The previous chapters built your basic mindfulness skills to improve your ability to handle difficult moments with your teen. You’ve worked to cultivate perspective-taking and to open yourself to compassion for what’s happening emotionally behind the scenes, for both you and your teen. In this chapter, you’ll get out of your head and heart and take action. This chapter focuses on leading teens toward new patterns—patterns that can transform suffering into possibility and connection.
In this chapter you will:
When I was a child, I loved to toss rocks into the large reservoir down the street from my house. Sometimes I skipped them on the surface. When thin, flat rocks were unavailable, I opted for big chunky ones that would make the biggest kerplunk! I loved to stand and watch the water ripple out from the point of impact. As parents, we all hope to trigger such rippling. We hope for a positive impact that will carry forward in our children’s lives—and through them into the lives of others we may never meet.
Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler (2011) have documented contagion in moods and behaviors within social networks. Simply by being in relationship with others, by being associated with others, peoples’ likelihood for experiencing significant mood states such as loneliness and depression, as well as problem behaviors such as smoking and overeating, increases dramatically. Moods and behaviors appear to be contagious—or, to put it another way, they can ripple out among people.
The current thinking is that our basic social natures lead us to constantly and automatically process emotional information about the people we encounter. We observe each other’s facial expressions, gestures, tones, and emotional tendencies. And, without intending to, we subtly mimic one another, sparking emotion and behavior.
We are contagious to our children—and they to us—whether we intend it or not. While more research on mood contagion remains to be done, what we know already poses important questions for parents: What sort of infectious agent do you want to be for your kids? What specific emotions and perspectives do you hope to spread?
When we get caught up in pointless games of tug-of-war with our teens, we miss opportunities to coach them to manage emotion effectively. What is more important in these moments—being right or being a good mentor? Caregivers—clinicians like me and parents like you—need to step out of reaction and cultivate proactive responses. You can’t create positive ripples if you’re wasting time yanking at ropes by the water’s edge.
Ask Abblett
Q: My teen seems to be doing a lot of frustrating things on purpose. Aren’t they sometimes just trying to provoke a fight with me?
A: Yes, your teen is indeed intentionally doing frustrating things in heated moments with you and others. And yes, your teen is looking to get a rise out of you at times. But also no—your teen isn’t angry or lashing out due to any sort of master plan. Your teen’s overall cycle of emotions and behavior is out of their control.
When we focus on concepts of power or control in parenting an angry teen, we tend to neglect truly understanding the teen’s behavior struggles. As we discussed in chapter 3, it’s important to understand what’s going on behind the behavior and to recognize any RSVP needs that have either gone unmet or are perceived as threatened.
As a therapist, I once tried to leverage a teen client into owning up to a serious abusive behavior he’d done in his past. In an earlier session, this client had disclosed some significant family-related pain. I made the error of trying to impress my superiors by using that information to get this teen to fess up. Not only did he not do so, he completely shut down on therapy. I was then faced with the crisis of my own accountability. I had to either own my error and take a one-down stance (more on that in a moment) with this teen, or stubbornly cling to my justifications.
A talented supervisor nudged me in the right direction: “That kid had the guts to be real with you. I wonder if you should be real with him.”
So I let go of being the high and mighty therapist and let myself be a human being. I told the teen I’d screwed up, and that I would understand if he wanted a new therapist. I put the ball in his court. Thankfully, he hit it back to me. We kept working together. He made great strides in treatment, and I learned a great deal about the power of authenticity. Much of this applies to parenting an angry teen as well.
Taking a one-down stance involves owning your piece of the coercive cycle of anger and disconnection. It’s the opposite of one upping. Rather than increase your attack, you let down your guard. In the next practice we explore how to actually do this.
Skill Practice: Letting Down Your Guard with a One-Upping Teen
With this practice, you work to make a habit of authenticity when you feel tempted to insist on being right or engage in tug-of-war with your teen. This practice is both a contemplation to do in quiet moments as well as an active practice to use with your teen.
Consider how many years, billions of dollars, and lives were wasted during the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. And now, by contrast, consider the stance that Mahatma Gandhi took with the British Empire. What was different in Gandhi’s approach to conflict versus how the United States approached conflict with the Soviets?
Gandhi acted in the direction of connection, of relationship. He did not look to force separation or leverage violent control. Rather, he sought compassionate, inevitable change. When summarizing his nonviolent philosophy of “satyagraha,” Gandhi (2001) suggested that change amidst conflict comes by appealing to the reason and conscience of one’s opponent. It is perspective, the ability to assume the healing role—to maintain compassion—that makes progression toward victory possible.
