship with her classmates, they may not be suffering, but she just can’t stand it inside herself when they treat her badly. An emotionally independent person doesn’t care too much about others treating her badly.
[Avoidance type
Parents are too demanding and strict with their children, which can lead to low self-esteem and avoidance of frustration and failure.
Case 2: Looking for expert help, Xiao Wei is a senior graduate of a key middle school experimental class in the city, the results have been very good, many parents are very envious of his parents, lamenting that if they also have such a son to save their hearts how good. However, Xiao Wei does not think so, he always feels that he is not as smart as his classmates, often worried about exams and competitions than others, before the examination is extremely anxious. He lacks self-confidence and is afraid that others will look down on him and dislike him. Sometimes he also felt that some classmates were saying behind his back that he was incapable, etc. Xiao Wei felt lonely inside and longed to make more friends. A month before this year’s college entrance exam, he told his parents that he did not want to go to school and did not want to take the college entrance exam because of his poor relationship with his classmates. Xiao Wei’s parents were taken aback by their son and were surprised: “You said you don’t want to take the college entrance exam even if your grades are bad, the problem is that he is so good, how can he give up the college entrance exam because of this reason?”
Expert analysis: Experts later learned that Xiao Wei has been strictly educated by his parents since he was a child, they praise less criticism more, worried that praise will make his son complacent. In fact, the individual’s self-confidence and low self-esteem depends on the size of the gap between the self-ideal and the current situation, the greater the gap, the lower the self-esteem. This self-ideal is related to the requirements and evaluations that parents and other important family members made of themselves when they were children, and individuals experience internalizing their parents’ requirements or evaluations of themselves into their own requirements and evaluations of themselves. The higher the self-requirement, the more difficult it is to achieve the goal, the easier it is to produce a sense of inferiority, and the more inferior, the more difficult it is to accept the setbacks and failures in life, so some take the way of avoidance to cope with the case.
How to deal with: First of all, we should let Xiao Wei recognize his own strengths, so that he can see and allow that there are failures and unsatisfactory life. Only by accepting these will it be more beneficial to recognize his own strengths and improve his self-confidence. The second step is to help Willie identify effective ways to improve his learning and avoid feelings of helplessness. The third step is to help Willie realize that there are many factors that affect success, and that learning gaps are not only related to internal factors such as intelligence and effort, but also influenced by many external factors, and cannot be attributed to “his own stupidity. Finally, encourage Xiao Wei to face and try to interact with his classmates, so that he can experience that his classmates’ actual attitudes and opinions about him are different from his own guesses, in order to strengthen the motivation of interpersonal interaction and turn passive into active.
[Confrontation type
Children who were often scolded by their parents during childhood will project their repressed anger toward their parents onto others, leading to a vicious cycle of hostility on both sides.
Case 3: Xiao Zheng is a senior high school student who often argues and strikes with his classmates. In the minds of his classmates, Xiao Zheng is catty and calculating, with a particularly strong temper, arguing with people at every turn and hitting them. According to teachers and classmates, Zheng used to think badly of others, for example, when his classmates discussed that some people like to “act cool”, Zheng thought that was an insinuation of himself; when his classmates looked at him, he thought they were scorning him; when his classmates jokingly touched him, he thought they were deliberately bullying him, so he hit them, causing classmates He also felt that his classmates were scorning him when they looked at him; when they jokingly touched him, he felt that they were deliberately bullying him, so he hit them, causing them to resent him and his friends. Zheng himself believes that his classmates and friends are not friendly to him and often deliberately bully and make things difficult for him.
After some understanding, it turned out that Xiao Zheng was often scolded by his father during childhood, and his mother often showed impatience. Zheng felt that his mother did not like him very much. “homework slightly not done, the mother will be loud reprimand, since childhood, I feel her attitude is hard, I feel more alienated from her.” Zheng said. As he grew older, he disliked being with his parents and generally hid in his room when he got home, rarely communicating with them. The relationship between his parents is also very tense, often blaming each other.
Expert analysis: The way parents raise their children and the relationship between husband and wife both have an impact on the development of interpersonal relationships of individuals. Children may unconsciously imitate their parents and develop an “identity” that includes hostility and hitting. These children are often sensitive to the perception that others have designs on them and unconsciously project their childhood repressed anger toward their parents onto others, which in turn leads to resentment and hostility toward them, and the attitudes and behaviors of others further reinforce their own hostility toward others, creating a vicious cycle. As a result, individuals usually remain wary and are unable to get along with their friends. In Shenzhen, most of the working people leave their children in the Mainland and become left-behind children, and these situations are likely to lead to children’s dissatisfaction and complaints.
How to deal with: In this case, the expert used the “empty chair technique”: let Zheng face an empty chair, imagine his father or mother sitting on this chair, and cathartic himself; then, he sat on this chair instead, imagining himself to be his father or mother, so as to experience the inner feelings of his parents, so as to achieve the purpose of transposition. The purpose is to achieve transpersonal thinking.
Next, the expert asked Zheng to try to lower his own demands and let him understand that the determining factor of his psychological condition is his own inner feelings, sometimes not the objective situation. For example, some children’s parents have taken good care of their children, but the children themselves still do not feel loved by their parents, but feel that their parents are not good for them.
The third step is introspective therapy. Let Zheng think about “how much his parents have given”, “how much he has given back to his parents”, “what trouble he has brought to his parents”, etc., so that the inner grudge and anger will gradually disappear and make Gratitude comes to his heart