Breaking the Silence
- David Forrest
- 18 hours ago
- 10 min read
I was one of the speakers at this inaugural conference for Healing in Paradise. I felt honoured to be included in this event. What follows is an extended version of my talk - which was limited for time - and synchronised with the others speakers to present a comprehensive view of the task and desires of this new organisation, Healing in Paradise.
Breaking the Silence: Healing in Paradise
we believe in the transformative power of mental and emotional well-being. Here, we understand that seeking therapy is not a sign of weakness but rather a courageous step towards self-awareness and growth.
A Grounding Message
If a young adult in your life is struggling:
You have not necessarily done something wrong.
They are not necessarily broken.
This may be developmental, relational, existential — not simply behavioural.
Depression in young adults often appears as what does not happen:
initiative fades, dreams stall, motivation collapses.
Addiction often appears as an attempt to survive unbearable states.
Trauma often hides beneath irritability or avoidance.
And yet —
desire does not disappear completely.
Young adults still want connection.
Still want dignity.
Still want to matter.
Our task is not to rescue.
It is not to control.
It is not to lecture.
It is to create conditions where hope can re-emerge.
Healing in Paradise inaugural Conference
Hope Centre, 2 Southchurch Drive Nottingham NG11 8AR
For Parents and Carers
Many of you here today are parents.
When a young adult withdraws, it feels personal.
It feels like failure.
It feels frightening.
There is often an urgent desire to fix.
To motivate.
To reassure.
To warn.
To pressure.
But pressure can undermine self-definition.
Reassurance can invalidate experience.
Over-functioning can train helplessness.
Sometimes the most powerful intervention is steadiness.
Listen more than you speak.
Ask what they want from the conversation.
Move slowly.
Support small steps.
Restore rhythm — sleep, food, daylight, routine — without moralising.
And look after your own anxiety.
A calm parent does more than they realise.
What we are doing today is considering a New Voice with and for the young person
Trauma and Its Quiet Echo
Trauma does not only live in memory.
It lives in the nervous system.
In expectation. In vigilance. In shame.
Some young adults carry early experiences of abandonment.
Loss. Violence. Racial trauma. Family breakdown. Neglect.
Or chronic misattunement.
Trauma narrows tolerance.
It alters perception of safety.
It magnifies threat.
When excitement lacks support, it becomes anxiety.
When anxiety lacks containment, it becomes avoidance.
When avoidance hardens, it can become depression.
Healing is rarely dramatic, It is often relational, It often begins with someone staying steady in the face of the intensity of the young person's behaviour and attitude, whether it is outward and aggressive, or inward and silent.
The young person is also looking for a New Voice
Developmental Vulnerability
Young adulthood is not simply an extension of adolescence.
It is a fragile transition.
Young people are trying to answer questions that do not have easy answers:
Who am I?
Who am I becoming?
Who am I allowed to become?
What does the world expect of me?
What do I expect of myself?
What if I cannot meet those expectations?
They are negotiating separation from family while still needing connection.
They are negotiating independence while often still being financially dependent.
They are negotiating identity in a culture that is louder, faster, and more comparative than ever before.
Add social media.
Add economic uncertainty.
Add cultural displacement.
Add intergenerational trauma.
Add racism.
Add gendered expectations.
Add academic and employment pressure.
It is not surprising that anxiety rises.
It is not surprising that depression emerges.
It is not surprising that substances become appealing.
When the internal world becomes too heavy, young people look for relief.
Sometimes that relief is alcohol.
Sometimes cannabis.
Sometimes risk.
Sometimes self-harm.
Sometimes silence.
Addiction and depression often share the same root:
an attempt to regulate unbearable internal states
in the absence of reliable relational support.
Depression Looks Like ...
In adults, depression can look like sadness and silence.
In adolescents, it often looks different.
It may look like:
Irritability.
Constant boredom.
Withdrawal into bedrooms.
Sudden refusal of school.
Loss of interest in things they once enjoyed.
“I don’t care” repeated often.
Chronic fatigue.
Reckless behaviour.
Self-harm.
Risk-taking that makes no sense.
Sometimes the depression is not in what they say.
It is in what stops happening.
They stop trying.
They stop reaching.
They stop planning.
They stop imagining a future.
And here is something important:
Many young people cannot explain their suffering.
They do not have the language.
They may not say, “I feel depressed.”
They may say:
“I’m bored.”
“Nothing matters.”
“Leave me alone.”
“What’s the point?”
Behind those words is often a quieter experience:
A loss of hope.
A feeling of not being able to reach others.
Or of others not really reaching them.
When a young person’s energy drops and stays dropped, that is not laziness.
