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Living in the world of young adulthood present unique challenges.
There are so many different pressures and challenges. Your relationship with your parents is changing. You may explore new parts of your identity. There are endless decisions to make about school, work, relationships, money, and technology.
Common Stressors in Young Adulthood
Being a young adult is such a strange time of life, isn’t it? In many ways, you have the responsibilities of an older adult. However, you’re also still a teenager or just emerging from those years. While you’ve overcome many of the issues you faced as a teen, some of them still linger, even as new ones begin to emerge.
Your Relationship with Parents Changes in Young Adulthood
One of the issues you may face right now is in understanding the changing relationship that you have with your parents. You are no longer a child, but you are still their child. On one hand, they may still treat you as such. On the other hand, they may expect more independence from you than you are ready to handle.
Many young adults find themselves struggling financially to make ends meet.
Student loan debt and soaring housing costs have made it difficult for your generation to afford to move out of your parents’ homes. Therefore, you might still live at home. Even if you’ve moved out, you may rely on your parents for financial help. Either way, this can pose challenges to fully realizing your adulthood in your parents’ eyes.
Or perhaps you don’t have that parental support. You may have to navigate the tricky waters of early adulthood, including the finances, all on your own. That places a lot of stress on you.
The great news is that most people find that their relationship does improve with their parents over time. The teen years are rough for both you and them. As you move further into adulthood, you can have a much better connection.
Therapy can help you improve your relationship with your parents starting today.
The Challenges that Arise Around Education
Education issues are another common challenge that people face in young adulthood. First, you have to decide whether or not to go to college. Then you have to decide where to go. Then you have to deal with the competitive stress of trying to get into that college.
Once you get to college, there are many more stressors including:
- Learning how to stay on top of your studies in a less structured environment
- Selecting the classes, schedule, and major that feels right for you
- Financial challenges around paying for college and/or working while in school
- Social pressures including those related to sexuality and substance use
Of course, you might also discover that college isn’t right for you at all. Many young adults start college with good intentions and then drop out. This causes a whole slew of feelings that can be a huge challenge to cope with.
I specialize in working with young adults who have dropped out of college.
While I enjoy working with young adults facing all different types of issues, I am particularly passionate about helping you if you have dropped out of college. I can also help if you are in college but thinking about dropping out.
I don’t have any agenda about what choice you should make. I want to support you in figuring out the right choice for yourself. I also want to give you the skills you may need to handle the emotions that arise during this challenging experience.
How Therapy Can Help Young Adults
Many people wonder how therapy can help them. There are many different ways I can work with you to relieve stress and improve wellbeing. People come to therapy in large part because something feels wrong.
Therapy offers a safe space to gain understanding about what’s wrong and tools to improve the situation.
More than anything else, I offer you completely non-judgmental respect for who you are and where you are at in your life journey. You already have many of the tools within you to achieve greater self-understanding and a higher quality of life. I want to support you in uncovering and utilizing those tools.
Play and Expressive Therapy for Young Adults
Sometimes it’s hard for any of us to express ourselves through words. Using art and other forms of expressive therapy, you may find answers within that surprise you.
I am a member of the Association for Play Therapy California, and I am both educated and experience in using play therapy to help people of all ages.
Many adults find play to be such a relief.
As a young adult, you may feel a lot of pressure to act responsibly at all times. Getting the opportunity to express yourself through drawing, painting, clay, sand trays, or acting can help you to access a vibrant, youthful part of yourself that you don’t always get to enjoy these days.
Of course, I also have training and experience in other types of therapy. My approach combines play therapy with techniques from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Trauma-Informed Therapy. We will collaborate together to find the approach that helps you the most.
Skills You May Learn in Therapy
No matter what specific techniques we end up using, you’ll have the opportunity to gain and practice a range of different skills in therapy. These include:
- Anger management and improved coping skills
- Better communication in all relationships
- Increased self-understanding
- New tools for resolving childhood trauma and past issues
- Options for living with mental health challenges into adulthood
- Organizational skills to help with work, education, and finances
- Tools for building self-esteem as your identity continues to develop
- Ways to reduce stress and increase feelings of peace and clarity
Become the Adult You Want to Be
One of the most common questions that young adults have is, “who am I?”
One day your values, identity, and belief systems can feel so secure. The next you may not even recognize yourself. This can be extremely distressing. However, it’s very common.
You don’t have to know exactly who you are right now.
In fact, it’s perfectly age-appropriate to spend this period of your life asking that question and honing the answer. Chances are that you already have some idea of the adult that you want to be.
As a therapist, I am here to accept you as you are. I am also here to help you investigate that at a deeper level. Therapy provides a safe space to ask yourself what type of adult you want to be. It provides you with tools to explore all of the possible answers to that question.
As you work through the many challenges of young adulthood, you can get closer and closer to solidifying what you want. You can better understand your immediate needs and desires. You can also start to gain a vision of who you want to be in the future.
Therapy can give you skills to feel better right now while also working towards becoming the adult that you want to be in years to come.