This course gives teens something most schools never offer: a clear, practical understanding of the forces animating their thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
Students learn:
- How the brain and nervous system are wired for survival and safety
- The language – and wisdom – of emotions
- Simple tools to calm the body and focus the mind
- How unconscious patterns shape behavior and relationships
- What attachment styles are — and how they affect connection
- How early experiences influence identity and belonging
We combine science, psychology, and hands-on practices. Students explore breathwork, attention training, reflective writing, and guided self-inquiry. The course also introduces key ideas from Freud, Jung, and other depth psychologists in an age-appropriate, grounded way — always focused on lived experience rather than abstract theory.
Students leave this course with practical tools for emotional regulation, healthier relationships, and greater self-understanding. The goal is simple: to help young people respond rather than react, understand rather than suppress, and move through their lives with more awareness, steadiness, and confidence.
A Deeper Dive
Most teenagers spend years studying algebra, chemistry, and world history — yet receive almost no guidance on how their own minds actually work. At the very moment they are navigating intense emotions, shifting identities, powerful attractions, insecurity, ambition, loneliness, and longing, they are largely left to figure out their inner lives alone. The Human Mind: A User’s Manual fills that gap. This course offers young people a grounded, compassionate, and practical orientation to their own psychology — not as abstract theory, but as lived experience.
We begin with the nervous system as an evolutionary inheritance. Why does anxiety flare so quickly? Why can anger feel volcanic? Why does shame shut us down? Students learn how the brain and body are wired for survival — and how those ancient patterns show up in modern classrooms, friendships, and family dynamics. Alongside this scientific foundation, we explore concrete practices for regulation: breathwork, attention training, and embodied tools that help students calm, focus, and respond rather than react.
From there, we dive into the deeper architecture of the psyche. We examine emotions not as problems to suppress, but as signals with purpose — fear as protection, anger as boundary-setting, sadness as integration. Drawing from Freud and Jung, we explore the unconscious and the ways hidden patterns shape behavior, attraction, self-image, and recurring conflicts. But we don’t stop at theory. Through guided dreamwork, reflective writing, and structured self-inquiry, students learn to encounter their own inner worlds directly and safely.
Finally, we turn toward relationships and belonging. Students explore attachment styles, how to recognize their own relational patterns, and how early experiences shape expectations of closeness and independence. We discuss trauma — personal and collective — and how it lives in bodies, stories, and cultures. The overarching aim is empowerment. By the end of the course, students leave with language, tools, and self-knowledge that allow them to navigate their inner and interpersonal lives with greater awareness, steadiness, and agency.
Course Content
Course Includes
- 1 Class