It is usually depletion.
Suicide - Myth and Do This
Now we must speak about something that makes most parents afraid.
Suicide.
First — talking about suicide does not cause suicide.
Avoiding the conversation does not protect your child.
If a young person says:
“I don’t want to be here,”
or
“You’d be better off without me,”
or
“I’m tired of everything,”
do not dismiss it.
Do not panic.
But do not ignore it.
Ask directly:
“Are you thinking about hurting yourself?”
That question does not plant an idea.
It opens a door.
Second — suicidal thinking is often about escape, not about death.
It is about wanting pain to stop.
Wanting humiliation to stop.
Wanting hopelessness to stop.
Third — isolation increases risk.
If a young person withdraws completely,
gives away possessions,
suddenly seems calm after deep despair,
or begins speaking as if they have no future —
those are signals to take seriously.
What should parents do?
Stay calm.
Stay present.
Reduce access to means.
Increase supervision.
Seek professional help.
Tell someone.
Do not carry it alone.
And above all:
Remain reachable.
A young person contemplating suicide often feels unreachable and alone.
If depression is the collapse of hope, then your steadiness matters more than perfect words.
You do not need a speech.
You need presence.
I will often agree .... that there is something you want to kill, it's not you that wants to die, its a part of you that you want gone, dead, removed. Let's find that part and deal with that. If not, I will miss you and much prefer you come back to me; you came here once, come a second time, let me try with you.
Every Behaviour Serves a Function:
Addiction, Gangs, Risk taking, Drugs, Alcohol
Now let us speak plainly.
Substance misuse, gang involvement, compulsive gaming, sexual risk-taking — these behaviours are rarely random.
They regulate something.
Alcohol can numb.
Drugs can soften anxiety.
Belonging to a gang can create instant identity.
Risk can create feeling when numbness dominates.
Online worlds can give control where real life feels overwhelming.
If a young person does not feel valued at home, they will look elsewhere.
If they do not feel powerful, they will find something that makes them feel powerful.
If they cannot express anger safely, they may discharge it destructively.
If they feel invisible, they may choose dramatic behaviour to be seen.
Addiction is not a moral failure.
It is a desperate attempt to stabilise an unstable internal world.
That does not mean we excuse it.
But if we only punish behaviour without understanding what it regulates, we miss the real work.
Worth repeating
If we only punish behaviour without understanding what it regulates,
we miss the real work.
The question becomes:
“What is this behaviour doing for my child?”
Because every behaviour serves a function.
The Relational Compass
Relational Needs
four relational themes appear repeatedly.
These are not abstract theories. They are practical anchors.
Security. Valuing. Mutuality. Self-definition.
Let me say a little about each.
Security
Security is not control. It is not surveillance. It is not threat.
Security is a steady tone. Predictable availability. No ridicule. No humiliation.
Young adults need to know that conflict will not end relationship.
That mistakes will not erase belonging.
That disagreement does not equal abandonment.
Without security, anxiety escalates.
Without security, addiction becomes attractive.
Without security, silence deepens.
Valuing
Valuing is not praise for achievement.
It is noticing endurance. Effort. Small acts of persistence.
When a young adult feels invisible, depression grows.
When they feel that only outcomes matter, performance anxiety grows.
Valuing says: “I see you trying.” “I see how heavy this is.” “You matter even when you are not succeeding.”
We are looking to say this with a New Voice
Mutuality
Mutuality means being with, next to, alongside, not above.
It means asking, “Do you want advice, or do you want me to listen?”
It means tolerating “I don’t know.” tolerating silence.
Tolerating anger without escalating it.
Curiosity opens space where as Interrogation shuts people down.
Mutuality
is the difference between
cross-examination and conversation.
Adopt a New Voice
Self-Definition
Self-definition may be the most fragile and the most important.
Young adults must be allowed to disagree without being shamed.
To choose differently without being rejected.
To struggle without being labelled a failure.
Blocked self-definition often tracks depression or aggression.
When a young person feels they cannot become themselves
without losing connection,
something collapses.
Parents, Misattunement, and the Relational Field
Adolescent depressive experience cannot be understood in isolation from the parental and adult responses that form part of the relational field. Parents are rarely neutral observers. Their responses are shaped by anxiety, fear, and a powerful wish to restore normality. While understandable, these responses often become misattuned, inadvertently frustrating the very needs that are most fragile.
Pressure and exhortation commonly undermine the need for self-definition, conveying the message that the young person is acceptable only once they are different. Reassurance and minimisation often compromise validation, communicating that the adolescent’s lived experience is not fully recognised. Overprotection and monitoring can erode security by suggesting that the world is too dangerous to face independently.
