Young Adults & Not-So Young Adults

While Blueprint has built our reputation for doing amazing clinical work for children and teens, a lot of people don’t know that we also love to work with both young adults and not-so-young adults. As much as we love the little guys and angsty teenagers, as clinicians, it can be refreshing to work with folks who have a bit more life experience under their belt. If you’re an adult looking for a stuffy therapist in an old cardigan that won’t talk for the first 20 minutes of the session if you don’t and spends most of your time together analyzing the dreams from your childhood…we’re probably not what you’re looking for. But if you’re an adult who wants to have a genuine connection with your therapist, who has a fresh perspective and is up to date with all of the most recent research and interventions, then you should probably give us a shot.

The transition from high school to college or work can be an exciting but also challenging time. What feels like overnight, teens leave a world and relationships that may have felt stable and understood, to feeling like a stranger in a strange place in a strange land with new people, responsibilities, and pressures. At 17, teens have their parents, schools, and friends helping them to navigate their more difficult times. At 18, this often changes in what feels like an instant, sometimes leaving a now new young adult to face these challenges alone. Once familiar emotions they may have had like fear, anxiety, hopelessness, depression etc… can take on a whole new form and can become very disruptive at a time that feels so important. We see you and have opened a space at Blueprint to fit your life, your challenges, and your schedule to help guide you in that strange place between high school and finding your identity as a young adult.

Wait… who? While it can feel like becoming an adult happens as fast as blowing out a few birthday candles when you turn 18, we see adulthood as a process, not a pit stop or a television station you happened to land on and are now stuck. As human beings, we are continually changing, evolving, and growing as people. This change can look very different from the eyes and experiences of an 18-24-year-old versus those of someone whose been in the game a bit longer. That means for those individuals who are about say, 25-35, are your ears ringing? Life should make sense by now, right? Nope, not quite. Perhaps the world has placed different expectations at this point of life than before and perhaps those expectations are different than one has for themselves. This group often deals with challenges that they thought they were prepared for but may be met with a different reality than expected. Areas like family, marriage, work, relationships, or perhaps the lack of those things can all affect mental health in new, different, and challenging ways. We haven’t forgotten about this often-overlooked stage of life and are excited to create the space at Blueprint to step up and meet it with our clients.

And you may ask yourself, “How do I work this?”
And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large automobile?”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful (husband)/wife”

If this sounds familiar, you either recognize the lyrics from the 80s song Once in a Lifetime by the talking Heads OR you may just be an adult somewhere in between that “Not so Young Adult Stage” and the rest of your life. Let’s face it adulting isn’t easy. Whether you are an adult who may have had a significant life change, loss, divorce, or have reached a point where you are feeling a sense of being lost in it all, sometimes it helps to take a step back and press pause to recenter, refocus and re-evaluate what is important to you right now. As adults, things change, people change and our lives change. We recognize the importance of these changes and the impact it has. We are ready to take this journey with you.

Parenthood has been the subject of countless television shows, movies, books, plays, songs, poems, etc. because of the special impact it has on one’s life. While we have been working with children and teens since our inception, we recognize that parents need some love too, not just from their kids but maybe also maybe away from their kids. We are excited to be able to offer the space and availability at Blueprint for parents to come and speak not just as parents, but as people. This can be as partners, as single parents, or whatever parenthood looks like because we know parenthood does not have a single appearance.

Nor does it hit the same way to everyone whether they are new to the parent game or have been in it a long time. This also includes those parents who may have had their children leave the nest and are now confronted with a whole new reality. Questions like who am I now, what is my purpose, should I feel this sad, and what is next to name a few can be overwhelming and distressful and affect our quality of life. We are here for parents at any stage of life to help navigate those uncertain thoughts, emotions, and feelings that come along for the ride. We recognize the extraordinary generation is not alone, they belong to an extraordinary world of individuals at all of life’s stages.