A few years ago, a mother contacted me by email so that I could meet her daughter, Inès, who had become “unbearable for several months and who needed to talk to a shrink”! On the phone, this lady tells me that she has just separated from her husband and that the situation with Inès is now very tense: "She climbs the towers very quickly, gets carried away quickly, especially with me, and tends to isolate himself in his room. »

The dad, although invited to the first appointment, does not come. So I receive the mother and the daughter a few days later. In the waiting room, in a rather familiar tone, the mother said to me in a voice that was both powerful and shrill: “Patrick couldn't come because of his work. But it doesn't matter… I'm here. Inès looks at me with a scowl. Obviously, she doesn't want to be there. Remarkably fashion victim, she wears carmine lipstick and strong make-up, and dresses in a fashionable way, with a real attention to detail. Obviously, this young girl is extremely careful about her physical appearance.

In the office, barely seated, the mother begins to speak very quickly and very loudly, in a jerky and authoritative tone, without letting anyone speak, especially not her daughter… The flow of her words is so rapid and continuous that it seems to be similar to a tachyphemia, a verbal flow disorder. Little by little her logorrhea becomes less stammering, but remains quick and incoercible when she evokes her daughter's difficulties: “For several months, we have not been able to say anything to her. She instantly snaps and quickly gets angry. In college, her grades plummet… And she spends all her time on her laptop and tablet. I sometimes have the impression that she is bipolar: she gets angry quickly, then does nothing and locks herself in her room. We wonder if she is not depressed too. With Patrick, we think it should be followed. »

A logorrheic mother

The young girl, in the armchair next to her mother, remains impassive, indifferent. She lets it be said, appearing as a simple spectator. She watches her mother fidgeting and ranting to no purpose. But when the latter said to me "we are separating with her father, but we get on very well, huh my darling, and it's true that we are both very busy with our work and that with the separation, it doesn't it's not going to get any better…”, Inès insistently places her gaze on me – a gaze that no longer has anything detached. Although her body remains frozen and static, her face becomes truly emotionally expressive. She looks doubtful and questioning, as if wondering what I think. I then interrupt her mother: “And what does Inès think of it? »

Quite simply, the young girl replies, without glancing at her mother: “I don't know why I'm here. I come to please my parents, well, especially her. But if I have to talk to a shrink, then I'm okay,” she said, looking at me.

Let's explore the story of Inès. At just 14 years old, she is in third grade. She has a 19-year-old half-brother from her mother's first marriage. A student in a school of architecture, the latter lived in alternating custody one week out of two with each of his parents before, as a teenager, choosing to live mainly with his father, himself an architect. The girl has contact with her half-brother only through social networks, since he is studying in Canada. Inès' father is a journalist in the written press, her mother works in human resources in a large import-export company.

A smart girl

Aged about forty, both are fully occupied by their professional activities and always have been. Before going to nursery, Inès had a nanny for a few months. Throughout her kindergarten and elementary school, her father and mother took turns driving her to school in the morning, and her babysitter brought her back to do her homework, cook her dinner and very often put her to bed because her parents came home late from work. “We got used to this rhythm,” the mother told me.

At school, Inès demonstrated, from an early age, excellent acquisition and learning skills. To the point that we plan to make him skip the CE2 class. Her father finally opposes it, against her mother's advice, fearing that his daughter is not emotionally mature enough for a direct transition to CM1. Inès is always one of the first in her class at the start of middle school but, from the middle of the fourth, she shows the first signs of relaxation. His results decline and his motivation declines.

