How often do you experience moments of connection with your teen? When asked this question, parents of teens struggling with emotional sensitivity pause, ponder a bit, and sometimes recall sweet memories; other times they don’t, as if feeling that connecting with their teen were almost a nonexistent experience. The large number of emotional crises that parents and teens go through together usually becomes part of a family’s daily life, which makes it naturally harder for you or any parent to look at your teen as a person who is struggling and using all the skills she has in those moments; even though those skills are not helpful, that’s all that she knows.
As some of the parents I work with describe, it’s almost as if parenting has become a chore; even just the image of spending ten minutes in the car with your teen makes you feel stressed out, and your mind goes into disaster forecaster mode, anticipating an argument between the two of you. That’s the time when you may notice that the master author of your mind starts speaking loudly, and naturally it’s hard to be present in the moment and be receptive to other experiences.
All these challenges understandably lead you and any parent to go into a problem-solving mode to search for a solution to this problem, your “teen problem.” Your mind needs to make sense of what’s happening; and as a result, you find yourself spending hours and hours going over multiple reasons for your teen problem, such as your genetics, your partner’s genetics, your partner’s behaviors, or your teen’s friends…the list of potential causes goes on and on. Your mind will relentlessly continue to look for a solution, because you’re in pain, and your mind is simply doing its job, attempting to alleviate your pain.
I have seen two mind-solutions parents arrive at when searching for solutions to their teen problem: they either get fused with a blaming story about their teen or get hooked on a self-blaming story about themselves for what their teen and families are going through. What’s the payoff of holding on to those blaming narratives about yourself or your teen? More hopelessness, disconnection, and sadness for you and your teen. This chapter is about making a shift from looking at yourself or your teen with harsh eyes and as a problem that needs to be solved to looking at yourself and your teen with compassionate eyes while accepting that both of you are struggling right now—not just you, not just your teen, but both of you.
The etymology of the word “compassion” can be found in two Latin terms: com-, which means “together,” and pati, which means “to bear or suffer.” Therefore, compassion can be understood as “suffering or struggling together.” Many spiritual traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Muslim, and Buddhism, have long emphasized compassion and its benefits.
Paul Gilbert (2010), a clinician and researcher from the University of Derby in the United Kingdom, drew on attachment theory, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and Buddhist principles to develop a specific therapy model called compassion-focused therapy. For Gilbert, compassion includes both sensitivity to suffering and also a deep commitment to preventing and relieving that suffering in yourself and others. Gilbert identified three different affective systems in our brains that are important to understanding compassion: the incentive system, which is in charge of behaviors connected with wanting and pursuing; the affiliation system, which gives us a sense of safety and connection; and finally, the threat system, which regulates our need for safety. All these systems get activated and interact constantly through different daily life experiences, allowing us to go back and forth between our internal and our external worlds.
Here is the sensitive aspect of the interaction among these systems in parenting your teen: it’s possible that frequent arguments and crises with her have led you to experience a degree of discomfort about your teen that activates your threat system, blocking any soothing or caring behavior for her. Therefore, because you’re in threat mode, it’s really hard to engage in any soothing or kind behavior for you or your teen.
Within ACT, as Tirch, Schoendorff, and Silberstein (2014) pinpointed, compassion-focused practices are already built throughout all of the skills you have been learning, and compassion is also a skill that can be learned, developed, and practiced intentionally. In this chapter, compassion is presented as a two-fold skill: compassion for yourself and compassion for your teen.
Compassion is important when dealing with your teen because the more you get fused with the blaming story about yourself or your teen, the more disconnected and hopeless you may feel about raising her.
Exercise: Looking at Blaming Stories
Let’s take a look at the impact of getting hooked on a blaming story about yourself as a parent. Pick up your parenting journal, bring into your mind a particular moment in which you were blaming yourself, and answer the following questions:
And finally, answer this last important ACT question: Were those actions helpful to be the parent you want to be?
After Seth completed this exercise, he came up with the following responses to the first three questions:
“I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did.”
“I always screw things up with my teen.”
I have failed my teen, myself, and my family.”
When Seth asked himself if those actions helped him be the parent he wants to be, he realized that his self-blaming thoughts led him to feel defeated, sad, and disappointed about himself as parent.
Self-blaming stories blind you, and any parent, from acknowledging that you and your teen are both struggling; self-blame also opens the door to getting hooked on the judgment machine, past- or future-oriented thoughts, feelings of rejection, and disconnection at the end.
Compassion skills could prevent you from making things worse for yourself or your teen, as they increase your ability to defuse from unhelpful mind-talk, acknowledge your pain and your teen’s pain, respond to it kindly, and discover flexible ways to support yourself or your teen. Compassion skills won’t solve all the painful issues you have with your teen, but they will certainly help you cope much better with the stress, so you can focus on getting unstuck and move toward being the parent you want to be.
Most parents I work with struggle with a sense of isolation because they may find it shameful to share with others what they are going through with their teens. Once, a father came into my office saddened after going to an event at his workplace and seeing his coworker and son hanging out together; his mind quickly went into comparison mode and slowly became filled with self-criticism: You’re the only one who messed up with your teen; no one else screwed this teen up, just you. Other times, parents have a sense of shame about what they go through with their teens and do not know how they could possibly speak about it with other parents; a mother once said, “How can I tell my friend that my teen has been cutting and calling me names, when she’s telling me her kids are going to apply for college, getting a job during the summer, and she can’t believe how quickly they’re moving on in life? How could I possibly tell her that I feel like hiding myself and wish I could make myself small?”
