This is not a theoretical book, and it’s not written from the office of a researcher. This book is the direct result of my clinical experience, first as an educational psychologist and later on as a clinical psychologist, working with teens, parents, and families affected by mild to severe emotion dysregulation problems in one form or another.
My work with those parents has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had. Supporting them to navigate from really challenging places, when they were afraid for the lives of their teens, to sweet moments of connection and laughter with their teens has been a true gift. I’m eternally grateful for the families who walked into my therapy office and worked so hard moment by moment in their lives. I wouldn’t have been able to write this book without the experiences they shared, their trust in me, and the challenges we navigated together.
I respect what parents do and appreciate what they go through on a daily basis when raising a highly sensitive teen. One moment you are looking at your baby in your arms, and the next one he’s a teen screaming at you. I know the gap between the dream you may have had for your teen, all the work you put into materializing that dream, and the reality of discovering that your teen struggles with emotion dysregulation.
Life brings all types of challenges to us, and we don’t see them coming at times. It’s life, and the business of being alive is not easy, but what’s the alternative when all types of struggles unexpectedly hit us? What’s the alternative when you don’t understand what’s going on with your teen despite all the love you have for him? Do you give up? Do you stoically tell yourself that you should embrace your pain? Do you tell yourself you should learn about it? Our minds naturally come up with many problem-solving strategies, but our pain is our pain, and our reality gap is our reality gap.
Here is what I have learned: we continue to search for what matters to us, our life treasure, and we make the best of every moment we have. In the end, life brings to us not only pain but also beautiful, sweet moments of connection and an invitation to choose how to live our life given where things are and how they are.
This book is an invitation for you to choose the parent you want to be when raising your teen with emotion dysregulation struggles. You require a specialized set of skills, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can make a difference for you. ACT (pronounced as a single word) is an empirically supported treatment approach based on a psychological theory of language known as relational frame theory (RFT) and has been researched in 136 randomized clinical trials, the most rigorous type of scientific research (Hayes 2016).
I did my best when writing this book, and now I want to invite you to continue giving your best for your teen while you learn new skills that will help. My best wishes to you in this journey of ACTifying your parenting skills!