5

Empowering Change for You and Your Teen

We’ve arrived at the final PURE step for mindful management of a teen struggling with anger. Hopefully, you’ve already begun to discover the benefits of practicing skills of mindful presence, both in parenting and in your overall well-being. We’ve explored the crucial role of compassionate understanding in effective management of tough situations, as well as how both presence and understanding help you to lead effectively. Now, we just have to tie up the interaction! Ideally, you end every parenting exchange with a nudge toward empowering the capacity for change in both you and your teen.

In this chapter you will:

Self-Compassion: Moving Past Self-Blame

Self-compassion is definitely something you need as a parent of an angry teen. The term has been buzzing around the mindfulness world recently, but what exactly is self-compassion? According to experts such as psychotherapist and meditation teacher Tim Desmond (2015), self-compassion involves three primary components: an acknowledgment of the fact of one’s own suffering; a recognition of attempts to help oneself; and an acceptance that this suffering is shared with many others—that we’re never alone and that there is no true separation from others.

Sounds good, right? In fact, for our lives to be as expansive and free of suffering as possible, we all need heaping doses of self-compassion. Here are some ways to actively practice self-compassion:

Skill Practice: Voice Over

  1. Think of a recent mistake or misstep you made while parenting your angry teen.
  2. Notice what your inner critic says about you, about how you failed or made things worse, or something else derogatory.
  3. Recognize that this critic actually does want what’s best for you. It’s the part of you that wants you to get things right so you avoid causing and experiencing pain.
  4. Thank your critic for giving you feedback and for trying to take care of you.
  5. Ask yourself what your inner voice might say, and how it might say it, if the same message were delivered in a more compassionate, nonjudgmental tone.
  6. Remind yourself of this more compassionate voice whenever the critic rises up in your parenting. Consider writing the compassionate sentiment down on a card or sticky note and placing it where you’ll see it throughout the day.

The skill here is to second-guess your second-guessing—to balance yourself with a compassionate acceptance of “errors.” In addressing an intense, chronic problem such as teen anger, it’s important to remind yourself to focus on progress, not perfection.

Skill Practice: Off the Hook

You are probably aware of some less than ideal habits in your parenting. Perhaps you yell on occasion, or multitask when your teen needs your focused attention, or maybe you lecture your teen too much. Whatever it is, you have some habits like this. We all do.

It’s important for all parents—and especially parents with kids who struggle with emotional and behavioral challenges—to cut themselves some slack. If you bought this book, you love your teen. If you’re reading it and trying the activities, you’re taking this love and using it to build new possibilities for your teen and for you. Let’s start with a breathing practice that will soften the hard places in your parental heart.

  1. Breathe in: notice the pain or upset you’ve caused by over- or underreacting.
  2. Breathe out: drop any impulse to beat yourself up yet again.
  3. Breathe in: allow yourself to begin to forgive yourself.
  4. Breathe out: connect with your wish for better patterns and less pain for you and your teen.
  5. Breathe in: a wish for a lightening of the burden of your heart.

Ask Abblett

Q: How am I supposed to have compassion for myself when I’m surrounded by people—my kid in particular—who think I’m screwing everything up? That I’m the source of their misery? How do I let myself off the hook when I’m surrounded by pain and negativity all day, every day?

A: It’s said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Psychologists such as Nicholas Christakis (2004) refer to this as social contagion (see chapter 4). While you may not be able to—nor should you—completely divorce yourself from your teen and your teen’s angst, you can take a look at the others in your life. Whose positive energy can you spend more time near in the coming days? Notice the effect this has on you and your ability to manage things with more resilience.

Revving Up: Inner Power

We all have habits of mind. However, people vary in their inner responses to a situation—there are different ways to process things. Instead of continuing to practice pain-drenched thinking with regard to your parenting, how about making a daily practice of inside-out empowerment?