Exercise: You Are Not Alone
For the next exercise, slowly read the following directions, recording them in your cell phone or any other device, and then listen to them. This exercise may take approximately fifteen minutes.
After finishing this compassion exercise, grab your parenting journal, and jot down any reactions you had to it.
Holding on to self-blaming thoughts about your parenting role makes you want to hide your struggle, because you feel like you’re all alone, but your experience parenting an emotionally sensitive teen is more common than you could imagine in these moments.
Self-compassion is the skill of acknowledging your own distress and responding to yourself with the same consideration and kindness that you would show to someone you care for who was in similar distress.
Exercise: Practicing Self-Compassion
Let’s move on to practicing self-compassion for the next couple of moments. Make sure you find a quiet space, budget fifteen to twenty minutes, and have your parenting journal next to you. Then, slowly and intentionally read these guidelines.
Finally, answer for yourself this last question: what type of relationship do you really want to have with yourself as a parent when those self-blaming thoughts pop up in your mind?
This exercise is the beginning of incorporating self-compassion into your parenting life; it may feel awkward at the beginning, but the more you learn to get unhooked from those self-blaming thoughts, the more space you’re going to have to be the parent you want to be and to choose your parenting behaviors from that place.
It’s quite unlikely that while living your daily life and doing all the errands you have to do, you will always find time to be in a quiet place for fifteen minutes. Most of the parents I work with don’t have that time. In fact, they usually say that finding fifteen minutes or even one minute for themselves is a luxury in their day. So, part of our work together is to find ways to practice self-compassion in a way that allows you to continue moving through your day. Here is what I usually recommend parents do for practicing self-compassion in their daily life when those self-blaming thoughts get loud and prevent them from making choices.
If it’s hard for you to get unhooked from those self-blaming thoughts because they seem so real, it’s okay. You’re still making a choice, and it’s certainly not easy to shift gears when handling these self-blaming thoughts. It’s hard and yet not impossible to do. It certainly took a lot of commitment on my part to learn these skills and let those self-blaming thoughts go, but as we say within the ACT community, our personal commitment is not to a perfect outcome but to the process: the process of living our values by starting again even if we don’t succeed the first time.
Incorporating self-compassion into your parenting life may feel awkward at the beginning, as it does with any new practice; however, it also offers you another choice to make when those self-blaming stories come up for you.
At the root of your emotional needs, your teen’s emotional needs, and every human being’s emotional needs, there is the same need for affection, caring, acceptance, forgiveness, and love. So, instead of focusing on the differences of opinion or disagreements about how to live life and to be in the world, between you and your teen, compassion skills are about recognizing the commonalities of your struggle and your teen’s struggle. You both are hurting, not just you, not just her.
Exercise: Practicing Compassion for Your Teen
Here is a brief exercise to practice compassion skills toward your teen. Make sure to have your parenting journal at hand and budget approximately ten minutes to complete this exercise.
Moving forward with practicing compassion skills, see if you can practice this exercise not only when recalling an argument you had with your teen but also when recalling when your teen was struggling with a particular issue totally unrelated to the relationship with you, such as rejection from a person she likes romantically, disappointment because someone didn’t text her back, sadness because she feels that she doesn’t fit within her group, and so on. If you recall from chapter 11, to practice empathy skills, you ask, accept, acknowledge verbally your teen’s experience, and ask directly what you can do to help your teen in that moment. When adding compassion skills, the question for you is, what would the compassionate voice within you tell her about her pain and that moment of struggle?
Compassion is a vital skill for handling harsh thoughts, seeing your own and your teen’s struggles with caring eyes, and creating sweet moments of connection between the two of you. Life is a rollercoaster of experiences and full of moments of joy, happiness, and excitement as well as sadness, struggle, pain, and hurt. No one better than you can teach your teen how to hold all those experiences and still make the best of every moment you have in your hands with a touch of caring.
The reality of raising a highly sensitive teen is far from what you may have imagined when becoming a parent. The reality of dealing with a teen suffering with emotion dysregulation problems is that you are going to make mistakes, as your teen will make mistakes. Sometimes you are going to be very angry or your teen is going to be very angry; sometimes, despite your efforts, it will be challenging to forgive yourself or your teen; and sometimes things will go wrong, terribly wrong. What does your mind do in those moments? Your mind will do its job and it will try to find a cause of your pain. Your mind will also lecture you to do a better job or will hold stories about yourself or your teen not trying hard enough. The self-blaming talk or blaming talk toward your teen may motivate you sometimes, but when it becomes habitual, the outcomes are usually different: the more you get hooked on those self-blaming thoughts or blaming stories about your teen, the more stuckness, resentment, and hopelessness you’re going to feel.
Here are three other exercises to continue incorporating compassion practices into your parenting:
Grab your parenting journal and write down how you imagine your compassionate self. Allow yourself to write down what type of facial expressions you would have, what your body posture would look like, how you would talk, speak, what tone of voice you would use, and even the rhythm and speed of your voice.
As another exercise, think and write about a situation that provoked anger or irritation when dealing with your teen. Describe the triggers, your behavior, and the outcomes for yourself. Then on another sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left side, write down the reactions from your angry self to this situation, and on the right side, write down the reactions from your compassionate self to this situation. At the end, notice both responses and write down anything you learned from contrasting these two very different responses.
Looking at the same situation that provoked anger or irritation when dealing with your teen, respond to it from three different viewpoints: your housewife or stay-at-home dad self, your struggling self, and your compassionate self. Afterwards, answer these questions: what would your struggling self tell your housewife or stay-at-home dad self if listening to those self-attacking thoughts? And what would your compassionate self tell your struggling self and your housewife or stay-home-dad self if listening to those self-attacking thoughts?