Michael Johnson

About

The person who usually finds me is sitting in a car outside their own house, taking a few minutes of quiet before going back in. They are competent at work, respected by friends, and completely outmatched at home by someone half their size. Teenagers have an unerring instinct for the gap between what you say and what you do, and living under that scrutiny is really wearing. We work on staying consistent when you are tired, on not taking the bait, and on repairing the ruptures that will happen regardless of how well you handle any of it. My first setting was crisis services, which gave me a very high threshold for what counts as alarming and a low tolerance for catastrophizing. Most of what alarms parents is developmentally ordinary. If you are the person in the car, get in touch. The car is a perfectly reasonable place to have reached this decision.