Back to Center: Even though things are better with COVID, my friends are still on medication

Sarah Perron

December 28, 2022

The purpose of the “Back to Center” advice column is to provide perspectives for personal realignment and empowered living in these tyrannical times. Sarah encourages you to reach out to her with requests for advice about self-development and emotional and mental well-being. Please send your questions to advice@aflds.org. Anonymous and secure. Looking forward to hearing from you!

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I’m writing in because I’m really worried about some of my friends. We’re all high-school aged, but I am homeschooled, and they go to public school. When COVID was really bad, a couple of my good friends had a really hard time with their schools closing over and over and having to wear masks all the time. Some of them even went on medication to help deal with the anxiety and depression.

Even though things are much better with COVID now, they’re still on the medication, and I’ve seen it basically change their personalities — they’re not the same people they used to be.

I’m so worried about my friends. I just want to help them get off the medication and be themselves again, but I have no idea how. Do you have any ideas?

Thanks so much for sharing your worries. Your care and concern for your friends is so beautiful. They are very blessed to have you in their lives! It definitely is a concerning situation, and I hope you’ll find my thoughts helpful.

The first thing I’ll share is a thought that could be helpful for framing this entire situation. Here it is: Everyone is entitled to freedom of medical choice. While we might have our own opinions about what other people should and shouldn’t do, it’s so important to respect their right to choose for themselves. Without that respect for bodily autonomy, we get into messes like COVID, where certain people start trying to control what others think and do with regard to their own health and safety. It can get pretty ugly.

I hear how you want to help your friends be healthier in a more natural way, but with the above thought in mind, I’m wondering if you know what your friends want to do. Do they want to get off the medication? Do they feel that something’s out of balance and want to make a change? Where do they stand on the issue? While your desire to help is an honorable one, I encourage you to be careful to make sure that your friends want your help first.

While you can’t and shouldn’t try to control their choices, something you can do is share your heartfelt concerns with them, if you haven’t already. You can tell them how hard it’s been to see them go through these struggles, and how you’re worried that maybe the medication is doing more harm than good. When you approach it this way, you’re focusing on your experience of the situation — expressing how you feel — versus coming in with advice and trying to persuade them to get on board with your opinions. It's much more powerful and effective to come to a loved one and say, “I’m worried about you” than “I think what you’re doing is wrong and I want to help you change.” The latter is likely to put most people on the defensive right away, and make them more resistant to having a conversation with you. Consider sharing your heart with a focus on your feelings, on how much you care about them and want to be there for them.

If your friends are open to talking about all of this, a great way to help them think about what they’re going through for themselves is to ask some curious questions. You might ask things like, “Do you feel this medication helps you?...How is your life different when you’re on it?...How does the thought of going off it make you feel?...If it brings up fears and worries, what are they?...Do you think there could be other ways to address those fears, and make them go away for good?...” Simply ask the questions, not to try to lead your friends to specific answers, but to get a real sense of what they’re experiencing. Then you’ll have a much better idea of whether they want help, and if they do, how you might be able to help them get it.

It can be really difficult to watch people you care about do things that you consider harmful, and so easy to want to just swoop in and make them change. But the more you can show respect for your friends’ right to make their own choices, and gently be there for them, the better the chances are that they will want to make positive changes on their own…and coming to our own answers about what’s best for us is a million times more powerful than being told what to do by someone else.

Sending best wishes for complete health and well-being for you and everyone you care about!

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I inadvertently overheard my 13-year-old daughter talking on the phone with one of her friends the other day, and am feeling very distressed by something she said. Her comment was about Christianity, which is our family’s faith. She said in a scoffing sort of tone, “Yeah, I go to church with my family every week, but it’s pretty much just to keep my parents happy and off my back about it. I don’t actually believe any of that stuff. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

This really hurt me to hear for a few reasons. For one, my husband and I have tried with our whole hearts to instill love for God, the Bible, and Christian life in all of our children since they were young. It’s my dearest wish for them to follow that path, so I’m deeply saddened to hear that it doesn’t appeal to my daughter (this is the first time I’ve heard her say anything like this).

Second, I want my kids to feel like they can be real with us, their parents. If they’re having a problem with something, I want them to feel like they can talk to us about it, and we can work something out together. And I don’t want them choosing their actions based on what will keep us “off their back,” just going through the motions to make others happy. I want them to be people who act from their own inner conviction, which I hope will be genuinely rooted in faith.

So, all of this together has me feeling pretty upset, not sure where we went wrong with our daughter, and uncertain of what to do now. Thoughts?

Thanks so much for writing in. I’m sorry to hear that you’re feeling so distressed over your daughter’s words. It’s never easy when our kids display a lack of respect for values that we hold dear. Let’s take a look into your situation together.

One thought that might be helpful to keep in mind as we begin is simply this: your daughter is 13. Do you remember what it was like to be 13? I do. I didn’t really know who I was yet. I was trying to figure out my place in the world. I was imitating my friends, wanting to be popular, trying to fit in. I was doing and saying things that were not ultimately reflective of who I became as an adult and what I think is important now. I was working on figuring things out.

What you heard from your daughter is not necessarily indicative of who she will become or what she will believe as she gets older. It may not even fully reflect how she feels now — it’s possible that she simply wanted to create a certain kind of impression on the friend she was talking with. So, even though you found your daughter’s words hurtful, how could you possibly reconsider them within the whole context of where she is in life right now?

There’s something else I notice in your message about the things you describe wanting for your daughter, and all your children. You express the hope that they will choose to follow the path of faith that you and your husband have laid as the foundation of your family. You want your kids to feel they can be real with you and come to you with problems and difficult feelings. You hope they will be people who live according to their own convictions, making their choices based on their own values and not just to make others happy. These are all beautiful desires!

I encourage you to consider whether there’s possibly any conditionality running underneath these desires. It would be wonderful if your children choose to live a faith-based life, but what if they don’t? What if they come to you with difficult thoughts and feelings about faith, and the conversation doesn’t resolve in the way you’d like it to? What if your kids do become people who are strongly in tune with their own inner compasses, and make decisions based on what they think is right, but you don’t like what they’ve decided?

We have to be very careful as parents to stay honest with ourselves about our hopes for our children. If the way we feel about who they are as people is at all conditional on how their decisions line up with what we think is best, we need to take a good look at where that’s coming from. If things turn out differently than we had expected or hoped, will it change our love or respect for our children?

This might be a good opportunity to take a step back and focus on everything you love about your daughter — on all those reasons why you’ll always love her, no matter what direction she goes in life. I encourage you to write them down. Those are the things you can hold fast to no matter what’s happening with her or between the two of you. Remember that she’s on the journey of growing up, and you’re on a journey as her parent, and neither journey is over yet.

I hope this is helpful to you! Wishing you all the best.

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Sarah encourages you to reach out to her with requests for advice! Please send your questions to advice@aflds.org. Anonymous and secure.

Sarah Perron is a Certified Transformational Life Coach. Her passion is to help people create a powerful vision for their lives, identify and eliminate anything that holds them back, and step into their own unique greatness and mission in the world. She believes deeply in the power of coaching to bring fresh perspectives, ideas, and motivation to anyone who wants to thrive in life. Sarah works with clients one-on-one and in group coaching programs and presents exciting workshops on self-development topics. You can follow her on her YouTube channel Find Your Fire.

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