Some of my therapy work with teenagers takes place at a clinic devoted to serving a younger population. That setting offers multiple offices for conducting sessions and I have used them all, owing to scheduling needs. This inevitable shuffle of rooms has put an unexpected characteristic of my teenage clients into high relief—high enough that I feel like writing about it for both its humor potential and its possible meaning as a noteworthy trend. I never anticipated it as one.

With more than negligible frequency, as I guide teenage clients from the waiting area to our assigned room and open the door to let them go in, no matter which room it is, they walk directly to the chair for the therapist and plop down into it without any compunction about relegating me to one of the couches or armchairs. They choose the big leather swivel chair in the most central location in the room and make themselves ingenuously at home in it without a pause or remark. Then they watch me sit down in the customary location for clients.

There’s a lot to enjoy about this behavior. I always appreciate unconventional moments, and I’d like to think my ego is strong enough to tolerate and savor an inadvertent affront to it now and then—especially professionally. The experience is actually healthy for me if only for shaking me out of possible counterproductive ruts about being in charge or having special status as represented by which seat I inhabit. Plus, my delight in the mix up is genuine enough, not something I’m contriving for the sake of making myself feel better. I feel fine. I want all my clients to express themselves comprehensively. I want to know their every extemporaneous flourish.

Meanwhile, it’s also my job to reflect on how that expression takes place. I therefore pause to ask myself what is it about this repeating action of seat snatching that gives it such statistical over-representation among my teenage clients? Don’t get me wrong. If the most banal explanation passes the truth test, I’m all for it. I have no special wish to make an excessive big deal of something trivial. Do the teens keep commandeering my chair because it has the most sophisticated construction? Are they drawn to it on the principle that an office recliner simply makes for the most comfortable sitting?

I have come to suspect otherwise. When Erik Erikson outlined his eight famous stages of psychosocial development, thereby mapping the major epochs of the human lifespan, he determined that adolescence mainly involves the inner task of developing an identity or else lapsing into perpetual role confusion. This mounting tension in teenagers is why they have a reputation for experimenting, often rapidly, with so many different versions of who they are. They need to try on enough self-templates to find out what fits adequately for an initial transition into adulthood. Is that why they sit in my chair? Consciously or not, are they trying my role as data?

Or what about a psychodynamic explanation? Following in Freud’s feisty footsteps, what we’re looking for here is some compelling indication that intolerable instinctive drives are emerging in secondary expression instead. Teenagers are notorious for defying authority, so maybe their nonchalant displacement of the therapist from the traditional location of power is a form of indirect aggression. If so, who can blame them? At the same time that they want some support from me, needing it must be incredibly vulnerable for them. On first installment it would therefore make sense to unseat me, letting me know with that action that power goes both ways, but making that statement in an underhanded fashion, as if getting the point across without any liability about doing anything confrontational.

From a social constructionist lens, their behavior also suggests there are discourses at work within our culture that influence how we act. In this case, the discourse would have something to do with entitlement and who really has any. Once upon a time an automatic respect for one’s elders may have been a social norm, but nowadays might the opposite be true? Might not the behavior of my younger clients demonstrate that the cultural expectation now is the dominance of youth as a coded value? It will come as no secret that our culture favors staying young and being young. Magazines and social media pump that message like crude oil. When my teenage clients claim the customary location of the therapist, perhaps they are simply expressing collective conformity to the underlying message that youth rules the day.

I like to consider all these possibilities before I take the rash action of telling my clients they are in my chair and ought to sit in another one. Sensitivity about shaming the people I work with is one important guideline in my work. Nothing good comes from correcting someone unnecessarily, while tremendous good often follows from curiosity and tolerance about the unexpected. Only then is it occasionally valid to settle into a traditional parental disposition of setting firm boundaries. In those cases, I play the role of a missing fatherly presence, establishing a moral compass for my teenage clients to experience and eventually internalize. I often find out in those moments that my client’s history with fathering has been exceedingly poor.

The profound influence of one’s upbringing is a cornerstone of much psychotherapy. Building on it is sensitive work. The therapist must perform the proper due diligence before any substitution of present adult for past adult in the client’s psychic situation is useful and integrative. I tend to feel I can wait. I can sit in the client’s position for as long as it takes to reveal the real point of it. Paradoxically, that access to patience will often help my teenage clients regress internally to wherever the real obstacles to their development took place. Once that happens, they typically choose the proper seat on their own. It becomes a soothing refuge as the next phase of healing begins and the ability to depend on someone risks a real return.