What’s Really Going On for Struggling Teens?

By the time I was 17, I had cycled through treatment centers, therapy offices, and diagnostic assessments more times than I could count. Depression. Anxiety. Borderline. ADHD. PTSD. ODD. The list kept growing. Medications changed, diagnoses shifted—but the confusion remained. Despite everything, I still didn’t feel any closer to understanding myself.

Looking back now, with the perspective that healing has given me, I can sum up what was really going on in a single sentence:

I didn’t know how to feel okay within myself.

I had no internal sense of home.

And when a person has no sense of home—no steady place inside to return to—it puts them in a constant state of survival. That was my baseline as a teenager: discomfort, urgency, despair. My nervous system was always buzzing. I either tried to numb the pain, escape it, or drown in it. Sometimes all three in a single day.

Numbing looked like substances.
Escaping looked like chasing intensity and attention in unsafe relationships.
Drowning looked like meltdowns, panic attacks, and self-harm.

So often, when we see a teen spiraling or acting out, we rush to label or fix them. But underneath it all, the truth is often heartbreakingly simple:
They don’t feel safe in their own skin.
They don’t feel at home in their own being.

And when you don’t feel at home, your choices aren’t made from clarity or alignment—they’re made from survival.

We chase connection because we’re starving for it.
We seek control because everything feels chaotic.
We turn to substances or risky behavior because we’re desperate for a break from the ache inside.

It’s not always as conscious as “I want to get high” or “I want to run away.”
Sometimes it’s simply: “I just don’t want to feel like Im dying inside.”

When someone’s inner world feels that overwhelming, life becomes a series of reactions—intense highs and lows, urgency, impulsivity. And the more I lived in that state—always reacting, always bracing—I developed a familiarity with chaos. It became my baseline. And over time, that chaos shaped my identity.

I’m broken.
I ruin everything.
No one really likes me.

Those beliefs started to feel like truth. They shaped my choices—and the consequences of those choices only reinforced the story I already believed about myself.

It was a deeply painful loop. And it’s one I now know so many teens are silently stuck in.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand:
That feeling of emptiness—that sense of not-okayness—isn’t permanent.
A sense of home is learned. It is available to everyone. And it is one of the great tasks of adolescence:
To become attuned to their own instincts, so they can act from a place of integrity, self-worth, and self-respect.

When a young person begins to live from that place, their life starts to reflect not their deepest fears or wounds, but the beauty, depth, and remarkable essence of their soul.

And we can support them in finding their way back to that by seeing them and by reminding them that there’s a whole, worthy self beneath the noise.

It is my deepest honor to walk alongside someone as they begin to find, create, and build that sense of home within themselves.

Because once they’ve found it, the world no longer feels like something they have to run from or prove themselves to. They know they belong. And they carry that home with them, wherever they go.

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If you’d like to connect about working together, please reach out here. I specialize in working closely with a particular profile of girls—those who are highly sensitive, deeply loving, and profoundly impacted by relationships and the emotional complexity of life.

And if this resonated with you, I talk more about the process of helping teens build an inner sense of home in this episode of the Fear Less podcast. It’s a powerful conversation exploring practical, metaphorical, and deeply meaningful ways to support a young person in finding their way back to themselves.