Gathering Reference Points: Teenagers and Hope

Why believing things will get better is so hard when you’ve never experienced “better.”

Many parents I work with ask some version of the same question:

Why does my teen feel so hopeless when things really could get better?

From the outside, we can often see possibilities they can’t. We have lived long enough to know that life unfolds in surprising ways — that people find their communities at twenty-three, discover their calling at thirty, heal relationships years later. But teenagers don’t yet have those timelines inside them.

They are still gathering the experiences that show them what is possible.

How do you convince someone of something they’ve maybe never experienced? As a mentor and coach for teens, my role is often something like an ambassador for the possibility that things can get better. I try to help young people imagine that there is, in fact, a chapter of life where they will find good friends, feel more comfortable in their skin, and feel less burdened by their anxiety. But this can be a difficult task.

How do you help a teen believe — who has been to several schools and felt like an outsider at all of them — that belonging is possible?

How do you show a teen who has felt dropped by friend groups and never had a "best friend that there will one day be a friendship that is reciprocal and kind?

How do you invite a teen to imagine — one who feels inadequate academically — that they have gifts worth nurturing, even if those gifts aren’t yet recognized by the grading system?

We naturally develop our beliefs about life based on our experience. If we’ve been repeatedly let down in relationships, we begin to expect that pattern to continue. If we’ve lived with a background hum of loneliness or sadness — and can hardly remember a time when we didn’t feel that way — it can begin to seem like that feeling is simply the atmosphere of our lives, something immutable and permanent about us and who we are. And that conclusion is understandable.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote:

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Adults carry an advantage: we have already accumulated many experiences that show us life can change. We’ve seen friendships form unexpectedly, passions emerge later than expected, and chapters of life unfold that we never could have predicted. Teenagers, however, are still living in the earliest chapters.

They are trying to live forward without the benefit of looking back.

As a struggling teenager, I was asked to believe in the possibility of something I had never experienced.

When people urged me to feel hopeful, with the classic line “It gets better,” I didn’t believe them. I couldn’t. It wasn’t an unwillingness, but a lack of reference points.

By the time I went to a wilderness therapy program at seventeen, I had given up because it all felt pointless. I was so far away from feeling good about myself or my life that I couldn’t imagine such a feeling existing. This was just who I was — how life had always felt, and how it would always feel.

And then, one night in the Colorado mountains, I really looked at the moon.

I was lying in my sleeping bag inside my A-frame tarp shelter. I had hung my t-shirt up to dry on the cord line above me and was settling in for the night when I noticed it.

It was full and glowing, hanging in the sky like a perfect ornament.

I was so touched by the sight of it that I lay there quietly, just looking at it.

And for the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt something unfamiliar.

Peace.

Peace — deep, quiet, and perfect.

Nothing in my life had changed. I was still in treatment, a thousand miles from home.

But somehow, in that moment, my body felt peace.

It was the first time my nervous system learned that peace was something my body could feel.

That moment gave me something incredibly important: a reference point.

In the days that followed, I began to understand something I hadn’t before. When people told me that life could get better, I hadn’t been able to believe them — because I had never actually felt anything different.

My mind couldn’t hold the concept because my body had never held the feeling.

Parents often encounter this dynamic in very concrete ways.

A teen who insists that school will always feel impossible.
A teen who says they will never have real friends.
A teen who believes they are fundamentally “behind” everyone else.

From an adult perspective, we can often see how life might unfold differently.

But teenagers are interpreting their entire future through the relatively small number of experiences they’ve had so far.

They are still gathering their reference points.

One of our greatest teachers is the nervous system. Our bodies learn what is possible through lived experience.

We don’t learn that belonging exists by being told about it — we learn it by feeling welcomed somewhere.

We don’t learn that we are capable by hearing encouragement — we learn it when someone trusts us with responsibility.

We don’t learn that connection exists through advice — we learn it through moments of genuine warmth.

This is why seemingly small experiences can matter enormously during adolescence:

a part-time job
a mentor who sees potential
a team, club, or community
a creative pursuit that lights something up
a friendship that feels different from the ones before

Each of these experiences becomes another reference point for the nervous system — evidence that life may hold more possibilities than pain once suggested. Hope often grows from these lived moments.

Adolescence often asks young people to do something almost almost magical: to believe in something they have never experienced. To have faith where none seems to live.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once offered this beautiful advice:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”

For teenagers, so much of life is still an open question.

Who will my friends be?
Where will I belong?
What will I be good at?
Will I ever feel comfortable in my own skin?

They are living inside questions whose answers have not yet arrived.

This is where the adults around them matter deeply.

We can serve as living reference points ourselves — reminders that belonging, peace, and meaning are not fantasies, but experiences that many people eventually encounter.

We can lend young people our belief while they are still building their own. We can gently encourage them toward new experiences — the moments that slowly become evidence that life can feel different than it does right now.

And we can have patience with them when they can’t yet imagine it.

Sometimes I tell teenagers that it’s a little like trying to imagine outer space. Your mind can’t quite grasp it yet — it’s too vast, too unfamiliar. But the fact that you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

Over time, they will gather their own evidence.
They will have moments that surprise them.
They will discover feelings they didn’t know were possible.

And those moments will slowly begin to fill the reservoir that hope draws from.

Until then, sometimes the most powerful message we can offer is a simple one:

Just because you haven’t yet doesn’t mean you won’t.

Your life may hold experiences you cannot yet imagine — but that doesn’t mean they aren’t waiting for you.

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