“My House Is a Stress Machine”: Your Struggle as a Parent
It’s Monday night, and Kathleen returns home after a long day at work. She opens the door, and as soon as she enters, her fifteen-year-old daughter, Natalie, calls out, “Can I spend the night at Chad’s house?”
Caught by surprise, Kathleen pauses, and says, “You were there all weekend. It’s Monday, and it’s a school week—”
Kathleen is unable to finish the sentence before Natalie yells back at her, “If you don’t let me go to Chad’s, I’m gonna be depressed, and then I’m gonna cut!”
Kathleen raises her voice too. “You know you can’t go to Chad’s tonight. Why do you do this to me?”
Natalie starts screaming and runs upstairs to her bedroom. Next, Kathleen begins to cry; she doesn’t know whether she should go upstairs or not. She starts yelling while running up the stairs; she pounds on Natalie’s door, asking Natalie to open it, but there is no response.
When Kathleen came back home and encountered the situation described above with her fifteen-year-old daughter, she did the best she could to handle the situation in that particular moment. She said no and tried to explain why; she tried to be firm and quickly found herself screaming. Arguments like this happen more often than not in Kathleen’s household. Any denial of a request from Natalie can easily escalate into a battle of wills, with threats, tears, and doors slamming. While Kathleen is doing her best, her relationship with Natalie seems to be getting only worse. Kathleen feels hopeless about the situation, and Natalie continues to become an island.
Does this scenario sound familiar to you? If you have a teen at home who struggles with emotional sensitivity, you know it’s as if he has an emotional switch that suddenly turns on—his reactions are too strong, too quick, too often. Sometimes you can anticipate when the emotional switch will turn on; other times it happens so suddenly, like a fire alarm going off, that you are caught off guard and end up thoroughly confused about what just happened. Naturally, you try to calm these emotional flare-ups using every strategy that you believe will help your teen calm down, and of course, that’s totally understandable. After all, what are you supposed to do when your teen is totally out of control?
In the next few pages, I’m going to invite you to take a close look at those difficult situations with your teen and begin to discover better ways to support him when his emotional switch is on. You cannot make the situation better unless you look at it more closely.
Let’s Play Detective: Your Responses
A detective usually carries a first-rate magnifying glass to see things in fine detail. Like a detective, you will pay close attention to the types of memories, thoughts, sensations, emotions, and urges that you have experienced in the midst of these challenging situations with your teen. And just to make sure we’re on the same page, keep in mind that when looking at thoughts, we will be looking at the words, images, and memories that show up in your mind; also, the terms feelings and emotions will be used interchangeably throughout the book; and finally, an urge or impulse is what you feel like doing based on the thought, emotion, or sensation you’re having.
Exercise: Recall a Difficult Situation You Had with Your Teen
Let’s figure out what’s going on when dealing with your teen during times in which his emotional switch has been turned on. Recall a difficult situation that you had with your teen in the past week or so. Do your best to imagine this moment vividly, zooming in on the details. With this specific situation in mind, pull out your parenting journal, and write down your answers to these questions.
- What was the triggering event (what caused the situation)?
- What did you go through internally? Write about the thoughts, images, feelings, and physical sensations you had at the time.
- How did you respond to the situation?
When Kathleen completed this exercise, her responses looked like this:
- Triggering event: Natalie asking to spend the night with her boyfriend
- Internal thoughts, feelings, sensations: Why does she need to ask me this today? Doesn’t she know it’s not okay? I have told her many times she cannot sleep at Chad’s home on the weekdays. What’s wrong with her? Why does she try to control the situation? Feeling very frustrated.
- Response to the situation: Explain why she cannot go. Then scream at her.
After you have zoomed in on the specifics of a problematic situation, you can take an even closer look at it. Answer two more questions:
- What happens to your teen’s behavior in the moment (what does your teen do)?
- What happens to you in that moment?
If Kathleen were answering these new questions, her answers would look like this:
- Natalie runs to her bedroom; she screams back at me and threatens to cut her wrist. I feel exhausted. Am crying, feeling helpless, not knowing what to do next.