All the time on his mobile

That's when his behavior began to change, according to his parents. From being a "wise, calm and serious" child, she becomes irascible, soup in the milk, with moments of withdrawal into herself, or she locks herself up for hours in her room or in the bathroom, without the we know what she is doing there. The mother adds: “To us, she says nothing… She is completely withdrawn and spends all her time on her cell phone and tablet. »

I then ask the parents if they have noticed any other changes in food or sleep. Her mother then replied: “It's true that she's been paying more attention to what she's been eating for some time now and that she's become much more refined. I put it down to adolescence because I was like that at his age. And her sleep… well, I let it go a bit!… I have to say that she gets so angry when I tell her to sleep that it's her father who manages that problem. It's true that the young girl has a very slender appearance and that her body mass index must be below average. I therefore remain vigilant on this point. The mother also notes changes in her friendly relations: “Inès kept her friends from primary school, even some from kindergarten, for a long time. But for the past two years, she has been seeing new, less serious friends…”

The parents have now been separated for a few weeks. They put the house up for sale. The father has left home and lives alone in an apartment. And the mother is actively looking, with her new companion, for a house in her daughter's college sector, "so as not to destabilize her too much". For the mother, everything is going very well. The separation is agreed to on both sides, and everything is done for the well-being of Inès. “We always keep her informed, we always ask her for her opinion and, above all, with Patrick, there is no problem. On the other hand, with me… it's different: she gets angry very quickly. »

A depressed dad

Next consultation: the father brings Inès. It doesn't take long for me to realize that, in reality, “everything is not so perfect”. The father, even if he hardly talks about himself, gives obvious signs of depression. He is both overwhelmed, resigned, apathetic, but also truly invested and worried about his daughter. His relationship with Inès is much less tense than that between the young girl and her mother: the teenager is benevolent towards her dad as she feels him to be fragile and vulnerable. He then brings up an important point: “What worries me is above all the time she spends on her laptop and her tablet, often both at the same time! She never separates from it. I do not understand. Last year, we went to the mountains for a week, without a wifi connection… Inès couldn't stand it and got into a frenzy. As her 4G plan is limited, she kept nagging us to increase it for her… Which we ended up doing. »

This is an interesting element on which I rebound with Inès. It was when entering CM2 that the young girl had her first laptop. Her parents, who came home quite late from work, quickly decided that their daughter needed to have a smartphone so that they could reach her easily. In the early years, Inès mostly watched videos and downloaded a few games. Then, in college, she got to know the world of social networks. She has created accounts on several applications in order to view and share photos and videos, and to communicate with her friends via internal messaging.

" No more battery ! Nooonnnn! »

Inès describes her relationship with her smartphone as special: she spends a lot of time on it and constantly receives notifications, which exasperates her parents. She constantly, almost compulsively, checks her phone to see if she has received messages, notifications, alerts... She will tell me later how much she checks her battery level all the time: happened to run out of battery. I panicked, I couldn't reach anyone. “Since then, she always has an external battery on her, as well as a charger…

Any punishment involving the confiscation of her smartphone pisses her off. On this subject, the mother reports an event: “Just after the All Saints holidays, she had two bad grades in quick succession, because she had not prepared her history homework at all and had botched her work in French. . So we wanted to confiscate his phone. It was terrible… We came to blows… She screamed… I had to snatch her phone from her hands. She slammed the door and threw down the picture of the three of us that was in her room. “Inès recognizes this violent incident and adds that she can't stand the idea of ​​not having her mobile phone: “My phone is my whole life. You don't realize it, but I have everything on it… The rest, I don't care! My parents told me to turn off my laptop when I sleep, but I prefer to leave it on and put it on airplane mode when I go to sleep. »

Indeed, impossible for Inès to bear the absence of her phone, even at night. She also jokes: “I'm addicted to my phone. » Phone that is the latest model from a well-known brand, with a custom shell. Because, beyond the function, the usefulness, her phone is also an object that she fetishizes, that she always has on her and almost continuously in hand. “We had to go to several shops to find the case that suited her and, in the end, she ordered it on the internet, because she wanted to customize it. »

Nomophobia, smartphone addiction

All these elements allow me to diagnose a smartphone addiction called nomophobia. Inès' parents will even tell me later that they took her to their doctor because she was complaining of wrist pain, diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome. The latter is characterized by the presence of various symptoms (pain, impaired sensitivity and decreased strength) in the first three fingers of the hand. It results from a compression of the median nerve of the wrist, favored by the repetition of certain movements or postures of the hand. Although the origin was not discovered by the doctor, it's a safe bet that this syndrome is one of the consequences of his nomophobia!