Recent data (Creswell et al. 2013) suggests that self-affirmation statements—such as, “This is important to who I am”—can buffer the effects of stress. Here, we’ll practice the skill of reconditioning ourselves toward more adaptive modes of self-talk.

Skill Practice: Power Question

  1. In your journal, write down one of your strengths as a parent. What is something that you do well as a parent?
  2. Sitting in an upright, aware posture with eyes closed, notice what emerges in you with this question. Don’t judge, label, or analyze. Simply witness any inner dialogue or reactions.
  3. Next, regardless of any chatter from your inner critic, do something that exercises and builds on that strength. Do it right now.
  4. Notice how it feels to exercise one of your parenting strengths. Notice the effect this has on your thoughts. How are you handling the situation that arises after having done this? Can you make a regular practice of noticing how it impacts you to perform something well?
  5. Try doing this activity soon after or in advance of more challenging parenting situations. Notice the effect of invoking your power in these tougher times.

Skill Practice: Finding FLOW as a Parent of a Teen

You’re probably familiar with the idea of being in the zone. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls this flow. Flow is a state of energized focus and immersion in an activity that is moderately challenging and for which you have at least moderate skill. You may have noticed yourself in flow while playing your favorite sport or performing an aspect of your work. It feels good to have the experience of time drop away. You flow through an activity with efficiency and effectiveness. When is the last time you experienced flow in your parenting?

Notice what arose for you, in mind and body, upon reading this question. (Return to the preceding section on self-compassion if need be.) It’s a safe bet that you are not wholly without skill as a parent—your kid has made it to adolescence after all. It’s also likely that there are parenting activities that pose a moderate degree of difficulty for you. The goal here is to be able to identify the match or mismatch between your skill and the activity’s difficulty, and then to address any gaps.

  1. In a single column your journal, list the activities you engage in regularly as a parent that pose very little challenge (e.g. for the color blind/challenged like me, doing the laundry). Now list activities that are extremely challenging (e.g. speaking compassionately behind a teen’s nasty, acting out behavior). Next, list activities that appear to fall in the moderate range of challenge to you.
  2. In an adjacent column, honestly assess how skilled you are in performing each of these activities. Try to be as objective as possible. Get feedback from someone you trust to gauge your accuracy.
  3. Next, scan your list for well-matched pairs—where your skills nicely match the challenge of the activity, particularly moderate ones. Schedule yourself to do at least one of these activities in the next twenty-four hours. Reflect—perhaps journal—about your inner experience of doing this activity. How does it feel to do it? How does it impact things later in your day, particularly with regard to your interactions with your teen and your practice of the other skills in this book?
  4. Identify the parenting activities that are highly challenging and currently appear to exceed your skill levels. Consider pursuing resources—books, clinicians, other professionals, a trusted mentor or family member—in order to build your skills in these areas. Remember: progress not perfection. Is the activity important enough for moving things forward with your teen that you’re willing to put in the time, effort, and money to beef up your skill? Note any inner or outer obstacles you may experience and develop a plan for addressing them.
  5. Do a passion check on your parenting. Whether it’s the activity you’ve listed above or another altogether, what parenting activity are you willing to do—today—without any pay, praise, or prompting from another? What could you do with absolute, undivided attention? Flow into that right now.

From Garbage to Flowers

Any organic gardener intuitively knows what meditation teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (1991) means when he says that you cannot have flowers without garbage. The best flowers grow out of healthy doses of compost—garbage. And compost or garbage is, of course, what all flowers eventually become. Nhat Hanh reminds us of what at some level we already know: bad things can lead to good things, and good things themselves inevitably change.

Pain can become possibility. This is not just a greeting card sentiment. But in order for this to happen, we need to be open to experiencing pain. Empowering change with your teen requires being aware of the changing tides of pain. Instead of seeing the pain of things with your teen as stone solid, can you get curious as to how it has, is, and will certainly always change?

