As teens learn about mental health and wellness and are perhaps struggling with anxiety or depression symptoms, it is extremely important that parents are involved and take a hands-on approach versus a hands-off approach where they let their children come to them with what they need and when they need it. More often than not adolescents don’t know why they feel the way they do, what they need in the moment, or when they need the help that they need to move past what they are dealing with.
This timeframe can be very confusing and challenging to adolescence and without the support in guidance from their parents, they can be left wondering and struggling on their own and not knowing what they need, what they want, or what to even ask for as far as help. It is far better for a parent to be over involved than under involved. In the worst-case scenario if a parent is over involved, their child might just get frustrated and communicate that with them, but they will know that they are loved, supported, and can come to you with most things.
However, if a Parent is under involved, the child will likely not learn how to effectively communicate what they need or want from their parents because they have little to no experience in communicating important issues or feelings or emotions with their parents. Typically, when parents are over involved or correctly involved their child has effective communication skills because they are constantly communicating with their parents or siblings, and they have learned how to communicate but more importantly they feel comfortable communicating with those around them that can help them if and when needed.
However, if a child has little to no experience communicating with parents because they are given too much freedom or their parents treat them as young adults far too early, they will not feel comfortable or confident in communicating with their parents, siblings, or extended family members enough to ask for help or enough to even know what they need or when they need it.
Too often in the past two decades parents have used electronics as a babysitter for their kids, thus making communication a sidebar that is rarely used. There are fewer and fewer families that even eat dinner together every night and more and more people have their phones with them at the dinner table, so they communicate less and less with family. As this has happened, adolescence have stifled their need for communication and therefore don’t know what they need or how to ask for it and communicate with others.
Electronics, social media, video games, etc. take the attention away from us reflecting on our emotions, thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs, thus making it almost impossible to know how we feel in different situations. We need time to reflect on ourselves to know how we feel in different situations and in different settings with different people so that we know what affects us and in what ways and what boundaries to set and when and with who.
Electronics are a huge distraction that negatively impacts our ability to reflect and become self-aware and connect with others. I’ve seen so many families out for dinner ware everyone in the family is on their phone as they wait to get a table and then when they are at the table, they are on their phone waiting for their food. People are communicating less and less than they did a decade ago and less and less than they did a decade before that. I have seen three and four-year-olds out with their parents at dinner where they are sitting at the table on their tablets and the parents might be having a conversation, but they are not interacting at all with their kids.
Parents have taken this approach where they are letting electronics, teachers, professors, daycare workers, etc. raise and highly influenced their children when they need to be doing the work to support and guide and love their children so that their children know that they can come to them with not only issues but also good things that are happening in their lives. Within the therapy process, when working with adolescence it is imperative that parents are involved. I’ve seen how this has drastically changed relationships between parents and kids simply by having parents as a part of the therapy session either for the first 10 minutes or the last 10 minutes. This tells the child that their parents are interested in them and their life and how they’re feeling about different situations. This simple act can be life-changing for their child and their mental health moving forward.
The Importance of Saying Affirmations
Say specific affirmations for at least 30 days to ensure that they sink into your subconscious and have a chance at becoming your subconscious self talk. If you drive a car you can listen to affirmations from individuals on YouTube that have channels dedicated to affirmations to help with different topics in your life. It is a perfect time to let these affirmations sink in and let the ideas permeate your consciousness until they become a part of you. It is my hope that each and every person learn how to use affirmations to create self-love, peace, joy, prosperity, and a sense of well-being for themselves today and every day.
Today is a great day to start creating a joyous and fulfilling life. Today is a great day to change your life for the better. You already have the tools within you to do this this. The tools are your thoughts and your beliefs. Affirmations can improve the quality of your life. For those of you who are not familiar with the benefits of positive affirmations, they are simply anything you say or think a lot. Much of what we normally say, and think is very negative and creates negative experiences for us.