This is the stance of a responsive leader. As a parent, you may never approach Gandhi’s level of equanimity and perseverance, but you can build a peace-conducive platform for your daily interactions. You can offer compassion, see what’s truly behind your teen’s anger, and show respect for your teen’s highest self. The following practice helps you build such a platform.
Skill Practice: Lending-a-Hand Meditation
A few simple questions can help you put a new frame on your difficult exchanges with your teen. Choose one or more of the following questions and post it somewhere around the house where you’ll see it regularly. These are your prompts for a wider, more compassionate perspective on your child’s behavior.
An attitude of curiosity about how you might shift your relationship into a new, more productive space can go a long way. If you can remember to pause and ask yourself such questions before you react (this is difficult!), you have a chance to sidestep your old scripts and respond with compassion.
Your teen expects you to do your typical back and forth—the lecturing, demanding, arguing, and escalation of the coercive cycle. You want to break that cycle. You want to step away from escalation and unresolved anger and toward compassion, connection, and effective resolution (also known as a happier kid and parent!).
When taking a one-down stance, you need to lower your guard. But that’s not the same as caving in. You’re not a doormat to walk on. You’re not a target in search of arrows. And although you’re not reacting or escalating, you are sending a message of solidity and certainty.
Here’s the basic emotional message you want to begin to send your teen as regularly and consistently as possible: I’m here, I am working to hang in this with you because our relationship matters to me, and you’re neither bad nor wrong for having the experience you’re having. We can abbreviate this to the mantra “Here, now, you matter.”
It’s not about saying this mantra aloud. (That would certainly serve as conclusive evidence to your teen of your adult awkwardness!) It’s the how of your stance. Your new, connected dance step with your teen comes from how you embody these words in your emotions and behavior. So let’s practice the physical manifestation of this stance.
Skill Practice: Grounding Breaths
Famous mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has said that we should “walk as if we are kissing the Earth with our feet” (1999, 28). What he means is that when we cultivate presence we begin to really feel the ground and become connected with it. Let’s practice how to be both light and grounded, so that we are no longer blown around by the stress of anger.
Now, try practicing this in a more everyday fashion: while at home—even in the midst of interactions with your teen—simply pause and breathe lightness of body and solidity of stance into the moment you’re in. Do you think others, including your offspring, can notice any shift in you when you do so? What message does that send?
In the Tao Te Ching, the classic text from the sixth century, Lao Tzu declares, “The sage acts by doing nothing, teaches without speaking, attends all things without making claim on them” (2012, 145). What Lao Tzu refers to here is the ancient principle of wu-wei, the power of change that comes from not trying to force change to happen.
Remember, trees may be firmly rooted to the ground, but they are more flexible and have give at the top. There’s a wu-wei to assuming such a stance. The wind will blow, and, yes, it will shove at you. But you won’t meet it—your teen’s emotions—with rigid resistance. You’ll let the surge of your teen’s angst push through, and yet you won’t be going anywhere. Your teen’s anger will not uproot and topple you, as it would that inflexible oak of an old-school grandparent who insists your teen is in need of tough love.
Recent research on the concept of grit, or perseverance and emotional commitment to long-term goals, is relevant here. Researchers such as Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania have presented data showing that students with higher grit scores were significantly more likely to advance in their educations, have higher GPAs, and even rank higher in the National Spelling Bee (Duckworth et al. 2007). Grit was predictive of these outcomes over and above intelligence and other aspects of personality. This unwavering commitment is clearly something we want for our children. It starts with our grit as parents, by which I mean the willingness and skill to lead your angry teen.
As W. H. Murray wrote in The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, “Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too… A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance” (1951, 6–7). Parenting an angry teen requires no less grit than does trekking the Himalayas. The results that come from the commitment to practice the skills in this book—despite the discomfort, pain, and outright angst of doing so—open up possibilities for choice and connection that would not otherwise have arisen.
In my early twenties, I dropped out of law school. This wasn’t due to intellectual weakness or lack of desire. I left due to insufficient grit. I didn’t have a honed, practiced skill set for committed action. (By the way, Duckworth’s data also suggests that grit can predict fewer career changes.) I almost dropped out of my graduate training in psychology as well. Thankfully, by that point, I’d started to learn a bit about perseverance that has helped me tremendously in my roles as clinician, author, and, yes, parent. Let’s turn now to a daily practice of grit.