After looking at this difficult situation, did you notice that in that moment, you and your teen are each managing your own emotions, sensations, images, memories, and thoughts? You have to deal with your internal private noise when your teen does or says something that is upsetting to you, and simultaneously, your teen has to deal with his own private noise when you respond the way you respond.
If you step back from the conflict to examine it, you may see that your teen’s behavior is a trigger for you, and your response becomes a trigger for your teen. In that particular moment of struggle, it is really as though you and your teen were dancing together, but instead of dancing together in a synchronized manner, you are stepping on each other’s feet.
Sometimes parents tell me, “But Patricia, it works! When I scream back to my teen, he stops.” Giving it back to your teen in equal measure may seem to work in the moment. However, it does nothing to stop the problematic behavior in the long run. You are both responding to each other with what you have learned about handling conflict, but that doesn’t mean that what you are doing is helpful to your relationship. If these interactions reoccur a number of times, ask yourself whether this type of response is really helping the two of you to get closer or is actually making things worse in the long term.
You’re Trying Too Hard
By now you may have tried a variety of strategies in an effort to manage your teen’s problematic behavior. You may have already read many parenting books, taken your teen to therapists, offered him money, removed his cell phone, forbidden him to see his friends, taken away his ability to buy music from iTunes, and so on.
Exercise: What Have You Tried?
Take out your parenting journal and create a list of everything you have done to manage your teen’s behavior; label this list “strategies.” Then looking at each strategy, ask yourself if that strategy has brought you closer to the parent you want to be. Write down your response next to that strategy. Then write down what happens to your relationship with your teen when you’ve used that strategy in the past.
Here are some examples:
- Strategy: Offer money if he behaves
- Does doing this bring you closer to the parent you want to be? No.
- What happens to your relationship with your teen? Gets worse.
- Strategy: Giving up on asking for compliance
- Does doing this bring you closer to the parent you want to be? No.
- What happens to your relationship with your teen? He still gets angry at me.
- Strategy: Yelling at him
- Does doing this bring you closer to the parent you want to be? No.
- What happens to your relationship with your teen? He screams back. Complains to his grandmother about me.
- Strategy: Saying firmly, “Stop and listen.”
- Does doing this bring you closer to the parent you want to be? No.
- What happens to your relationship with your teen? He criticizes everything I do, even if it’s unrelated to him.
Be as specific as possible with your list, especially when you write about what happens to your relationship with your teen when you use each strategy. Afterward, write down anything you noticed as you were taking this inventory. Looking back at the inventory, are any of your parenting strategies working?
If you completed this inventory, kudos to you. You have successfully accomplished what many parents cannot do, which is to look at your parenting strategies. What did you notice when completing this inventory? Did you make any discoveries? At this point, you may have realized that when you are triggered by your teen’s problematic behaviors and respond to them in the best way you can while managing your own internal private noise; some of the parenting strategies you have used certainly work in the moment but they are often not sustainable in the long run.
Allow me to clarify that I am not suggesting that you are a bad parent or that you should let your teen get away with whatever he wants to do because he threatens you. What I am suggesting is that the difficult moments you and your teen go through cannot be understood in isolation but need to be understood within the context of how the two of you interact when you are both feeling triggered. You are both hurting in those moments: not just you, not just him.
Sometimes when I have this conversation with parents, they ask, “Why do I have to do all the heavy lifting? Why do I have to work so hard with my teen? He should just be doing what teens are supposed to do. He should be going along with what his parents say.” I never have a perfect response for these questions. I would like to have an answer for why a teen behaves in a certain way or another, but I don’t. I wish your teen would simply go along with anything you request from him, but that’s not the case, and you can’t control his behavior.
I can tell you that while understandably and naturally you may feel that you should not have to work so hard to have a healthy relationship with your teen and that your teen should go along with whatever you say, these wishful thoughts are just another attempt to manage his behavior. Sorry, but there is no way to guarantee that your teen will respond positively to every instruction you give him, and there is no therapy, medication, or self-help book that will make it happen. All relationships require a certain amount of work, including this one with your teen.
