Have you ever had your teen go from being calm one minute to screaming the next because you asked him to come back home by 10:00 p.m.? What about waiting for your teen to come down to breakfast and then finding cuts on her wrists? Did you find your teen crying in her bedroom, refusing to talk to anyone for hours or even days because no one replied to her post in Facebook? Has your teen ever been talking about how school was going, until you offered some advice about a project, and then he suddenly began yelling at you? All those behaviors in your teen are indications of emotion dysregulation problems. This chapter will help you get a firmer grip on what is going on for your teen and for you.
Emotion dysregulation is a chain of intense emotional reactions to a situation that is too much, too quick, and too soon for that particular situation; it is as if your teen has an emotional switch that quickly turns on and off at any time. Teens struggling with emotion dysregulation experience their emotions at a very intense level because of their sensitivity, and when they are hurt or upset, it feels like an open wound. In those moments of high emotionality, they engage in all type of behaviors, problematic ones for the most part, to respond, suppress, or diminish their difficult feelings as quickly as possible. Common problematic responses include lashing out, disconnecting, blaming, name-calling, or threatening; these behavioral responses are challenging for both the teens experiencing them and the people around them. A parent on the receiving end, like yourself, only sees a teen switching quickly from being okay to being extremely upset, and it’s hard to make sense of what happened in between the upsetting situation and your teen’s response.
A fifteen-year-old teen described emotion dysregulation problems as “feeling like a house on fire. Everything feels intense, as if you’re burning inside and you don’t know how to calm the fire. Nothing makes sense. You can’t think clearly. You only feel the fire burning you.”
Adolescence is already a complex and vulnerable developmental stage, but having emotion dysregulation problems makes things even more difficult. To start, it’s as if your teen were a prisoner of his reactions, not only to one emotion but to almost all emotions: when he is anxious, he’s extremely anxious; when feeling sad, he’s overwhelmed with sadness; when he’s frustrated, he’s very frustrated; when he’s happy, he’s very happy. When these emotions are activated, you will hear a lot of black-and-white thinking, where it’s all one way or the other in the mind of the teen and there’s no room for compromise. For instance, if you were to ask your son to go to a family gathering, he might say, “If I go to spend time with your family, I don’t want you to tell me what’s appropriate or not for me to say to them.” Conversations escalate really quickly without you being able to detect what’s happening.
When high emotionality is on a roll, there is a gap between how a problem became a problem and the intensity of your teen’s reaction. From one day to the next, your teen may become best friends with someone she met only once or twice, or she may quickly stop being friends with a classmate who didn’t respond to her texts the same day. While situations like these may seem typical for teenagers, if you look closely, you’ll find it’s part of a larger pattern in which your teen’s responses tend to go from one extreme to another, not just with you or at home but also with friends and at school. Being prone to emotional sensitivity and reactivity makes teens victims of emotional hijacking; their lives quickly unfold into multiple angry episodes, self-harm behaviors, and even attempts at suicide. It’s not easy for them, and it’s not easy for you.
Most emotionally dysregulated teens notice that situations can set them off really quickly, but they don’t fully understand what’s happening to them; it may be only years later that they realize their responses are not within the range of what most people experience.
For you, the parent or caregiver, witnessing your teen’s emotion dysregulation problems is not easy. As one parent told me, “I don’t have a clue as to what happened. I simply asked my daughter to pick up her clothes from the floor, and the next thing I knew, she was screaming at me about how I don’t understand her.” You experience high levels of stress, and without realizing it, you may also be hijacked by your emotions, including having troublesome thoughts about parenting and intense physical reactions, when you’re dealing with your teenager. Because of the intensity of these experiences, you may engage in certain strategies to manage your own internal experience and start parenting based on those strategies. Sometimes those parenting strategies work, and sometimes they don’t. The biggest challenge comes when you get triggered as much as your teen does, basically responding to reactivity with reactivity, which simply makes the situation worse for both of you.
This book offers a different approach to take when dealing with those moments in which the emotional switch is on for both of you.
Change is possible. Being the parent you want to be is possible, and helping your teen without damaging your relationship is possible. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can help you facilitate this process of change.
Acceptance and commitment therapy was developed by Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson (1999), and it’s based on relational frame theory of language (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, and Roche 2001). A form of cognitive behavioral therapy, ACT currently has 136 randomized clinical trials demonstrating its applicability and efficacy in the treatment of multiple psychological struggles (Hayes 2016).
ACT invites you to do three things: accept, choose, and take action in your parenting life. When applying ACT into your parenting life, you’re invited to first accept your internal experiences—thoughts, memories, emotions, sensations, and urges you have when dealing with your teen—in particular when they are uncomfortable, by learning to let them be, without trying to change, alter, or deny them; second, choose what truly matters to you as a parent by identifying and recognizing your individual parenting values; and finally, take specific behavioral actions toward those parenting values in your daily life.
By practicing acceptance, choosing intentionally your values, and taking action toward becoming the parent you want to be, you will discover a new experience: a parenting life that is full of meaning and growth. ACT doesn’t offer you a perfect parenting life that is free of conflict, but it certainly invites you to stop going in circles and get unstuck with your teen.
In traditional parenting classes, training, coaching sessions, or even self-help books, you are often asked to identify your goals. While establishing your goals may look initially useful, it falls short in helping you deal with the unique struggles of your teen’s emotion dysregulation problems and the larger picture of your parenting role: who do you want to be as parent?
ACT invites you to choose your parenting values and, in taking actions that are based on those values, find a sense of purpose and direction in your parenting life that is beyond traditional parenting goals. Learning and applying ACT skills to handle your teen is likely to be more powerful for you as a parent and for your relationship with your teen than using other approaches.
This book is structured into four parts. The first part, “Getting Started” (which you are reading now), provides you with an introduction to ACT. It invites you to look at all the parenting strategies you have been relying on to manage your teen’s behavior.
The second part, “Being Real,” is all about learning to pay attention to the nitty-gritty moments of your internal experience when parenting your teen. You will identify the different types of thoughts, memories, emotions, impulses, and sensations that show up for you and learn how to handle them in a way that makes room for you to choose your parenting response; at the end of each chapter, a section called “weekly practice” will give you exercises to reinforce your skills and your commitment to being the parent you want to be.
The third part, “Making a Shift,” teaches you some ACT parenting skills that will help you move forward. These include mindfulness, appreciation, empathy, assertiveness, behavioral management, conflict resolution, how to deal with anger, forgiveness, and compassion skills.
The last part, “When Things Get Rocky,” addresses what to do in those challenging moments when things go wrong even when you’ve done your best. Chapter 18 is especially written for fathers or male caregivers who are dealing with a teen’s emotional-sensitivity problems. Finally, the appendix addresses suicidal or parasuicidal behaviors, problematic eating behaviors, and substance abuse issues.
Some chapter topics may speak to you more than others, and you may be inclined to skip around, but you will benefit more from reading the chapters in order since each chapter builds on what comes before it. Also, as you work your way through this book, it will be helpful to keep a parenting journal, since many of the exercises involve writing.
Are you ready to ACTify your parenting skills? Let’s start by looking at what you’re already doing to try to help your emotionally dysregulated teen. That’s the topic of the next chapter.