Skill Practice: GRIT Without Grinding Yourself Up
This practice is important to practice both narrowly (around your parenting) and broadly (in your daily life more generally). Choose an endeavor that can drain, fatigue, or vex you but is nonetheless important. Maybe it’s helping your irritable adolescent with homework. Maybe it’s leaning into the neglected household budget or financial plan. Regardless, try the following steps. Use a journal to record your thoughts and self-assessment.
Remember: to lead your teen away from anger, you need to send a message of compassionate roots-in-the-ground certainty. And grit isn’t inconsistent with the wu-wei stance of nonaction. Rather, the two concepts balance and fuel each other. The best persistence (grit) comes without resistance (wu-wei). You’ve probably heard “what you resist persists” before. Here, we’re flipping that on its head. You’ll best hang in there with your teen’s difficulties—and be most helpful—if you do so with flexibility and flow rather than tension or a grinding force of will.
Q: How am I supposed to hold on to a sense of hope when I’ve been dealing with this problem with my kid for so long? When nothing ever seems to fix things?
A: While it can indeed continue to be painful and difficult, it may be important to ask yourself a different question: If it’s painful right now and my thoughts are telling me to give up or give in, what’s the most important response for me to make despite the pain? Am I willing to do so regardless of what may or may not come down the line?
Before going further into how you can compassionately manage your teen’s anger-related behavior, let’s pause to explore another practice. This breathing activity can help you build the energy and emotional fuel to do the work of compassionate yet direct management of problem behavior.
Skill Practice: Fire Breathing
As a clinician, I’ve heard both parents and professionals express concern regarding behavior management strategies that call for parents to assert authority over kids’ behavior. Call it limit-setting, behavioral consequences, whatever: for many it calls up images of angry spankings and punitive angst. And of course reactive, intense punishment of behavior is not only ineffective—it can make things worse for an angry teen. But this doesn’t mean that teens do not need limits placed on their behavior. This doesn’t mean that if we just nurture them and praise them enough, eventually the negative behaviors will fall away.
In my twenty years of experience with angry youth, such an approach fails in two respects. First, it doesn’t help teens learn the cause-and-effect relationship of their angry behaviors on others, thereby muddling their development of healthy self-responsibility. Second, it distorts families’ relationship patterns, such that teens get the message that anger is the ticket to desired ends. A purely nurturing, empathic communication approach—that is, one without compassionately set limits on behavior—also sends teens the message that the world cannot help shift this unrest in their minds and bodies, that it is uncontrollable. These are not healthy messages for teens to internalize and carry into their own years of parenting.
Yes, kids need compassion and empathy. Yes, we need to take their perspectives, needs, and dearth of necessary skills into account. But in order to help them feel safe, in order to create a foundation for building skills and self-responsibility, caregivers must be willing to erect compassionate fences around angry, acting-out behavior.
Such actions may provoke significant fear, anxiety, and frustration in parents, particularly when there’s been a long history of not setting boundaries. However, when presence and compassionate understanding are wedded to setting boundaries and establishing consequences, teens learn to trust that their chaos can be contained. Research indicates that youth who perceive containment strategies in the parenting they receive are significantly less likely to exhibit aggressive behavior than those who do not believe their parents are willing or able to contain them (Schneider, Cavell, and Hughes 2003). These “contained” kids receive messages of willingness and engagement from their parents. They receive a healthy dose of consistency and predictability. They experience the safety and security of their attachment with their parents. All of this creates fertile ground for teens to learn how to manage their behavior in new, more productive ways.
You know from your own experience that households descend into chaos without such boundaries. However, if we’re not mindful while erecting boundaries, they can end up being far more reactive than necessary. Ideally, such boundaries should feel like compassionate guiding hands. To teens especially, though, such boundaries can feel much more like hammers.
What we’re aiming for here is a stance of calm, self-assured strength. Returning to Gandhi, his calm strength yielded acts of courage and compassion, including his famous fasts to protest British policies in India and his gestures of compassion toward angry protestors and followers alike.
Of course, you’re not Mahatma Gandhi. But you do have a deep emotional investment in your teen. You are willing to attempt to lead your relationship out of the angry chaos. There was nothing supernatural about Gandhi. Rather, he drew on the power of presence and compassionate communication. If you didn’t possess the potential for these skills, you wouldn’t have made it this far in this book.
