I am a girl.

I was a very late developing adolescent girl. Junior and high school were dark dark years for me, until I met Jesus at age 15. Finding out I was loved by Jesus changed my very identity.

Through God’s calling I became a woman pastor, early in the 1980s. I was a youth pastor for 39 years before I began pastoring my church, Larger Story Church, which has teens in mind in every decision we make. (Of course.)

Working with teens since 1981 meant I have decided to relive my adolescent years again and again in the girls I love. I get to feel their awkwardness and uncertainness again and again, which reminds me of those terrible years I lived.

I love teen girls. Currently my three granddaughters are all teens. I wish they would never age out of adolescence! They feel differently about that and thankfully we have the relationship that they tell me that. I enjoy them so much. I want the best for all of our teen girls.

The world is cruel to teen girls. This is why I write this series. I have some things to say.

_______________________________________________________

A Bravester faith realizes that all emotions move us towards God. All of the emotions—the good ones, the awe-inspiring ones, uncomfortable ones, the negative ones, and the ones that entrap us with repetitive and destructive behaviors. According to neuroscience, emotions are tunnels and God has a thing about meeting us in the messy middle of those tunnels. He loves to show up in the midst of chaos and repeat his loud message of “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

For teens, they are experiencing the complex feel of these emotions for the first time. This is a normal part of adolescent development. Teen girls express their emotions more than boys but this is not a problem. It is the wonder of girls.

“Girls are also more likely to seek therapy, encouraged by a culture that tells them talking about feelings is healthy. They arrive ready to explore their inner worlds with rich emotional vocabularies. Yet psychiatry, which claims to be a medical science, has no blood tests, brain scans, or biological markers for its diagnoses. Instead, a girl’s words become her pathology. The more articulate she is about her pain, the more symptoms get documented. Her nuanced descriptions become diagnostic criteria. Her emotional vocabulary becomes evidence of severity. “She has such insight into her depression,” therapists note, not recognizing they’re witnessing emotional intelligence, not illness. Within sessions, she inadvertently provides all the ammunition needed for psychiatric labels and medication.

“Boys who can’t or won’t articulate their distress fly under the radar. Girls who eloquently describe theirs get diagnosed and drugged. This is why females are medicated at more than double the rate of males. We’re punishing women for the very verbal intelligence that makes them exceptional at understanding and navigating emotional complexity.

“…The financial incentives are real. Every diagnosed girl is worth a fortune in lifetime pharmaceutical profits. But this goes deeper than money. This is spiritual warfare. A woman connected to her emotional power is independent and ungovernable. She is connected to a greater divine intelligence. A woman convinced she’s mentally ill never realizes her power and becomes a patient for life.” –Dr. Roger McFillin, https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/diagnosing-our-daughters

Read more about Dr. Roger McFillin and what he’s learning.

The overdiagnosing of our teens is a problem I’ve had a front row to in my over four decades of youth ministry. There used to be allergy and diabetic meds and now there are “thousands” of meds to be distributed on retreats.

Finally the rest of the world is hearing about the dangers of what has been considered “simple” SSRIs. Read this and this and this.

Are we turning our girls into lifelong customers to the pharmaceutical industry?

Girls have emotions. Adolescent development is hard, quirky, and emotional. Let’s not medicate what is normal.

“Help her see emotions as information, not illnesses. Sadness about a toxic friendship signals needed change. Anger at injustice fuels action. Anxiety before performance sharpens focus. These aren’t symptoms to suppress but messages to heed. After feeling them fully, she can return her attention to what matters: her goals, her values, her growth. This is ancient wisdom that therapy culture has forgotten: you don’t need to solve every feeling, sometimes you just need to outlast it.

“Struggle clarifies everything: reveals real friends, shows what she values, teaches what she can survive. Every difficult emotion navigated without medication builds capacity for life’s challenges.”—Freya India, https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/diagnosing-our-daughters

Adolescent development is purposeful to get everyone into adulthood. It is challenging, awkward, and full of failure. Let’s not forget the joys that create memories for a lifetime also. It is the awkward, painful, stretching parts where teens slowly learn how to tolerate frustration, recover from embarrassment, regulate emotion, solve problems, and discover they can survive discomfort without collapsing under it. These are not interruptions to development, they are the development process itself. This part sucks. It is also necessary.

Anxiety before a difficult conversation, sadness after rejection, loneliness, failure, insecurity, uncertainty, etc., all of these experiences become teachers and build this wonderful thing called resilience or grit. To form grit takes time. Time. Yeah, that sucks too not just for the teen but also for us. As parents and adults who love girls, we are walking with them as they move through those emotional tunnels and mature.

These normal developmental struggles are not problems to be medicated but experiences requiring guidance, support, wisdom, and endurance. Sometimes medication may genuinely help someone in severe distress, but there is also a fear that constantly medicating discomfort can interrupt the formation of emotional strength, frustration tolerance, self-awareness, and coping skills that adolescence is meant to cultivate over time.

Maturity rarely arrives through comfort alone. Or through intentional numbness. Or through the terrible terrible that too many teens suffer from without adults showing the way through the emotional tunnel.

Our teens need to hear from wise adults the words that this is terrible terrible, that this is temporary, that this is survivable. If they don’t get these words from wise adults or if they get these words from an AI companion or a social media group, shame sets in. Shame is a whole other layer that is deeper than the emotional tunnel.

“You don’t need to solve every feeling, sometimes you just need to outlast it.” –Freya India

Our teen girls are capable of outlasting it!

Thank you, parents and the many adults who love teens, for helping them outlast it.