Good-willed and emotional, the child submits his movement and his play in the context given to him by the caregiver, parent, teacher, responsible adult. Adolescence invades the child's life enabling this movement and play to question, destabilize, deconstruct the data and safety of the context in which it grows.

The possibility of the specialist concerned with understanding and capitalizing on this intense and often frightening process, for the adolescent and the adult himself, fascinated me and it seems that in my clinical practice and experience I did not avoid encountering it. Each teenager has their own particularity and unique way of experiencing the process of puberty.

That is why the meeting with different teenagers gives birth to new and unique experiences of understanding and therapeutic proposal. Different were the challenges but also the revelations in working with the delinquent teenagers of English society, the teenagers of religious families who are rewarded for suspension, the teenage wildflowers of reaction and challenge in a troubled high school class, the teenagers who seem to be fascinated by the perversity that can be hidden on the internet, the teenagers who measure their coming of age against the walls and faces of institutional frameworks.

The book, however, also contains the experience of meeting adults through the suggestions and interventions in school classes, educational institutions, the communities of adults who undertake sometimes with pity and sometimes more indifferently to teach them and expose them to the world of adults, as well as the parents and single parents with whom we cooperate therapeutically.

Often we adults who relate to teenagers do not realize that the difficulty of understanding may not be about the interpretation of the behavior of the teenager, but the understanding of the adolescence that we ourselves experienced. Our own adolescence was shaped by the way we were parented and by our own choice to change, postpone or "hide" in our own teenage years.

And if we don't know each other, how will we love each other? And if we don't love each other, how will we forgive each other?

"In the archipelago of his experiences, an adult, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, has marked which rocky islets and which islets he must or needs to avoid himself. These are experiences, experiences or knowledge of his own childhood, adolescent and early adult life, during which he was hurt, frustrated, betrayed or disgusted. Since we avoid these islets of experience, we do not know them. Avoiding them in fact, over the years we begin to believe many times that they don't even exist. But if we don't get to know them, how will we get to know us? And if we don't know each other, how will we love each other? And if we don't love each other, how will we forgive each other? And if we don't forgive us, how will we forgive those who hurt us, failed us, betrayed us, disgusted us? Because usually, those who were able to hurt and betray us are those people who at the same time were able to love us, inspire us, give birth to us, co-create us and support us. And the gift of life to man is the other, the third party, the stranger or the enemy, who shakes us out of the routine of avoiding all these experiences and forces us to meet them."

The Gift of Adolescence is a first such record of my experience. An existential approach to the paradoxical finding that the difficulty contained in the relationship with a teenager, or even in the relationship of a teenager with himself, can become an occasion for restarting and beauty in relationships between teenagers and adults. The book came about through the meeting with the friends-collaborators of En Plo publications and its way of writing has the authenticity of the communication that communication with the teenager himself requires.

Source: diastixo.gr

The gift of adolescence
Alexis Lappas