Skill Practice: Gratitude Breathing

  1. Sitting upright with your eyes closed, call to mind a recent interaction with your teen that went extremely well, where you connected or shared in something meaningful or fun.
  2. As the image of this situation appears, notice the sensations in your body.
  3. For ten breaths, sit with that image and any sensations or thoughts that arise.
  4. Count each breath gently and silently, keeping your focus on the experience of that good time.
  5. Open your eyes and notice how you feel. Truly savor this experience for its beauty.

Now, repeat these steps a second time. This time call to mind a recent exchange with your teen that did not go well, one that may have involved considerable intensity and pain for both of you. Notice what arises. Stay with this as you count out ten breaths. Don’t worry about breathing in any particular way, simply notice the breath moving in and out as you focus on the images and sensations from the situation.

Ask yourself: At the close of just these ten breaths, have the images and sensations of this tough episode remained exactly the same in quality and content? Have they changed on their own?

Ask yourself: How might the “garbage” of this episode continue to change across ongoing, mindful breaths? Over ten thousand breaths? Is there anything you or your teen can learn from this situation? Do you feel any more resolve to improve things? How might this garbage transform with time into a flower?

Attunement to Your Angry Teen

In a famous series of studies (Tronick et al. 1978), developmental psychologist Ed Tronick asked parents to cease their typical back-and-forth interactions with their infants and abruptly face them instead with blank expressions. Through these “still face” experiments, Tronick documented the immense impact—physiological, psychological, and behavioral—of interrupting the normal dance of emotional attunement, impact that was felt by both the baby and the parent.

You know this already because you feel the impact of the disrupted flow of emotional give and take with your teen. And, of course, your teen feels it as well. Tronick showed that these interruptions significantly impact the stress levels—and therefore the development—of an infant. For the wellbeing of you and your teen, it’s important to shift the emotional balance back toward attunement.

Ask Abblett

Q: I don’t believe that my daughter cares about connecting with me. How am I supposed to believe that she gives a damn when all I get is her anger and resentment? When all I get is blamed for everything that’s not going well for her?

A: The opposite of love is not hate. As a supervisor of mine said long ago, it’s really something more akin to indifference. When teens give you their anger, they are giving you a message of their pain—a message that they want you to hear. They are still children who want their parents to help remove the pain. We often make those we love most the targets of our anger because really we’re searching for more connection.

Skill Practice: Hang Time

Whether it’s inane gossip shows about overexposed and overpaid celebrities or video games that require more manual dexterity than piloting a fighter jet, it’s time you got comfortable hanging out with your teen. The point here is to make deposits in your teen’s emotional bank account that you can draw on later. You want to give small experiences of dedicated attention. Attunement and emotional investment in favorite activities will help your teen care more about your relationship going forward. Improvements in the parent–child relationship will increase the prospect for your teen to get on top of all that anger.

Your willingness to hang out with full attention and engagement will help your teen develop the resilience to hang in there with the difficulties of the change process. Try these steps:

  1. Carve out at least ten to fifteen minutes per day to hang out with your teen. If possible, establish a regular time for hanging out, a time when you are free from other responsibilities or competing demands.
  2. Express interest in joining your teen in some sort of leisure activity at home. Don’t force the issue. If the teen refuses to allow you to even sit nearby, simply state something like, “Okay, well I’d really like to hang out with you, so I’ll look to check-in with you later.” And then follow up, even if it takes twenty rejections before your teen finally says, “whatever” and allows you to sit nearby while your kid plays Grand Theft Auto. If your teen suggests you’re just trying to spy or get into the teen’s business, then say something like, “Hey, I’m just trying to flip things around between you and me. I just want to show some interest in what matters to you.”
  3. Ideally, the teen is up for doing something interactive with you, such as a game. If not, just sit as your teen does whatever it is your teen likes to do.
  4. Avoid asking questions. Again, your teen will likely assume that you’re prying, or perhaps judging in some way. Avoid lecturing or trying to teach. This is not a time to instruct your teen in any way. Don’t try to direct or manage how your teen does the activity. Also, don’t inquire into sensitive topics during hangout time. The focus here is not the content of any hot button issues—it’s on the process of your communication with each other.
  5. Practice attunement by:
  6. Let your teen lead the interaction. Practice letting go of trying to control things. Suppress any disdain for your teen’s preferences or passion for what you see as an irrational, nonsensical activity. Remember, your teen expects you to show disapproval or sit in judgment. It will send a very powerful message—a message your teen will certainly detect—if you refrain from doing so.

