PUBERTY

What fear hides behind making excuses

Vasiliki Dimitrakopoulou

During adolescence you have more school obligations and your parents, friends, teachers, coaches seem to expect more from you. What happens when you feel unwilling to do your duties?

Pretexts are a devious form of denial that can be used in various situations. Usually, they provide you with excuses, alibi, rationalizations or fairy tales in order to explain the reason you did or did not do what you wanted. Pretexts can keep you in a state of denial. You use them to avoid facing something that scares you. This often can be “the fear of failure”, “the fear of being criticized” or even “the fear of having to put a lot of effort and get tired”, so you may usually take the easy way out.

At that point, you’re trying to find some reasonable excuses to avoid it. You begin by not doing your daily homework or not studying today’s chapter in history, since it’s not such a big deal after all. When this happens, you keep breaking up your schedule for the next days. So, as soon as someone reminds you of your obligations, you come up with an endless list of lame excuses such as:

“I don’t have the time”

“I do not know how to do it”

“I am very weak”

“I’m not interested”

“It’s fine”

“There’s no homework for today”

“I didn’t know about it”

Usually, you choose convenient excuses that you can always use about anything. When you use such pretexts, you may also sometimes do it in other cases, without being aware and get used to it. When it comes to health for example, your pretexts can be something like:

“Oh, it’s nothing really”

“If I ignore it, it’ll just go away”

“The doctor will hurt me”

“It will heal on its own”

“I’ll make an appointment later, I don’t have time now”

Both avoiding and denying handling the issue, keeps you away from what you’re really afraid might happen, if you don’t deal with your obligations and if you don’t face your fear.

However, in order to maintain mental health, achieve your goals and move on successfully in your life, you need to face your real fears. Besides, if you don’t learn how to face your problems, they won’t just go away. The first step to overcome your fears is to admit what frightens you.

You can ask for help, if you’re having studying issues, discuss the problem with your teacher, or your coach, even if it is about your personal relations with your schoolmates, or ask the help of a specialist, in order to overcome what you fear the most.

It is important to be always optimistic and remember there is a solution to every problem.

Vassiliki Dimitrakopoulou

Psychologist, Sc