Kriya Lendzion

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT KRIYA LENDZION

I\'m passionate about empowering parents, educators and community organizations to help kids steer healthily through adolescence in an increasingly risky world. This requires an honest, comprehensive, science and reality-based approach that includes a bigger picture than just teaching how \"drugs are bad,\" and overdramatic scare tactics. We need to help them develop resilient coping skills for life stressors and discomfort, healthy ways of meeting their needs, real-world skills to resist the pulls and pressures to use, and a strong rooting in their values and goals along with research-based info on how to not hurt themselves or others with substance abuse and other self-destructive choices. As a middle schooler, a lot of my \"red flags\" were already flying, but being missed or responded to ineffectively by the adults around me. By 19 I was in rehab with multiple addictions and a trail of destructiveness in my wake. My own recovery naturally gravitated me towards substance abuse work in various settings with all ages, and into working as a therapist and school counselor with adolescents, focusing on prevention and early intervention in self-destructive and addictive behaviors of all kinds. I blend my personal \"street certified\" history with my clinical expertise to bring both knowledge and authenticity to my somewhat renegade student, parent and educator programs. I have worked with adolescents from 5th grade through college, and with youth across diverse racial, cultural, and economic lines. This includes pregnant and parenting teens, high schoolers in juvenile justice, high-risk inner city girls, expelled middle schoolers, and majority wealthy White students at a private college and at a smaller city charter and private school. It\'s crucial that addressing healthy youth decision-making involves cultural competency and being conscious of where racial and economic equity intersects with these issues.