Questions? Nassau (516) 714-4707 | Suffolk – North Shore (631) 828-2264 | Suffolk – South Shore (631) 828-2264 | NYC (646) 939-5210

  • What Is DBT
  • About Us

    Suffolk DBT

    Office Hours

    Monday:

    9am – 8pm

    Tuesday:

    9am – 8pm

    Wednesday:

    9am – 8pm

    Thursday:

    9am – 8pm

    Friday:

    9am – 8pm

    Our Locations

    Downtown NYC – Manhattan / NYC
    North Shore– Suffolk County / Long Island
    South Shore– Suffolk County / Long Island
    Nassau County – Roslyn Heights / Long Island
  • Treatment Specialties

    Our Approaches

    Who We Serve

    Our Specialties

  • Blog
  • Book An Appointment
    For Adults And Adolescents
    For Children 7-12

Do You Need Emotional Support

to Help You Stay Balanced Through the Most Fulfilling and Frustrating Parts of Parenting?

Book a free Screening Call

Dialectical Behavior Therapy For Parents In New York

Are you the parent of a child or teenager struggling at home and school? Does your child often experience intense emotions and struggle to regulate them? Is parenting an anxious child on top of dealing with your own anxieties and juggling your responsibilities to yourself, work, romantic partner, and friends overwhelming?

At Suffolk DBT, our team acknowledges the toll stress and parenting can take on your health and daily functioning. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy for Parents aims to help parents, especially stressed parents and those parenting with anxiety, learn the importance of self-compassion and self-care, which can help them manage the stressors associated with parenting.

With DBT Therapy for Parents at Suffolk DBT, you’ll learn to:

  • Recognize and validate your own feelings
  • Regulate your emotions and impulses effectively
  • Stay calm when facing difficult behavior from your child and others
  • Use problem-solving strategies in challenging situations

Is DBT Therapy for Parents Right for You?

At Suffolk DBT, our team recognizes parenting as a multifaceted role that can be as challenging as it is rewarding. As your child grows, develops, and interacts with the world around them, they experience complex positive and negative emotions and take you through the highs and lows with them. 

We understand that the parenting journey is personal and the circumstances you and your family navigate are unique. People may become stressed parents, confused parents, or even angry parents if they find themselves regularly struggling to keep up with

  • Tantrums and behavioral issues in younger children
  • Teenage angst and frequent clashes with teens
  • Daily demands of parenting

Likewise, some parents may feel insufficient in caring for their child if they’re doing it alone and experiencing single-parent stress, feel unsure of their bond if they’ve adopted a child or are parenting as an adoptee, or feel inadequate if they’re parenting with anxiety or parenting an anxious child or one who has a mental, emotional, behavioral, physical, or eating disorder.

Dealing with these emotional challenges can compound any stress you experience within your marriage or romantic relationships, friendships, professional life, and more. Considering this, we offer DBT specifically for parents, as well as a core feature of our DBT-C and DBT-A programs.

Our Approaches to Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Parents

DBT is an evidence-based psychotherapy developed in the 1980s by Dr. Marsha Linehan, who focused on helping individuals be mindful of their lives in the present so they can gain control of their behaviors and emotions, effectively cope with stress, improve their interpersonal relationships, and self-regulate harmful behaviors. 

It’s a beneficial choice for parents who want to help their little ones and teens manage their emotions and behaviors in positive ways and can be as advantageous for parents who need care and support for themselves as they care for their families. 

Dr. Linehan initially intended DBT for individuals with borderline personality disorder, but it has since been successfully adapted as an effective treatment form for other conditions, such as

  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
  • Autism
  • Bipolar disorder
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Our multi-family groups teach DBT skills for parents including mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness skills used in traditional DBT.

Mindfulness Skills

Mindfulness refers to the practice of being in the moment. It’s recognizing and acknowledging your thoughts and feelings without judging them and without attachment to outcomes. We teach mindfulness in DBT for parents to help them learn how to gain awareness of their thoughts and feelings without allowing themselves to become overwhelmed by them. 

Being mindful is crucial as today’s pressures push parents and their children to be multitaskers, which can overwhelm each person in the family and even strain relationships with each other. Parents in DBT can learn how to recognize when they are overwhelmed and triggered by their child’s behaviors on top of stress resulting from other responsibilities. They will learn how to observe their child’s behavior without judgment and self-regulate themselves before responding in unhelpful ways. 