You want your teen to listen, to just once actually do what you’re asking without the grumbling, disrespect, or outright hostility. And your teen wants you to stop nagging, to understand that what your teen is doing at the moment is important. Think back to the coercive cycle from chapter 1, where the dad objects to the teen’s laundry-strewn room while the teen taps at his phone. (If you need a reminder, perhaps revisit the related “Parent-Teen Coercive Cycle” graphics.)
“Oh, my god! Stop with the damn nagging! I heard you the first time. I’ll do it when I’m done with this text! God!” Sound familiar? Notice how simply reading this sparks thoughts and sensations in your body. Recall the skills of mindful presence you learned in chapter 2. And while you’re at it, remember, too, to look behind you teen’s angry words, to get curious about how that texting might indeed be crucial from your teen’s perspective. Let your thoughts of rightness pass by.
You’re ready now to give a directive if necessary—perhaps a medication needs to be taken, or attendance at a family event is required, or pungent trash heaped in a bedroom corner really must be cleared. However, there’s still another skill you need before you step into your teen’s bedroom, interrupt the texting, and issue your well-justified directive.
To break the destructive pattern of interaction between you and your teen, you need to learn to deliver concise, direct, and nonreactive directions. The following four-step series of skill practices helps you learn this skill:
Skill Practice: Speaking Behind Behavior (Step 1)
First, please revisit chapter 1 to review the needs behind your teen’s angry behavior toward authority figures. Remember, angry teens are sending authentic RSVP messages, but these are often obscured by angry, volatile behavior. Your job as a parent is to get to that real message—and to let your teen know you’re sincere in your attempt to understand. You’re not looking to manipulate or spin things. You genuinely want to learn and respond to what is truly important to your child.
This skill takes a significant amount of practice to get the hang of it. Are you willing? What is the cost of continuing with patterns as they are?
Skill Practice: Giving Effective Directions (Step 2)
Your teen has looked away from the phone and looks at you.
I once had a client who was a former Catholic priest. This former priest had adopted his daughter when she was three. The daughter had had a very difficult early childhood prior to her adoption; as a teen, she struggled to trust that her relationships could be lasting, safe, and supportive—especially her relationship with her dad.
Coercive cycles would frequently erupt between them. And when they did, the teen would get in her dad’s face and swear and yell. “I hate you. I wish you’d die!”
This father was wired on the anxious side. For him, emotional intensity sparked patterns of withdrawal and avoidance.
“And you’re a goddamn bastard!” the daughter would yell at glass-shattering pitch.
Remember, this was a former priest. Swearing alone was bad enough, but “bastard” was off the charts. “That’s it,” the dad would yell back. “I’m sending you to a residential program before your anger kills me with a heart attack!”
You can imagine what this self-defensive push from the dad did to the teen’s deep-seated fears of neglect and rejection. Things continued to grow more strained and more painful between them.
In a parenting session, I asked the dad to say “the b-word” aloud, just as his teen had done. He protested. I insisted. Sheepishly he said it. I asked him to say it again, to keep repeating it as fast as he could. I promised I’d do it with him.
When we finally stopped, I asked what he had noticed about the word, about what had happened to the sound and feel of it.
“The word lost its meaning. It became nonsense,” he said.
And that was the point. The message wasn’t that this parent should simply permit disrespectful language to be slung in his direction. He shouldn’t be a doormat for his teen’s anger. The point was for him to see “bastard” as merely a word—to deliteralize it so he could ignore both its meaning and the provocations from his teen. When he mindfully ignored words that stung, he could focus instead on leading and managing the difficult situation.
Now, returning to our practice, let’s assume you’ve delivered a great, efficient direction for your teen’s behavior. Nonetheless, your teen is lashing out at you. Here’s step three in the management process:
Skill Practice: Selective Attending: Leaning In While Tuning Out (Step 3)
I grew up watching and reading Peanuts cartoons. As a kid, I didn’t really understand the point of the teacher’s wah wah wah wah broken-record talking. As an adult—and particularly an adult who has spent years trying to get kids to listen—I get it. Kids can tune adults out. Adults can too. In fact, active ignoring can be a productive skill for you to practice as a parent when your teen is ranting and you’re working to sidestep reactivity and lead the interaction on to a healthy path. Here are the steps:
It’s important to be aware here of what we in the field call extinction bursts. When someone is used to consistently receiving a certain rewarding reaction to a behavior and you eliminate that reaction, the person will, for a time, actually increase the frequency and intensity of the behavior. So, for example, if you’re actively ignoring the “b-word,” your teen may escalate its use. This is actually a good sign. It means that your teen was getting a reward from your reactions to the word, and is now working hard—mostly subconsciously—to get that reward back.
