Jane Ballis
MA, LCPC
Counselor/Therapist
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Answers questions in Adolescent Issues · Anxiety · Bullying
What I do
I am a therapist who specilizes in children, adolescents, and family therapy through play, individual, family modalities.
Treatment Offered
Specialties
Therapy approaches
Patient population
Modalities
Answered Questions(4)
Going away to college can complicate social fears!
I’m a very shy person and I can only really feel comfortable with members of my immediate family. At home I’m outgoing and funny but in any kind of social situation I just shut up totally and never know what to say and anything I try to say always comes out wrong. Obviously, I don’t have many friends outside of my family, but I had a really great relationship with my sisters, so it wasn’t so bad. Now I am away at school and living in a dorm and it’s so stressful and I feel like my inadequacy is on constant display…and I feel like I can’t take it anymore. My roommate already thinks I’m a freak and I’ve heard her calling me like a Mormon homeschooler to her friends who are always camped out in our room. I got here on a partial scholarship and it would kill my family if I quit but I don’t know how much longer I can hold on when every social moment of everyday is like torture. I don’t ever expect to be popular but here I have nobody and no break from the stress. I am desperate. What can I do to stop feeling like such a loser whenever I am in social company?
Read answer →Can early introduction to alcohol in childhood reduce binging in later years?
My wife is French and she argues that kids should have wine diluted with water with Sunday dinners and other important meals as a way to teach them how to enjoy wine and dining but also as a way to introduce them to alcohol in a way that won’t make them want to get drunk. She argues that we have so many more problems with alcohol here because no one ever learns how to enjoy alcohol in moderation with food as young people and instead everyone’s first experiences with alcohol around here involve like keg parties and basically getting wasted. Her logic kind of makes sense to me but still, there is something that just feels so wrong about give our young kids (aged 7 and 9) alcohol – not to mention the possibility of child services busting down our door!!! Is what she says true or do the French have less problems with alcohol and drunkenness for reasons totally other than because they introduce wine at a young age.
Read answer →Bully bully or not?
Should I be worried about bullying if my son is not? Some close family friends have a daughter who picks on my son. If it were most people we would just limit the amount of time they would have to be together and it would pretty much solve the problem, but in this case our families are very linked and it would be very sad if we couldn’t all get together like we have for a lot of years. Their 9 year old daughter, however, seems to love to pick on my 6 year old son. It’s never physical but she teases him and tries to make him feel and look stupid and tries to exclude him when others are over – just out of a kind of meanness I think. Her parents, who are great people, seem to have a blind spot about their daughter’s behaviors and let her get away with, in my opinion, far too much. In any case, we do not ever let the two of them hang out together unless we are there to kind of supervise things (although this is hard because she likes to play in the room with her door locked from adults). If we aren’t in the house kind of as a mediating presence the bullying is much worse and he has complained about it in the past when we left him in their care for an afternoon or for a few hours. The thing is, it doesn’t really bother my son at all. He is really easy going and good natured and he doesn’t seem to notice half of what she tries to do and most of the other half doesn’t seem to bug him very much. He thinks she is a lot of fun and he just likes to play with her. It drives me crazy that he won’t stand up to her more…. So is bullying a problem if it does not cause any emotional pain for the bully victim? How do I get my son to be more assertive towards her?
Read answer →Balancing a Blackberry....
I need to use a Blackberry for work. It’s not really an optional thing for me and my work demands that I have it on so I am reachable 24 hours a day. The problem is I have developed this total compulsion to using the thing and I feel like I am missing out on half of my life staring into the screen. And the thing is it’s almost never for anything important. My kid will be asking me some question and trying to get my attention and instead of talking to him with any attention I pull out my phone and check my email as I give him some half assed answer. It’s really terrible and I recognize this at the big picture level but it’s like a habit now that I can’t break free from and I do it all the time without even thinking about it. I will even check my emails in the middle of the night and it’s the first thing I do in the morning. If I didn’t need to use it for work I’d throw it in the pool, I swear, but that’s not really an option. So how can I keep using it without it being the master and center of my universe. This sounds like a trivial concern, I know, but I really can’t seem to control myself and it is driving me, and everyone in my family very crazy.
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