Is Your Inner Teen Alive, really?
Inner Teen Gift #4
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A quote from the post Why Adults Fall Into the Swamp of the Troubled Teen and then “roll their eyes”
… where I first mentioned Inner Teen Gift #4
When an adult rolls their eyes, this alerts me to the possibility of…
Inner Teen Gift #4: where the Inner Teen is internally present, aware, and available for whenever their adult chooses to connect.
The eye-roll gives it away.
If you need external validation that you, absolutely, have an Inner Teen living in your internal landscape, then look no further than the mock-exasperated, adult eye-roll about whatever.
Because this eye-roll signals that you’ve just been tapped on the shoulder by your Inner Teen.
After all, what greater archetypical-teenage characteristic is there besides a teen’s signature eye-roll?
And The Point Is…?
At different times in this series on the Inner Teen and Radical Creativity, I’ve focused on three, overlapping realities:
1. The toxic, cultural caldron adults endlessly create around teenagers as problems stewing in a problematic time of life
2. Your Inner Teen vs the teenager you were historically
3. Your daily psychological reality that holds your Inner Teen—the inevitable, psychological dynamic akin to your inner child, who is alive and well inside your internal landscape
No. 1 - Our toxic, cultural caldron of adult distain
Even though we’ve partially exhumed the long-neglected, psychological dynamic of our Inner Teen from the dustbin of nothingness (which is how some teenagers feel most adults treat them), this nascent awareness is shockingly recent.
At the end of the twentieth century, and up to 2013, you could search online and find no reference to the Inner Teen or Inner Teenager. I know because I did that research—over and over.
From 1992 to 2008, a small handful of people working within a psychological/counseling context mentioned “the adolescent within,” “an adolescent/teenage self,” or “adolescent parts.”
But none of these writers/therapy specialists developed their slim references into a coherent model that paralleled, and logically followed, our inner child.
It was as if they were under the same cultural spell of teenage worthlessness as the rest of us.
In 2013, Daniel Siegel’s "Brainstorm" discusses adolescent brain development and advantages, but doesn't frame these advantages as accessible from an adult awareness of their "Inner Teenager." And yet, at the same time, a score of clinicians were helping adults access, and “work with,” their Inner Child.
For contrast, by 2013, the inner child had…
Multiple books dedicated to The Inner Child in their titles
Specific therapy practices for Inner Child work backed by…
… Dedicated academic papers specifically studying the Inner Child concept
Widespread popular recognition for the term Inner Child
And yet, here, in 2025, the Inner Teen can barely lift the deadweight of negative norms pushing them underground, far, far from the recognition the inner child has reaped.
Why? What is holding back that cultural breakthrough?
I will argue that no matter what troubling events happened when you were a teen, because those events were simultaneously stewing inside a toxic, cultural caldron, your Inner Teen never had a chance.
It is a devastating, double whammy.
First, being a teenager (as I’m sure you can remember…) is inherently demanding with massive life changes—everything from what you look like to yourself and others, to a reordering of all normative relationships, to an earthshattering awareness about the world around you and inside you.
Pair this with an adult culture reacting to your challenging changes as if you are the defective one. You are the problem. You are neither a child nor an adult—bummer!—the only two stages of human development that get a lifetime hall pass.
A Recent Case Study
The other afternoon, I was talking with a mother distressed over the inexplicable, frustrating behavior of her teenage son. She’d pause, and I’d say, “On a positive note…” But, her fears kept interrupting me with a barrage of “…but (he did this and he does that)…” After three times of “On a positive note…”, she caught on.
It's not as if the difficulties aren’t there: incomplete frontal brain development (immediate choices not linked to obvious outcomes) combined with testosterone immortality (I’m afraid of death, yet I will bury my fear by defying death). As a mother, she had every right to be at her wits end.
But I’d had a conversation with this young man and he exuded remarkable emotional awareness, ethical integrity, and advanced creative skills, which he was intentionally, consciously thinking about before taking action.
Can you imagine what cultural impact we’d unleash if the realistic concerns of our pop culture, and parents in the game, consistently held up another mirror, one that reflects all the advantages that your teen years bequeath you… as teenagers are developing?
No. 2 – Your Inner Teen Vs The Historical Teenager You Were
Because the Inner Teen—as a respected, valuable part of ourselves—is culturally invisible, we have no adult landmark to guide us in this singular wilderness of self-awareness.
Because any popular reference to the inner teenager has only recently (from 2015 to 2025) sprung up with websites touting “Heal Your Inner Teenager,” but without the specific, academic research and mature models— akin to the inner child—that could back up and validate these one-off, therapeutic experiments.
Because all of us were once teenagers—struggling inside the same toxic, cultural caldron of adult distain that we, as adults, now champion—we feel wary, resistant to remembering. Even if we had no disturbing traumas, it is as if the dismissive smog hanging over being a teen befuddles what we do remember.