Emotional Regulation Skills

Emotional regulation is an essential component of DBT for parents, as it is for traditional DBT. Emotional regulation skills help parents better understand their emotional responses and why they experience certain emotions, accept these emotions, and even change the particular emotion. 

Being equipped with emotional regulation skills along with the other DBT skills can help you gain clarity and insight into what pushes you to react and overreact, and identify what happens when you overreact. It helps you observe and consider how your emotional responses impact your child—did your reaction make things better or worse? When you have a healthy handle on yourself and your raw emotions, you can be an example to your child and guide, help, and support them in managing their emotions.

Distress Tolerance Skills

Distress tolerance is a critical DBT skill that helps people manage the intense emotions they experience without engaging in behaviors that could be harmful to themselves and others. This skill can help even the most stressed parents, angry parents, and those parenting with anxiety understand how to accept difficult circumstances and situations without making them worse. In DBT therapy groups for parents at Suffolk DBT—which itself can be a part of self-care as parents need support in their parenthood journey—parents learn how to take care of themselves while still supporting their children’s needs.

Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills

The interpersonal effectiveness skills we guide parents in learning help them enhance their relationships with others through conflict management, comfortably setting and enforcing healthy boundaries, practicing assertiveness, and improving communication. With interpersonal effectiveness skills, you’ll be able to better communicate with your children and your partner about difficult situations and topics. You’ll learn strategies that make you more effective at setting boundaries while still supporting your child’s needs and wants. 

Being able to calmly assert yourself and validate your feelings, while simultaneously hearing and validating your child’s experiences, emotions, and thoughts can empower you to comfortably and respectfully discuss tough subjects like substance use, oppositional defiance, peer pressure, and mental, emotional, and behavioral struggles with your child without a power struggle that strains the relationship or intensifies stress.

Ready to speak with a licensed Mental Health Specialist?

Book A free screening call

Non-Judgmental Parenting Support

DBT for parents at Suffolk DBT is a place where you learn to take care of yourself. It’s a place for you to feel seen, heard, validated, and comforted by DBT experts who understand the unique and forever-changing challenges and experiences you face if you’re parenting a child you adopted, parenting as an adoptee, supporting a child in recovery from substance abuse or disordered eating or treatment for anxiety, depression, or borderline personality disorder, helping your anxious child, parenting with anxiety, experiencing parental separation anxiety, or in therapy yourself for behavioral or emotional challenges.

We won’t judge you or your circumstances and encourage you not to judge yourself. No one’s parenting is perfect and we invite you not to put that pressure on yourself. Instead, we’ll guide you in mastering your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, and accessing your inner resilience so you can progress individually and with your family. You don’t have to walk the challenging road of parenting alone. Our compassionate, licensed DBT experts guide families through difficult, challenging times while promoting healthy, effective communication between parents, children, and all household and family members. By utilizing the techniques learned in DBT, parents can build and enjoy stronger relationships with their children built on respect and mutual understanding.

Parents in Suffolk County, Nassau County, and NYC who’ve been searching for ‘family therapy’ and ‘parenting support near me,’ don’t have to look any further than our Long Island and Manhattan offices for the care and support they need and deserve. When you’re ready to enhance your relationships and quality of life and learn DBT skills, we encourage and invite you to set up a 15-minute intake appointment with our staff. Call (631) 828-2264 to initiate the self-care journey of healing, joy, and peace you deserve, and during the call, we’ll get started with assessing your concerns to match you with the right licensed therapist based on your needs.

Get free screening call
Facebook-f Instagram

(631) 828-2264

OUR APPROACHES

OUR SPECIALTIES

OUR LOCATIONS

Manhattan / NYC Therapy

303 5th Ave #901 New York, NY 10016

Telephone

(646) 939-5210

North Shore - Suffolk County | Long Island

5505 Nesconset Hwy #222 Mount Sinai, NY 11766

Telephone

(631) 828-2264

South Shore - Suffolk County | Long Island

400 W Main St, #340 Babylon, NY 11702

Telephone

(631) 403-4719

Nassau County | Long Island

97 Powerhouse Road #104 Roslyn Heights 11577

Telephone

(516) 714-4707

Copyright © 2024 Suffolk DBT | All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Sitemap