This is where you double down and stay consistent. Continue your active ignoring, continue your practice of presence and understanding. If you don’t give the reward of your reaction, the behavior will decrease and fall away. And if you hang in there long enough, you will also be rewarded yourself by the feeling of empowerment that comes from helping shift these entrenched patterns. It is possible!
Skill Practice: Compassionate Consequences (Step 4)
Let’s return to our scenario. You’ve engaged thoughtfully and genuinely. You’ve given an effective, concise direction. You’ve practiced active ignoring. But now your teen is trashing the living room.
You’ve already made it clear that destructive behavior would result in a loss of privileges. No cell phone use and no hanging out with friends over the weekend. It’s clear your teen crossed a line. Though you dread the uproar to come, you also know it’s time for you to follow through—not doing so would erode your credibility and decrease your influence.
Step 4 helps you strike a balance between containment and compassion:
Remember, good limits are done with your teen’s underlying needs in mind. They are compassionate fences meant to create a space within which teens can feel safe and supported as you help them modify their behavior.
Let’s back up a bit. Instead of addressing your teen’s angry behavior only after it has escalated, what if you could intervene earlier in the process to shift your teen toward a calmer state? There’s a deer-in-headlights aspect to others’ anger, particularly if you’ve been there many times before with this particular loved one. But you don’t have to passively watch your teen build toward full-blown rage.
The challenge is to abide the anxiety, apprehension, and fear you’ll experience with mindfulness—and to move toward your teen anyway. Then you can interrupt the angry script and nudge the interaction toward a co-regulation activity, a physical or mental activity that calls for mutual give and take.
Instead of just arguing with a teen’s disrespectful grumbling, you could try picking up a small, soft ball and tossing it gently in their direction. It’s a rare kid who will let a ball approach without trying to catch it. You then silently raise your hands in full expectation that your teen will toss—hopefully not hurl—it back to you. The point is to begin a coordinated flow back and forth between you. This could involve playing catch, spinning a quarter to and fro across the dining room table, or maybe even placing a trash can between you and taking turns tossing in balled-up paper. The point is to create a resonance between you, a shared rhythm that pulls your teen out of the angry ruminating and gets your teen’s mind and body coordinating with yours. This is co-regulation. It’s a skill that requires a combination of playfulness, courage, and timing. These are qualities that, as a parent of an angry teen, you have undoubtedly demonstrated at some point. Are you willing to call upon them now to teach your teen that angry ranting need not be inevitable? Help your kid learn that it’s possible to break the buildup.
Co-regulation activities have double impact. One, Co-regulation activities physically and mentally disrupt escalation patterns. And two, co-regulation activities also send teens a clear message of your caring and willing engagement.
The following are the key steps to any co-regulation activity:
Skill Practice: Offering Co-Regulation M&Ms
Research definitively shows that developing clearer and more consistent problem-solving skills can help kids who struggle with anger to sidestep the ladder of escalation and instead actually address the obstacles that face them (Barkley and Robin 2013).
Anger makes solving problems more difficult because anger activates brain pathways that make the planning and thinking centers of the prefrontal cerebral cortex less effective. Anger narrows people’s ability to achieve perspective and facilitates erroneous perceptions (such as the correspondence bias with its blaming tendency that we discussed in chapter 3).
Parents can help teens manage their anger by directly modeling, teaching, and guiding teens to practice discrete problem-solving skills. With consistent practice—which requires modeling—angry reactivity can gradually be replaced by an investigatory approach to resolving life dramas. In turn, the success of using such problem-solving skills reinforces the skills. And once teens see how much these skills improve their lives, the skills become self-maintaining.
Skill Practice: Teach Them To SOLVE Problems
Sometimes parents cannot—and should not—try to manage their teen’s angry behavior all on their own. I have worked with far too many families in which unsafe aggressive and destructive behavior has become the norm and parents and kids live in fear of the next escalation. Whole families can become paralyzed by such fear, trapped in patterns that are unhealthy for everyone.