Therefore, we have to retrain our thinking and talking into positive patterns if we want to change our lives. When we say an affirmation, it is a beginning point of change within our world; we are literally speaking things into existence. In essence you are saying to your subconscious mind, “I am taking responsibility, I am aware that there is something I can do to change.” When doing affirmations, you must consciously choose words that will either help to eliminate something from your life or help to create something new in your life. Every thought you think and every word you speak is an affirmation.
Our self-talk is a stream of affirmations. You are using affirmations every moment whether you know it or not throughout the day in everything you say to yourself out loud or in your thoughts. You are affirming and creating your life experiences with every word and every thought. Your beliefs are merely habitual thinking patterns that you learned as a child, many of them work very well for you, however, some beliefs may be limiting your ability to create the things you say that you want.
What you want and what you believe you deserve may be very different as well. You must pay attention to your thoughts so that you can begin to highlight the ones that are creating experiences that you do not want in your life. Please realize that every complaint is an affirmation of something you think you don’t want in your life. Every time you get angry you are affirming that you want more anger in your life. Every time you feel like a victim you are affirming that you want to continue to feel like a victim. If you feel that life does not give you what you want, then it is most certain that you will never have the goodness that life gives to others until you change the way you think and talk. Just because you may have never learned how to think and talk doesn’t mean that you can’t start now.
The world has recently started to realize that our thoughts create our experiences. It is time for all of us to wake up and to begin to consciously create our lives in a way that pleases and supports us.
Once you learn how to use affirmations, then you can apply the principles in all situations. Some people say that affirmations don’t work which is an affirmation in and of itself. What they mean is they don’t know how to use them correctly. They may say my prosperity is growing but think, “this is stupid I know it won’t work.”
The negative affirmation will win out the positive one because it is part of a long-standing habitual way of looking at life. Sometimes people say their affirmations once per day and then complain the rest of the time. It will take a long time for affirmations to work if it is done this way. The negative/complaining affirmations will always win because they are more of them and they are usually said with great feeling or emotion. Saying affirmations is only part of the procedure, what we do for the rest of the day and night is even more important.
The secret to having your affirmations work quickly and consistently is to prepare the world around them for growth. Affirmations are like seeds planted in soil. For seeds to grow, they need rich soil where abundant growth can happen. The more you can choose to think thoughts that make you feel good the quicker the affirmations work. Thinking happy thoughts is not always simple but it is doable. The way you choose to think right now is just a choice. You may not realize it because you have felt this way for so long, but it really is a choice.
This very moment you can choose to change your thinking, it won’t turn everything around overnight but if you are consistent and make the choice every day to think thoughts that make you feel good, you will definitely make positive changes in every area of your life. I choose to wake up each morning with thinking of blessings and gratitude for the wonderful life I have and I make the choice to think happy thoughts no matter what others are doing. I don’t do it 100% of the time but I am up to about 75% now and it’s made a big difference in how much I enjoy life and how much good just seems to flow into my every day.
The only moment you ever live is this very moment. It is the only moment you have any control over and if you don’t choose to feel good in this moment how can we create future moments that are abundant and fun? How do you feel right now? Do you feel good? Do you feel bad? What are your current emotions? What is your gut feeling? Would you like to feel better and reach for a better feeling thought? If you feel bad in anyway, sad, irritable, bitter, resentful, angry, fearful, shameful, depressed, anxious, stressed, etc., then you have temporarily lost your connection to the flow of good experiences God has waiting for you.
Don’t waste your thoughts on blame. There isn’t a person, place or thing that has any control over your feelings because they do not think in your mind. This is also why you really only have control over yourself, and you have no control over others, because you cannot control their thoughts. The only thing you will ever have total control of is what you choose to think and this directly correlates to what you will get in life. Remembering joyful experiences and thinking of good things you would like to have happen in the future are just like affirmations and will have the same affect. Looking forward to tomorrow and thinking these kinds of thoughts is an act of loving yourself and loving yourself creates miracles in your life.
Now let’s get to the affirmations. Doing affirmations is consciously choosing to sync certain thoughts that will create positive results in the future. It is a focal point to begin changing your thinking. Affirmative statements are going beyond the reality of the present to the creation of future simply by the words you use in the present. When you choose to say, “I am very prosperous,” you may have very little money in the bank at the moment. What you were doing is planting seeds for future prosperity.