“In this way, retreat becomes a creative adjustment that enables the ground to breathe, in a field that is too thick with stimulus.” (Francesetti and Jacobs, 2013, Kindle loc. 8215–8217)
Seen this way, withdrawal is not defiance but a meaningful response to a relational environment experienced as overwhelming. Supporting parents to tolerate their own anxiety and relinquish premature fixing is often a crucial part of the therapeutic task.
When my own life began to unravel in my forties, that buried message — “you are not enough” — grew louder.
On the outside, I was functioning. On the inside, I was collapsing.
Depression. Chaos. Suicidal thoughts. It did not come out of nowhere.
It came from that early relational ground — the one I had adapted to, survived in, but never healed.
So I went to see a therapist.
Not because I was weak. But because I had reached the limits of coping alone.
And what changed me was not advice. Not diagnosis. Not technique.
It was relationship.
For the first time in my life, I experienced something different.
I was listened to without being corrected.
I was taken seriously without being ridiculed.
I could disagree without being humiliated.
I could show anger without being rejected.
And slowly, something shifted.
Not dramatically. Not instantly. But steadily.
The message “you are not enough” began to lose its authority.
What I received in that therapeutic relationship were things every child needs from the beginning:
Security — knowing I would not be mocked or attacked.
Value — being treated as someone who matters.
Acceptance — not agreement with everything I said, but respect for who I was.
Being heard — not fixed, not dismissed, simply heard.
And something very important:
The freedom to say “No” without fear.
These are not luxuries. They are foundations. When a child grows up consistently experiencing these things, they build an internal stability.
When these are missing, the child does not become “bad.”
They adapt.
They may become aggressive.
Or withdrawn.
Or addicted.
Or numb.
Or endlessly striving.
But underneath those behaviours are usually questions:
“Am I safe with you?” “Do I matter?” “Can I be myself here?”
And here is the hopeful part.
It is never too late.
I did not receive these things consistently as a child.
I experienced them in my forties.
And the nervous system can still learn.
The heart can still learn.
The mind can still reorganise around safety.
That is what recovery is. Not perfection. Not flawless parenting.
But relational repair.
Helping -v- Hindering
For Better or Worse
What Usually Makes Things Worse
Before we close, let me say plainly what often intensifies distress:
Minimising.
Sarcasm.
Moralising.
Threats in the heat of conflict.
Interrogation when someone is already shut down.
Doing everything for them to calm your own fear.
Young adults are exquisitely sensitive to shame.
Shame fuels depression.
Shame fuels addiction.
Shame fuels silence.
What Actually Helps
What helps is rarely dramatic, It is:
Steady tone.
Predictable presence.
Respect for autonomy.
Boundaries set calmly.
Direct questions about safety.
Seeking help when needed.
Not withdrawing in frustration.
Recovery often looks like:
One small conversation.
One slightly earlier bedtime.
One reduced argument.
One honest answer.
One crisis avoided.
One new connection made.
Incrementally, a little bit and a little bit, and a drop, another drop ...
Community Support Is Not Optional
No young adult heals in isolation.
Culturally attuned support matters.
Representation matters.
Understanding lived context matters.
Networks such as BAATN — the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network — exist because access to culturally responsive therapy is essential.
Community spaces matter.
Faith spaces matter.
Peer groups matter.
Mentors matter.
Healing rarely comes from one heroic conversation.
It grows in ecosystems.
Breaking the silence is not only about speaking.
It is about building communities capable of holding what is spoken.
Let me end here. Parenting is not a perfect science.
No one gets it right all the time.
We all miss things. We all react.
We all carry our own history into our homes.
The question is not: “Have I made mistakes?”
The question is: “Am I still willing to be in relationship?”
Because it is never too late.
Not too late to apologise.
Not too late to listen differently.
Not too late to soften a tone.
Not too late to say,
“I didn’t handle that well.”
Change does not happen through control.
It does not happen through fear.
It does not happen through lectures delivered at volume.
Change happens through relationship.
Through steadiness.
Through dignity.
Through staying reachable — especially when your young person is at their most difficult.
Depression can close down hope.
Addiction can distort identity.
Suicidal thinking can narrow the world to a single exit.
But relationship widens the field again.
A young person who feels seen,
who feels valued beyond performance,
who can disagree without humiliation,
who can fail without losing belonging —
has ground beneath their feet.
You do not need to be flawless. You need to be present.
Consistent enough. Calm enough. Courageous enough to stay.
Because
when a young person believes, “Someone is still here with me,”
hope has room to return.
from the website for Breaking the Silence: Healing in Paradise - visit and act
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