Skill Practice: SAVORing with the Breath

Here’s another activity for creating more positivity in your relationship with your teen. This activity has less to do with shifting the dynamics of communication between you, and more to do with shifting your own internal stance. The activity helps spark remembrances of good times and affinity with your teen. These then ripple into your daily life.

  1. Sit quietly with a favorite memento from a good time with your teen. This could be a stub from a film you enjoyed together, a favorite toy you gave your teen at the holidays, anything.
  2. Allow all of your senses to engage the object (perhaps not taste!).
  3. Value the pleasant sensations and thoughts—the peace—that arise.
  4. Open to any and all possibilities of transfering this peace to other situations today, whether that’s in interactions with your teen or not.
  5. Rest in what you cherish about this time with your teen.

The next time you’re in an actual interaction with your teen that involves some fun or meaningfulness, try savoring it. In the midst of the experience, take at least five conscious breaths. Gently count the breaths to yourself as you take in what is wonderful about the situation. What happens to your experience of your teen as you willingly breathe into it?

Inviting the Choice to Change

A large body of research reveals that people are more likely to do the hard work of changing difficult behaviors when they believe they are choosing to do so (Prochaska and DiClemente 1983; Deci and Ryan 2000). Whether it’s addressing addictions, following through on healthy lifestyle choices, or heeding a doctor’s recommendations, a sense of autonomy is crucial to the change process.

Change is not easy for most of us. For teens with anger issues, change can be particularly challenging. It’s important to empower teens to choose the changes their lives require.

Pause and think about your own change-resistant behaviors from the past. Perhaps it was smoking, unhealthy eating patterns, or even a nail-biting habit. Did you change when you felt pressured to by others? When you felt down and out? You likely changed only when you felt yourself at the helm, not when you felt pushed from behind.

Skill Practice: Real Choices

Let’s assume you’ve set a limit on your teen’s behavior. Perhaps you’ve grounded your teen for having given you the finger in front of dinner guests. You waited until after your guests left to address the issue, to lower the intensity for you and your teen. Following the steps for compassionate consequences in chapter 4, you went to the doorway of your teen’s room and stated the consequence for the teen’s behavior. Now you need to end the interaction with a brief reminder of your teen’s ability to choose:

  1. Assuming it is physically safe to say anything further after setting the limit, prepare yourself by softening your demeanor. With a full belly breath, relax your facial expressions and consciously ease the tension in your body.
  2. Look at your teen. Speaking more softly than when you set the limit, directly state, “What happens next is entirely up to you. You get to decide how you handle this.”
  3. Check your tone. Be sincere, not sarcastic. Do not, in any way, taunt your teen with a “let’s see how you handle this” edge.
  4. Offer to assist your teen with something that neither diminishes nor negates the consequence you’ve set. For example, if you’ve taken away your teen’s cell phone, that doesn’t mean you can’t offer to get the teen a glass of water. Your willingness to be civil and sincere will help debunk any suspicions that you’re rejecting or demeaning the teen as a person. You dislike the behavior, not the person.

Eyeing the Prize in Your Teen

Teens can respond well to praise from the adults in their lives. They can also react negatively if they feel they’re being praised so as to manipulate them into doing something the adult wants, or they perceive the praise as inauthentic. A helpful alternative to praising is the concept of prizing behavior. Prizing is a relationship-building skill that lets teens know their efforts are noticed. Prizing models authenticity and helps teens build their resilience and capacity to hang in there with challenges.