For teens to improve, it is absolutely crucial to send them a message of adult leadership and containment. You want it emblazoned in your teen’s mind—even when anger structures in the brain partially blind your teen—that you will take action to keep everyone safe in the home. A number of fears and doubts can make parents reluctant to send this message or follow it with appropriate action. Here are just a few:
There may be others as well, but you get the gist. These sentiments, though understandable, are obstacles to be overcome. Without a clear safety plan, the risks of dangerous situations worsen. Further, failure to create and use a safety plan can damage relationships between family members. Siblings may resent that you cave in and don’t take action, while your angry teen will further learn how powerful anger can be in swaying the course of things. You trap yourself in a vortex of fear and hopelessness.
If physically aggressive or destructive behavior—or frequent threats of it—are present, it’s important to create a safety plan. When creating this plan, a licensed clinician with experience working with risk behaviors in families can be very helpful.
Q: People tell me that I shouldn’t tolerate my kid’s unsafe behavior at home—that I should be calling the cops or at least taking him to the emergency room for a psychiatric screening. But I know he’s not really going to hurt anyone. Isn’t it true that calling 911 can just make things worse?
A: Yes and no. Yes, there’s an element of uncertainty when you call in authorities to intervene. There’s no guarantee that they’ll be sensitive to the clinical factors causing the outbursts—or even that they won’t arrest him. Likewise, there’s no guarantee that it won’t just end up an exciting story for him to share at school.
And no—involving external authorities can be a crucial step in breaking the pattern of toxic behavior in the home. There is much you can do to pave the way for a better response from emergency personnel or a specialized community-based crisis team, and to start giving your teen a clear, consistent message that there is a line that cannot be crossed without you taking action.
Skill Practice: Matter-of-Fact Safety Planning
As we’ve discussed, teens can’t learn to manage their volatile emotions if they don’t feel safe. Teens need to feel that caregivers are there to make sure things don’t spiral too far out of control. That’s why a collaboratively created home safety plan is crucial. “Collaborative” is the key word here. The teen should have the opportunity to contribute to the creation of the plan. Even if the offer to collaborate is rebuffed, the respectful and compassionate message this conveys is crucial. A safety planning worksheet is available online for you to download; visit http://www.newharbinger.com/35760 to access it. Here are the essential steps:
Peaceful Parent Practice: Your Home—A River Runs Through It
A short walk from my front door flows a small waterfall, an offshoot of the Charles River. I’ve often found myself there when I need a reminder of how much control I don’t have over what happens in my life. I seem to find myself at the water’s edge even more often since I became a dad. I stare at the water moving rapidly over the fall’s edge and think, How am I going to handle this? and, Where will the money come from? and, This is not what the parenting brochure advertised!
Sometimes by the waterfall I can catch my mind doing its worrying, regretful, fretful thing and let the thoughts drift away. Standing there, watching the flow of water, I’m reminded of a couple of key facts:
This Peaceful Parenting Practice is simple, crucial, and yet somehow elusive. Our minds tend to make things. We make our lives into various chunks of unchanging granite that we either want or don’t want to be permanent. We need the peace that comes from the inevitable truth of change. And as parents of a struggling teen, we want our love for our child to live forever—and yet we also want the pain associated with the teen to make a quick exit. Peace comes from trusting the water-like flow.
In a journal, or just in quiet contemplation, ask yourself: What outcome am I trying to force—to control—with my teen? Notice the thoughts and bodily sensations that arise. Notice how you want to either grab or shove away what you’re experiencing. Breathe deeply into this impulse and just watch as the thoughts and feelings flow on their own. Watch until you see them change of their own accord. Did you have to force the change? How might you let go of trying to force the chunks of granite that have accumulated around your teen’s anger and struggle to change? Can you make letting go your practice and just witness the results as they arrive?
By all means set expectations and limits, express accountability for behavior, and authentically state the impact of your teen’s negative behavior on you and others. But do so from the power of a wu-wei stance. Let gravity bring the outcomes over which you have no control anyway.
Before you move on to the next chapter:
Look for an opportunity to practice taking a one-down stance with your teen.
Identify a specific way you might show curiosity toward your teen—that is, see your teen in a new way—in an upcoming situation. Communicate that to your teen.
Practice at least one of the breathing exercises in this chapter and incorporate it into your daily routine.
What emotional need do you believe is resting behind your teen’s angry behavior? In what concise way can you speak to it? Explore this in your journal.
Practice setting compassionate consequences.
Create, perhaps with professional support, a home safety plan; discuss it at a family meeting and write it in teen-friendly language.