If you continue to read this book, you will find tools to help you stop parenting behaviors that hurt the relationship with your teen and tools to help you effectively handle stressful situations that will inevitably occur. As you change your behavior, your teen’s behavior will change too. At times it may feel like a long road, yet change is possible. There is no guarantee, of course, but it does happen.
If things get very rocky at some point, such as if you fear for your own safety or your teen’s safety, then, without a doubt, it will be time to switch strategies (as suggested in the appendix). If you choose to switch strategies, then at least you will know that you gave it your best shot.
On the other hand, if you’re unwilling to try anything different from what you’ve been doing fruitlessly up until now, then it’s quite likely that the relationship with your teen could simply go from bad to worse.
Making the Shift
If you are open to continuing to look at what you go through internally when dealing with a problematic situation with your teen, and you are willing to acknowledge that you both engage in a chain of behaviors that trigger each other—even though you are not the one who started the chain—then there is room for this book to be helpful to you.
You’ve already made great progress. You’ve looked closely at how you respond to conflicts with your teen. You’ve also identified and examined the effectiveness of all the strategies you’ve used in an attempt to manage his behavior. As a last exercise in this chapter, it will be helpful to look at your perceptions of your teen when the two of you are in conflict and to consider the impact of those perceptions on your relationship.
Exercise: What You Think When You’re in Conflict
Think of a recent conflict or series of conflicts that you’ve had with your teen. Grab your parenting journal so you can examine what you think about your teen when you are in conflict. Keep in mind that this exercise is a private one, only for you, and there is no need to edit your thoughts. Take the following steps.
- Write down all the thoughts (criticisms, judgments, complaints) you have about your teen when you’re in a conflict with him.
- Now imagine you are in your teen’s shoes, and start reading those thoughts slowly, one by one.
- Imagine what it must be like for your teen to be on the receiving end of all those thoughts you have about him.
- Slowly notice any reaction you may be having right now. Are any memories or thoughts showing up? Any emotions? Any impulses? Any physical sensations? Write down your reactions.
Did you notice how your thoughts about your teen have an impact on your ability to handle conflict with your teen?
Those criticisms, negative judgments, and complaints you have about your teen are very real, and I’m sure there are many experiences that have led you to have them. At the same time, looking at a conflict with your teen through the lens of those criticisms, judgments, and complaints doesn’t allow you to see that he’s hurting in that moment, just as you are, and see that the way that you both handle conflict has been ineffective for the relationship.
What’s Getting in the Way of Making a Shift?
If when completing the previous exercise, your mind was coming up with thoughts such as He doesn’t care. He’s responsible for everything. I gave him everything I could, then you have two options. One option is to continue dwelling on how bad your teen is; if you choose to do this, the result will be only more conflict and increasing distance between the two of you.
The other option is to let your mind simply acknowledge these thoughts for the time being and then ask yourself if those particular thoughts help you or not in handling conflict with your teen. Choosing this option doesn’t mean that all of those critical thoughts about your teen will suddenly go away. In fact, thoughts along the lines of My teen is a bad kid will fight for survival, emerge over and over again, and you may have to ask yourself again and again whether that narrative gets you closer to your teen or not. Choosing this second option comes with a big bonus for you: over time you will learn how to respond to your teen in ways that will improve the relationship.
Your teen may have never spoken to you about what is going on, or when he did start to talk about it, the conversation may have gotten heated and you both started arguing. We know that many teens are not skillful at telling parents, adults, or even other teens about their struggles. In fact, the most common response for teens is to hide their pain the best they can. They hide their troubles, not because they don’t want to get help or because they want to keep things from you but because talking about their difficulties makes them feel very vulnerable. I still recall a teen with whom I worked years ago who was referred to my practice because of cutting behaviors. After weeks of working together, she confided that she was having flashbacks from being bullied at school and that she had learned to cope with those intense memories and feelings by cutting her wrists. No one knew about her struggles at school. Her parents discovered she was cutting only after finding tissue paper with blood in the trash can.
When you make a positive shift in your parenting behavior, you may begin to notice a positive shift in your teen’s behavior as well. The more you read this book, the more equipped you will be with different ACT skills to handle rocky moments with your teen. Ultimately, this book is about helping you be the best parent you can possibly be. Are you ready to start this new journey?