Here are a couple of additional advantages of prizing: it makes you—and your perspective and feelings—matter more to your teen. Your teen will thus be more likely to take input and direction from you. Prizing is also contagious. It builds a culture of connection.

Skill Practice: Prizing vs. Praising

  1. Anticipate upcoming interactions. Ask yourself: How can I let my teen know that I recognize a valuable trait or effort? Maybe this would be through a direct comment in which you let your teen know you’ve noticed something really cool. Maybe it’s a gesture where you thank your teen for showing this side.
  2. Prize with patience. Get eye-level, be sincere, and let your teen know about the valuable effort or behavior you see. Be patient. Your teen may not respond readily, or even at all. For teens with low self-esteem, positive input can feel discrepant with how they view themselves. They may reject what you’re doing or saying altogether. Don’t give up! If they’re used to people giving up, giving up now is only likely to confirm the script they’ve been acting out. Through consistent prizing, show them a new script is possible.
  3. Let go of your own agendas, your own need for kudos. You’re the adult; your teen is the kid. Find your thank-yous and congratulations elsewhere. Trust that the message, when given enthusiastically and authentically, will resonate even if your teen doesn’t acknowledge it openly. This is not something your teen needs to be polite about. When you’re planting seeds, it doesn’t make sense to get mad that a seed doesn’t immediately bear fruit.
  4. Here’s an acronym to help you remember the keys points for effective prizing with your teen—or with anyone for that matter. Try it out with others in your circle and notice the effects:

Ask Abblett

Q: I really don’t feel like prizing my teen. He is so negative and draining. He does so little that I can be proud of—how am I supposed to honestly prize him? Won’t it make things worse to be fake?

A: Yes, being fake will certainly not help things. Your teen will see through it and resent you all the more. The trick is to keep working to see behind your teen’s angry behavior. Is there any aspect of resilience in him? Has there been any—even the smallest—effort on his part to try to show the world something other than anger? This could be a supportive gesture for a friend, or putting grungy clothes in the hamper without being asked. Prizing is about reflecting authentic effort with a genuine message of respect and valuing. It doesn’t matter how small that effort is.

Peaceful Parent Practice: Stressus Interruptus

This practice is deceptively simple. Its key lies in the cueing—in remembering and actually following through in the heat of things.

  1. Anticipate a likely conflict with your teen in the coming days. What marker or signal tends to happen that indicates a blowup is imminent? This could be your teen’s angry glare, your own clenching throat, or a knot in your stomach.
  2. Create a specific cue or reminder primed to guide you during an impending conflict. For example, this could be an index card with the word “interrupt” written on it. In your mind, link the cue with the marker or signal you identified in the previous step. Place this cue in a spot where you’ll see it as a conflict is developing with your teen.
  3. Identify a short but effective strategy you’ve used previously to calm and take care of yourself. Some examples are: listening to music, taking a bath, working out, going for a walk, drinking a cup of tea.
  4. Plan so that, the moment a blowup seems imminent during an actual interaction, you will interrupt your own behavior and put your self-care strategy into action. Do this no matter how much your inner engine churns for further reactivity.
  5. Before exiting the interaction, look at your teen and say something like, “I know this is very important to you, and I also know I need a break. I’ll be back later to see if you want to work this out. Right now, I’m going to go slow things down. I will be back.”
  6. Be certain to circle back. Do not prescribe, recommend, preach, or in any way lecture how your teen should be calming down. Let your actions speak on their own.

Your Parental Agenda

Before you move on to the next chapter:

Select a self-compassion practice for when you get stuck in blaming yourself. Use it.

Practice one of your parental strengths.

Contemplate the “garbage” and how it might flower or is already flowering.

Commit to hanging out with your teen on a daily basis.

Develop and maintain a practice of prizing effort and change-related risk-taking in your teen.