I then discuss this subject with the young girl who goes even further: she quickly tells me of her interest in bets and the challenges she takes up with some of her friends via social networks. Elated and enthusiastic, she tells me: “You know, I like to watch videos and photos where we see young girls doing funny things. And sometimes, some do really rare things…” But what is she talking about?

The A4 challenge

I then ask him if these are “dangerous games” (like the headscarf game). "No, no," she told me. It's not dangerous at all, just funny. She then tells me about a whole series of games she indulges in. Nothing that is not based on physical skills or sports, rather reserved for boys. Girls are especially interested in games relating to body image and slimness... For example, she proudly tells me that she is playing the "A4 challenge": it involves placing a sheet of paper in the A4 (21cm x 29.7cm) in front of her navel to prove that neither the waist nor the hips protrude. And of course, the proof – a photo of yourself with the sheet of paper – is published on social networks. Inès also plays the "belly button challenge": going around her waist from behind with her hand to reach her navel. Practices that therefore promote thinness.

The young girl then explains to me that if she has been paying attention to her weight for two years, it is precisely to meet these challenges that she has set herself up with her new friends. A psychopathological examination reveals that she does not suffer from anorexia nervosa, that the perception of her weight or the shape of her body is not altered. On the contrary, Inès has a very fair perception of it and exposes it on social networks. However, his very low body mass index (a value of 17, synonymous with being underweight) naturally requires monitoring his eating habits.

The lips of Kim Kardashian's half-sister...

Also terribly attentive to influencers on the internet, as well as ways to attract attention on social networks, Inès posts many photos and videos and constantly checks feedback, likes, comments and shares… Hence , at home, anxious and depressive signs related to this behavior vis-à-vis her smartphone. No wonder: scientific literature shows that excessive use of social networks such as Instagram and Snapchat is associated with more anxiety-depressive symptoms and low self-esteem.

Worse still: Inès tells me that she has played other challenge games, including the "Kylie Jenner challenge" (named after Kim Kardashian's half-sister). This practice consists of inflating the lips by suction effect using bottle caps. “I don't do it anymore, but with my girlfriends, it was for fun. We do it together and we take each other on video. “But this type of practice is not without risk: the Kylie Jenner challenge has also been the cause of serious lesions and tears of the lips that have required corrective surgery.

“Likes” to feel good and loved

During the psychological assessment of the young girl, I also noted histrionic personality traits: the need for attention, a certain theatricality in the expression of emotions, and strong suggestibility. This explains why Inès uses her physical appearance a lot, sometimes dressing in a provocative and sexy way. Her self-esteem depends on the gaze of others, the number of likes she gets on social networks. "When I don't get a lot of likes, I get depressed, and if I get negative comments, it kills me. She is also very impressionable: “I do all this… also because my girlfriends do it… I feel beautiful and loved doing it. »

All these activities based on self-image meet the young girl's need for recognition. She must show herself, do something singular (even spectacular) to feel that she exists narcissistically. “With these games, I feel good. My parents don't seem to see me, like I'm transparent. Now I'm in a girlfriend group and we don't just work. Before, I was serious, but it was boring. And then the boys started talking to me since I put those pictures…”

This analysis of Inès' relationship with her smartphone is not limited to nomophobia, challenges, or the compulsive tendency to send photos and videos to feel like she exists... It also leads me to understand the explosive relationship with her mother... Because in reality, everything is based on a secret, well kept by Inès for months: “It's true that I spend a lot of time on my phone and my tablet, but I have my reasons. »

“I have my reasons”: she admits everything

This sentence is not trivial! The girl uttered it quite early in psychotherapy. But I couldn't understand her. Until Inès, after having told me all her exploits on the internet, finally explained "everything" to me about "her reasons"... She discovered, about a year and a half ago, that the tablet (which, at the departure, was family before becoming hers) was configured with her mother's phone, so that all the messages intended for her mother also arrived on the tablet... She then understands that her mother has had an adulterous relationship with a man for several month. “I saw the messages and especially the photos… Some were disgusting. You realize ! They were sexting! And I couldn't help but read them and watch them. It hurt, so badly… And I didn't know what to do… I didn't want to tell my dad about it, because I was afraid he would ask for a divorce, and I was too ashamed to tell my mom. . But I kept thinking about it. I saw the photos that I should never have seen…”

