Editor's note: This story is shared with permission. Names and some details have been changed to protect privacy, and it was reviewed with Maya's family.
Maya's mother booked the session, not Maya. That detail matters, because when they sat down, the first thing Maya said — to me, not to her mother — was: "Whatever she told you, it's not that bad. I'm fine."
Seventeen years old, straight-A student, part-time job, the responsible eldest. From the outside: a family to be proud of. Inside: a girl who had started crying in the school toilets over a B on a chemistry test and was more frightened by that than by the crying.
She was, of course, not fine. She was a young person running an impossible contract: keep the grades, keep the job, keep mum calm during the separation happening at home, and never add your own weight to anyone's load. teenagers are not supposed to be load-bearing walls. Maya had been one for two years.
What helped, in the order it helped
First, someone believed her. When I said, "That sounds exhausting — carrying all of that," she stared at the floor and her eyes filled. Nobody had said it out loud, including her. Being believed is the whole foundation; nothing else builds on top until it exists.
Second, we made the invisible visible. On a whiteboard, we listed everything she was managing: exams, university applications, shifts, her mum's mood, her little brother's school run. She looked at the board for a long time and said, "It looks mental when it's written down." Yes. That is the point of writing it down.
Third, we renegotiated the contract — with real adults, not just in her head. Her mum came to one session, with Maya's permission and Maya in the room, and heard that her daughter was staying up until 1 a.m. to be reachable "in case you needed me." Her mum cried. Maya watched her mum cry and immediately started managing that too — we were several months from being finished.
The slow parts
Maya wanted a fix by the January exams. We worked on sleep, on dropping one subject to a pass rather than a battle for an A, on the radical skill of saying "I can't" to a shift manager. Progress looked like nothing, week after week. Then her teacher told her she seemed "lighter," and she came in and reported it with bewildered suspicion, like a person told they have grown taller.
The exams went fine. Not flawlessly — she got a B in chemistry, the same chemistry, and it cost her two days of spiralling instead of two weeks. That is what recovery from this looks like: the same events, shorter halflives.
What she says now
Maya is at university, two hours away, studying something she chose for interest rather than strategy. She checks in occasionally, which we agreed she would do less and less. Her last message said something I keep in my notes: "I still overthink. But now I notice when I'm doing it, and I know it's not the truth, it's just noise with my voice on it."
A word for parents reading this
Your teenager does not need you to fix their feelings. Maya's mother's bravest moment was not the conversations we had — it was learning to sit with her daughter's bad moods without demanding a reason or offering a solution. Being a calm, available adult does more than any speech.
If your young person is not okay — if sleep, appetite, grades, or joy have changed shape for weeks — take it seriously early. A counsellor, a school wellbeing lead, a GP, or even a first conversation with one of our AI teen support sessions can open a door that is much easier to walk through in September than in May. And teenagers: being the responsible one is not your job. It never was. Someone should have told you, so consider it told.
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