Each time you repeat it you are affirming the seeds you have planted in the atmosphere of your mind. That is why you want it to be a happy atmosphere as things grow much quicker in fertile rich soil. It is important for you to always say your affirmations in present tense, “I have,” or “I am.” If you say, “I am going to,” or “I will have,” it stays out there in the future. The universe takes your thoughts and words very literally and gives you what you say you want. This is another reason to keep your mental atmosphere happy. It is easier to think of positive affirmations when you feel good. Think of it this way, every thought you think counts so don’t waste your ever so important thoughts.
Every positive thought brings good into your life and every negative thought pushes the good away. It keeps what you want just out of your reach. How many times in your life have you almost gotten something good, and it seems to be just taken away at the last moment? If you could remember your mental atmosphere at those times, you would have the answer to why some things are not happening for you. Negative thoughts create the barrier against positive affirmations working. If you say, “I don’t want to be sick anymore,” this is not an affirmation.
For good health you have to say, “I am grateful for my good health.” Clearly state what you do want, “I am abundant and happy every day.” If you say, “I wish I didn’t feel terrible. I wish I wasn’t depressed,” you will not see positive change because the more you talk about the problem the more you are anchored in place. Don’t blame others for your problems, it’s just another waste of time as we are all in control of our own consciousness, our own thoughts and we attract specific experiences to us by the way we think. When you change your thinking process, everything in your life will also change.
You will be happy and surprised to see how people, places, things, and circumstances can change. Blame is just another negative affirmation and you do not want to waste your influential thoughts on. Instead learn to turn your negative affirmations around into positive ones.
For example, I hate my body should become, “I love and appreciate my body.” “I’m tired of being sick,” should be, “I allow my body to return to its natural vibrant health.” “I’m too fat,” should be, “I honor my body and take good care of it.” “Nobody loves me,” should be, “I radiate love and love fills my life.” “I’m not creative,” should be, “I’m always discovering talents I did not know I had.” “I’m stuck in a job that I hate,” should be, “I look forward to going to work every day.”
These affirmations are powerful and positive changes will happen because of them. Really pay attention to your thoughts so that you can start to make positive changes to your self-talk. Start with some self-esteem affirmations and see how many of the self-esteem affirmations you can memorize or write down on post it notes and display around your home or car, and then repeat them off and on. It will help change that worthless feeling you might be carrying around to one of self-esteem and self-worth.
Then watch your positive affirmations materialize your desires. Affirmations are solutions that will replace whatever problem you might have. Whenever you have a problem repeat that all is well and everything is working out for my highest good over and over again. Say to yourself, “Only good will come of this situation and I am safe.” This simple affirmation will work miracles in your life. I highly suggest that you not share your affirmations with others who may put these ideas down.
When you are just getting started it is best to keep your thinking to yourself until you have achieved your desired results. Then when friends see your life has changed a lot and that you’re so different then you can explain what you have been doing.
Remember to make up affirmations on your own first. Affirmations for you to use right now: “I feel good about myself,” “I make positive changes in my life,” “I am grateful for today,” “I am confident,” “I am strong,” etc. When talking about your health, one thing to note is that you cannot get angry at your body for any reason. Anger is another affirmation, and it is telling your body that you hate it or hate parts of it.
Your cells are very aware of every thought you have. Think of your body is a servant that is working as hard as it can to keep you in perfect health no matter how you treat it. Your body knows how to heal itself. If you feed it healthy foods and beverages, give it exercise and sufficient sleep and think happy thoughts, the cells are working in a happy healthy atmosphere, however, if you feed it chemicals and ingredients that cause inflammation, then the cells in your body are working at a disadvantage and in a disagreeable atmosphere and your body will not be as healthy as you would like it to be.
You will never create good health by talking or thinking about your illness. Good health comes from love and appreciation. You want to put good thoughts, feelings, and self-talk into your body as much as you possibly can.