His sleep disturbances date back to this period. “I was lost. I resented my mother, and I constantly monitored her messages. “Inès then feels extremely relieved by this” confession “. To say or not to say: for many months, she felt she had a secret that could shatter her family. “Now that my parents are separating, I wonder if I did the right thing. Maybe I should have talked to my father about it… And how do I do it now? “This question that torments her today will therefore require that the care be extended to her parents…

Overcoming the Discovery of a Parent's Adultery

Let's make a small digression here. It is increasingly common for family tablets to be the subject of involuntary images, compromising messages, which weaken those who receive them or discover them, without being the recipients. This is all the more prejudicial and damaging when it comes to intimacy, more particularly the boundaries of intimacy between parents and adolescents, made porous and weakened by these interconnected and synchronized objects of communication. Be careful, then! We must avoid a mixture of genres and roles that violently breaks into the intimate under construction of adolescents, themselves weakened by this tendency to expose their own intimacy on social networks.

Back to Ines. We therefore gradually worked on the relationship between Inès and her mother, so that after two years of therapy, when the teenager had first chosen to live with her dad, she again shared her time, equivalent way, with his father and his mother. Particularly intelligent, the young girl managed, without difficulty, to overcome all her resentment towards her mother and even had the opportunity to tell her of the discovery of her adulterous relationship and how much it had plunged her into an insoluble dilemma.

Gradually, she also recognized the deleterious effects of the addictive use of her smartphone – the tablet was ultimately only used to spy on her mother… – on the time-consuming, psychic, somatic, affective, social and cognitive aspects. and motivational, particularly with regard to their education. On this point, to help Inès, I used the “global model of change”, published in 2001 by two American psychologists: James Prochaska and John Norcross.

“Detoxifying” from the smartphone

This model allowed the teenager to decide, by herself, to change her behavior, in six stages: first, the “pre-intention” (we do not plan to change); then the “intention”, where we glimpse the possibilities of change, but where these remain ambivalent; then, the “decision”, which sees the subject engage in the change, but without acting; then comes the “action”, where one overcomes the obstacles, but without stabilization; then the “maintenance”, which allows the patient to achieve his objectives and consolidate them; and finally the “finalization”, which brings about a lasting change, where the motivations, both conscious and unconscious, of the person are brought to light. More specifically, the patient must become aware of his "hyperconnection", through metacognition (the points that we have just detailed), in order to work on his habits of connection to the smartphone.

Concretely, with Inès, we have developed the following elements to "detoxify" her: she must now limit the number of pages opened in her browser, delete notifications, reduce the number of social network apps on her smartphone, develop interactions real social events (sport, music, outings with family and friends, etc.), introspective work (self-criticism) and observation of objective effects. Inès now also forces herself to live the moments in a real way (without filming a concert or taking photos), not keeping her smartphone in the bedroom at night (she no longer uses it as an alarm clock), no longer consult in the presence of other people, and to forget it voluntarily at times.

From then on, the young girl was able to directly observe the effects of her treatment: her pain in the wrist and her headaches (related to the time spent on the screens) gradually disappeared. And she is now less anxious, less emotionally reactive and less irritable, and has also regained a more age-appropriate sleep time, falling asleep more easily.

From 40 to 50 hours a week on her phone, Inès has gone to around 7 or 8 hours! All this free time allows him today to resume his neglected sports activities, such as athletics, as well as the piano. She has regained her cognitive capital, largely damaged by the compulsive use of her smartphone, which translates into an improvement in her ability to concentrate and pay attention, in class and during her revisions and homework. His grades went up, giving him motivation and a desire to work in college. She even defined her professional project: to become a psychologist for adolescents! And in high school, her need for recognition and her desire to feel useful pushed her to become a class representative and to embark on the prevention of the misdeeds of challenge games on the internet...