From Self-Harm to Healing: A Highly Sensitive Girl’s Path to Recovery, with Ciara FanloFrom Self-Harm to Healing: A Highly Sensitive Girl’s Path to Recovery, with Ciara Fanlo
Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction
Brenda Zane talks with Ciara Fanlo about growing up highly sensitive, turning to self-harm and substances, and how wilderness therapy helped her start healing. The conversation offers parents a candid look at the hidden pain behind a teen’s anger and how those experiences now shape Ciara’s work with struggling young women.
58:41•17 Sept 2026
A Highly Sensitive Girl, Self-Harm, and the Hidden Plea Behind “Leave Me Alone”
Episode Overview
- A teen’s angry, rejecting words can hide a desperate wish for help and connection, even if they insist they want to be left alone.
- Highly sensitive young people often feel social exclusion and injustice far more intensely, needing extra support to process those emotions safely.
- Wilderness therapy can interrupt manipulation and avoidance, offering physical challenge, simple routines and nature as a calming influence.
- Parents may need to shift from rescuing and controlling towards curiosity, assuming there is a "good reason" behind risky behaviour and asking for the story.
- Finding daily practices like time in nature and reduced screen use can help sensitive nervous systems stay more regulated and less overwhelmed.
“The voice that you hear is, "Leave me alone, I know what I'm doing, this is my life, I hate you, you don't understand me." And the voice that you're not hearing is the one that's saying, "I'm really struggling, I need help, please don't leave. Please see how much pain I'm in."”
Curious about how others handle a highly sensitive teen who’s spiralling into self-harm and substance use? This conversation between host Brenda Zane and guest Ciara Fanlo gives parents a front-row seat to that journey from chaos to hard-won stability. Ciara describes growing up as a deeply sensitive girl in San Francisco, feeling everything "at full volume" without the skills to cope. Her parents’ divorce at nine triggered intense grief and, by ten, self-harm.
She explains how what adults heard – "Leave me alone! I know what I am doing! You don't understand me!" – was masking a silent plea: "I'm really struggling, I need help, please don't leave. Please see how much pain I'm in." The episode walks through failed therapy attempts, social media’s glamorisation of risk on Tumblr, and the mounting crisis that led to wilderness therapy.
Brenda and Ciara talk frankly about the unique challenges for girls – hormones, social pressure, self-loathing, and secret self-harm – and what it’s like for a mum to be on the receiving end of the worst behaviour simply because she "was never going to leave." Ciara also explains how she now works with teen girls and young women as a mentor, drawing on her own past to help them understand their sensitivity, build self-awareness, and channel their energy into lives they actually want to be part of.
Ciara shares how being out in nature, making fire, and hiking with a heavy pack gave her, for the first time, a sense of competence and calm: she vividly recalls looking up at the moon and feeling a peace she’d "literally never felt" before. Parents hearing "I hate you" from their teen will gain a new lens on what might really be underneath those words. Ready to rethink what your child’s resistance could actually be saying?
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