Dear Dr. Wes and Marissa:

I am a 15-year-old who has lost nearly everything. I have made some pretty serious mistakes with school and drugs. I have caused my family so much pain and embarrassment, including extra financial stress because of legal issues. I have lost friends, the respect of my teachers and the trust of my family. What bothers me most is no one will trust me. What can I do to get it back? I don’t want to be labeled a loser. Other than moving away to get a fresh start, what can I do? I want to make it right. – 15-year-old boy

Dr. Wes: You’ve faced a lot of struggles for a young man of 15, and I appreciate your desire to set things right with your family, school and community. However, to do so you must first give up what you want most: Winning back anyone’s trust or forgiveness. I’ve said it several times before in this column: Teenagers are for loving, liberating, protecting, teaching, growing, valuing, etc. They are not for trusting.

You’re a good example as to why. Your family is disappointed in you and feels let down by your behavior. Their anger and pain are only made worse by their belief that you have violated their most fundamental faith in you. The very idea of betrayal – which is clear in your letter – means that your family trusted you to be a certain way and instead you are another. Expecting trust leads parents to personalize teen behavior, which in turn creates hostility and resentment. I hope your parents will decide NOT to be so trusting in the future. This will allow them to keep better track of you and your bad choices, and to react before things get out of hand.

In starting over, you will have many stumbles. If each one makes your family feel a new sense of betrayal, you’ll actually fall deeper and deeper in the hole out of which you’re trying to climb.

While your path back to respectability may be a long one, it’s pretty clearly marked. You must first get involved in some kind of treatment. One of the best is still Alcoholics (or Narcotics) Anonymous. There are other programs, including Rational Recovery and SMART, but they’re less prevalent in our area. If you think your problems really are not based on addiction, but just bad choices in life, you might start with therapy first and let the therapist help decide what will work best for you. By regularly attending and working on recovery or therapy (or both) you can show that you are trying to change.

Next, you must get a job and contribute whatever small amount you can to your legal and treatment expenses. In our clinic, we call this “reparation” because it helps repair the damage you’ve done to your relationship with others. You must also develop a plan to make amends to those you’ve harmed. If you are sincere, share with your family and friends the sadness you feel for having made poor decisions.

As for being a loser, I think you must take a position of humility without being humiliated. Be humble, admit your mistakes and put forth a good-faith effort to change. Trust and forgiveness will come when the relationship is repaired. They are for others to decide upon, and they will make their choices based on your actions. Start off with the above steps, and eventually – perhaps several years from now – you’ll reap a great harvest from what you are now trying to sow.

Marissa: Every teen comes to a point in life where they feel they have let everyone down and no one trusts them anymore. The individual instances, of course, vary in type and degree, but you are not alone in your feelings of frustration.

Gaining back trust is one of the hardest things to do. Unlike Dr. Wes, I do not think that it is a bad idea to trust teens; in fact, I think it is extremely important. A teen needs to feel trusted or else it is hard to be motivated in life and in relationships. It also teaches them what trust really means and how easy it is to break someone’s trust. Having said that, gaining it back will not be an easy feat.

Just as it is with anyone, when parents are disappointed and their trust is violated, it takes a long time to build it back. It takes a lot of talking, a lot of patience and a lot of understanding on the part of both parties. You will have to prove time and time again that you are changing. Even though you will probably feel frustrated with how long it takes to feel like you’re trusted again, you have to remind yourself that you were the one that messed up in the first place.

I think it’s wonderful that you want to start over and change yourself. You are only 15 years old; it’s not too late to do this. It will take awhile for your friends, family, teachers, etc., to get used to the new you, but in time they will. If you continue to hold yourself to new moral standards, people will start to accept the new you by witnessing your long-lasting behavioral and personality changes. Good luck.

Next week: A teen complains about fighting at school and wonders why her peers seem to think violence is the answer.