Our teenage years were some of the most pivotal and powerful years of our childhoods.
As teenagers, we encountered a LOT of pressure and emotional turmoil from our social groups at school, the larger cultural expectations, not to mention whatever degree of dysfunction, abuse, or pain we may have been encountering in our home environment with our parents and siblings.
For many of us, we didn’t feel listened to, understood, or respected as teens. We may have felt unseen, unloved, and unheard.
We may have felt dismissed by adults and disappointed in their lack of integrity. We may have coped with the pain of all these pressures in unhealthy ways like acting out, high-risk behaviors, lying, or isolating and turning inward to protect ourselves.
In your adult life, during times of stress, the "inner teenager" may get triggered and make attempts to take action to protect your system.
This is a problem because the inner teen doesn’t yet have the tools to do this because she is still a child, not yet an adult. So these "protective actions" can be self-defeating, dysfunctional, or even destructive.
When she is activated within us due to fear and the impulse to protect, the inner teen can actually *perpetuate the problematic programming* we received from family and the patriarchal culture in a misguided effort to feel safe, free, and in control.
This is really important to understand as it’s a form of self-sabotage when we allow a panicked or reactive inner teen to be at the wheel of our self-system rather than our adult self/inner mother.