Supporting Your Teen Through Cultural Adjustments

If your teen is struggling with anxiety, sadness, or the stress of adapting to a new culture, you’re not alone. You may see them feeling withdrawn, overwhelmed, or unsure of where they belong. These experiences are common for kids growing up between worlds.

At Intrepid Counseling, I provide therapy for multicultural and international teens navigating anxiety, depression, and recovery from difficult experiences. Together, we uncover what’s happening beneath the surface. I help parents and teens to understand both what’s making things so hard right now, and what is also still going well to get a balanced idea of the situation. Then we work on skills and strategies to help your teen get back to feeling good and build long-term resilience and confidence.

I Team Up With Parents

I prioritize include parents in counseling for kids and teens so that over time you and your child become a team, and share an understanding of what was hard and what works to help. The goal is that when you’re ready, you and your child as a team can confidently take over from me to continue the healing process. Therapy is not meant to be long term, but to equip you to be in it together as long as it takes.

Common Challenges for Culturally Complex Teens

• Cross-cultural social anxiety

• Sadness, loneliness and trouble making friends

• Cultural adjustment stress

• Unprocessed grief and trauma

Why Work With a Cultural Complexity Specialist?

Therapy from from someone who has lived the challenges that come with being a mix of many cultures and places, prevents confusion and delay in getting to the core of the problem. I’ve lived the belonging-everywhere-and-nowhere story, and I have training and experience working with teens growing up globally-mobile. You can be sure you’ll get knowledgeable support that’s normalizing and not over-pathologizing.

What Happens In Therapy?

A multicultural upbringing is an asset which also brings challenges. I talk with teens about what’s common and typical when you’re a culturally complex kid, so that we can work on handling it well when its really hard. This could include working on coping skills, processing grief, or gently working through traumatic memories. It could also mean making stress-survival or friendship-building strategies.

Finding Balance Between Worlds

Are you wondering, “how can I be me here?” Settling in and finding your place is hard especially when it’s hard to pin down where exactly home is.

If you’ve ever felt like you don’t completely fit in, or like you’re an un-nameable mix of cultures and places, you’re not alone. Maybe you’ve moved countries, changed schools, or feel pressure to be someone you’re not. It’s exhausting to keep it all together.

Therapy is a space just for you, where you can talk through things out loud, and figure out what’s really going on inside. Working together on how to explain it, helps you understand it better yourself, and brings out new possibilities for how to be a more settles, grounded version of you. We seek and find the you who makes sense in all your complexity and can own your uniqueness while feeling your connectedness too.

Getting Back to Being You

I help multicultural and international teens manage anxiety, sadness, cultural adjustment stress, and recover from tough experiences so you can feel more like yourself again.

Finding How to be Yourself Here and Now

Have you ever struggled to answer the question “where are you from?” Or have you been asked “Where are you really from?” I help culturally complex teens and young adults integrate complex identities so that you can finally feel like you’re all the way you’re whole self at once.

It’s Complicated

As a therapist familiar with Third Culture Kids (TCKs), international students, and globally mobile families, I understand how culture shapes emotion and identity. I’m not offendable or shockable by the kinds of situations you might worry are too much, or too weird or too foreign to explain to an American. I’ve been right there with those worries myself since I didn’t grow up in the U.S. As an Adult Third Culture Kid, I’ve lived a culturally complex story, so you can count on me to be open, curious and you can be confident that our work will be grounded in respect for your story and background.