Once in a while, when I’m talking with an actively-creative adult about their teen years, their eyes will light up. Then I’ll hear about the creative spark, as a teenager, that continues to shine on their creative projects today.
It is a street version of Dr. Rothenberg’s academic research where he saw a correlation between creative adults with cultural validation (awards, membership in prestigious organizations, etc.) and their experiences with that specific creative pursuits that began when they were a teenager.
Even if they started playing an instrument as a child, it was not until their teen years, when they discovered (say) jazz, that their current adult passion for jazz took hold.
As Dr. Rothenberg concluded:
“...the beginnings of a specific creative identity in adolescence are a necessary foundation for creative motivation and ability to create throughout life." But—and I cannot stress this point enough!—your Inner Teen (that psychologically available, inner self) is not another version of the teenager you were historically.
Your Inner Teen operates as the same psychological dynamic as your inner child, but draws from adolescent experiences that time has compressed and refined into gems of inner awareness and creative instinct.
Your historical teenager grew and developed all the tools you needed to use as an adult—relationships, a defined sense of self, your life ambitions, how you interact with the world and others, how you treat yourself, etc.
These teenage developmental pillars interlace with the earlier landmarks of your childhood and the continuing evolution of your adulthood. And all of this scaffolding creates an internal container which I’ve called The Internal Family, a dynamic of multiple aspects of your OneSelf that contribute individually to the Whole Of Who You Are.
Your Inner Teen has a vantage point that your historical teen could not, because at that time you were not yet an adult.
Your Inner Teen has access to all the internal aspects of Who You Are, which your historical teen could not because at that time you were actively developing Who You Were Becoming as the foundation for your adulthood.
Your Inner Teen has some basic hallmarks of your historical teen, but with a mature awareness that can be of service to you in ways your historical teen, in its necessary, self-centered focus, could not.
Your Inner Teen is a brilliant combination of Who You Were, with Who You Are Now, with Who You Are Always Becoming.
And its existence is in service to any aspect of your life, at any point where another internal viewpoint, awareness, suggestion, admonishment, or validation might be useful or life changing.
I mean… what’s not to love here?
And, really…
Who is this Inner Teen living inside you?
Aren’t you just a wee bit curious?
Take The Challenge
(as short as 10 mins, to as long as you want…)
1. Move away from all screens.
2. Make sure you will not be interrupted.
3. Pick up a physical pen/paper
(because accessing your internal awareness needs a specific neurological engagement that keyboards can’t facilitate).
4. Write an ice-breaker question (as you would with any new acquaintance) with your dominant hand (right or left).
Example: I would like to talk with my Inner Teen. Would you be willing to tell me your name?
5. Switch pen/cil to non-dominant hand (right or left) to allow for your Inner Teen to respond.
NOTE: Our dominant hand represents our Dominant Self, the one that tells us what to do all the time. Get up! Sit down! Eat this. Say that!
Our non-dominant hand represents the parts of ourselves that are overridden by our Dominant Self. Think Grecian slave ships with the Dominant Overlord yelling down to the slaves who are rowing below.
As soon as you write your question, your brain may instantly begin to form an answer. Please ignore it and continue as if whatever information your brain is insisting on providing is irrelevant, because most of the time it will be!
Your non-dominant handwriting may be illegible. That’s normal.
Briefly switch back to your dominant hand and print above the illegible word.
Continue with the non-dominant hand response.
Begin the next back-and-forth by addressing your Inner Teen with the name they’ve given you.
6. Continue the conversation with follow-up Q & A.
Example: [Inner Teen Name], is there anything you would like me to know about you?
Mining the Deep-End Challenge
This writing exercise might bring up feelings you weren’t expecting. Or, it just might be enough inner work for the moment.
Either way, honor where you are, and end the conversation when you feel ready, with your dominant hand letting your Inner Teen know that you are ending the conversation… for now!
This is a new relationship and it needs to be handled with care, respect, and love. Your Inner Teen may have emotional reactions too. Give both of you space to breathe, to drop into learning about each other.
If this practice suits you, bring any concerns or questions that are bugging you to your Inner Teen and see what they have to offer.
Once a regular connection is developing, our Inner Teen responses can be surprising, often short, meaningful, and full of aliveness.
No matter how astute, complex, and aware-seeming AIs will become, since they cannot ever have your lived history, this alone is our human work.
What’s Next?
This is the One Question that haunts me: no matter how hard I try to experience something, anything, as someone else, I cannot not. It’s like trying to see my back…impossible.
But why?
Even when the winds of fate buffet me, when emotional ice storms take over, when I’m in-the-trenches low or flying high, at some damn crossroads, or in front of the television, there’s a core sense of ME experiencing it all.
Why do I feel as if this ME is unquestionable? Undeniable? Inviolate? And ultimately only knowable to myself?
Next time, welcome to your Inner Teen Gift #5: our coherent sense of self!
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