Teens may sometimes act like adults, but in many ways, they’re still children, actively growing and learning. The teen years combine increasing independence with brand new life challenges, all while teens are coping with massive physical and mental changes. In a time of so many changes, learning life skills, like those covered in DBT therapy for teens, can be crucial for helping your teen grow into the person they want to be.
Parental guidance is helpful in the teen years, but it’s also normal for teens to pull away from parents, so making sure teens have a broader social network to learn from and find support in is crucial. Friends, family, neighbors, community members, and even Suffolk DBT’s therapists in Nassau County can help your teen meet the challenges of adolescence.
Therapy can be an integral part of a teen’s support network
Your teen will probably choose their own friends, and you and your teen can work together to involve them in the community to add to their support network. But that leaves you with the questions, which therapist should you choose, and what kind of therapy will help your teen the most? We know from experience that searching online for “teen therapy in Nassau County” can lead to an overwhelming number of options, and it can be hard to know what will help the most.
To support you in your search, we’ve put together this guide on what teens need from therapy, and how dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) for teens provides a unique combination of support, skills, and structure that can help teens thrive no matter what they’re going through.
Teen therapy needs to focus on managing overwhelming emotions and experiences
All of the inner and outer changes teens face often lead to mood swings, dysregulation, and longer-lasting reactions to life situations. Teens may struggle to constructively respond to emotional overwhelm, leading to meltdowns, rudeness, abandoning responsibilities, eating disorders, withdrawal from others, suicidal thoughts, and self-destructive behaviors.
Without a safe space to learn how to cope, these unhealthy and unhelpful responses to life’s challenges can become long-term behavior patterns. Chronic emotional dysregulation disrupts your teen’s life, making it hard for them to build a solid foundation for a “life worth living”.
DBT for teens offers adolescents practical, helpful skills to cope with emotional dysregulation
Teen therapy has to provide sensible, actionable ways for your teen to recognize when they’re emotionally dysregulated, and to respond to that dysregulation in ways that help them re-regulate. Our DBT-A program for teens in Nassau County provides practical life skills in four broad categories that cover a huge variety of life challenges like emotional triggers, grief, mental illness or mood disorders, chronic stress, friendship or relationship breakups, peer pressure, bullying, and more.
Mindfulness DBT skills help your teen direct their attention to the present moment, away from worries, negative self-beliefs, and rumination. It helps teens look at their thoughts and emotions without judgment, reducing shame and reactivity.
Emotional regulation in DBT teaches teens how to recognize and name their emotions, how to validate and constructively express their emotions, and how to reduce vulnerability to emotional overwhelm.
Distress tolerance helps your teen make it through emotional challenges without becoming totally overwhelmed by emotional pain. These tools can help your teen through an emotional crisis, helping them cope effectively until the extreme distress passes.
Interpersonal effectiveness DBT skills help teens to learn how to communicate with respect, while maintaining their self-respect. Strong boundaries, effective conflict resolution, and expression of opinions and needs in a balanced, dialectical way help teens preserve existing relationships and build strong, healthy connections in the future.
Teens need to Build confidence
Teens are still learning about who they are, and their self-concept can quickly become highly critical. Teens are bombarded with messaging about inferiority, needing to fit in, needing to perform, needing to look a certain way, etc. They’re also still learning, so they don’t have full mastery of many life skills yet, and in a world of shiny, happy social media fakery, teens can quickly feel worthless because they’re simply in progress.
Teens need therapy that can build self-confidence, help them define their values, and build a strong concept of self that they can lean on when emotional overwhelm tries to amplify their negative self-beliefs.
DBT skills build up teens’ confidence through self-actualization and self-respect
DBT skills for teens focus on action and introspection, without judgment. Reducing shame and self-criticism through mindfulness and distress tolerance helps your teen gain a greater perspective on their worth, and on what is and is not okay to experience. These skills also give teens space to figure out what their values, goals, and needs are, so they can better understand themselves and make choices that align with what they want out of life. DBT validates your teen’s values and needs, supporting them in learning skills that help teens assert and express themselves.
DBT skills are also their own form of mastery. It can be exciting for a teen to learn a helpful new skill that gives them a chance to reduce emotional suffering, and your teen’s therapist will cheer them on as they acquire and use these skills, giving them positive feedback that can reinforce a positive self-image. Your teen will also be responsible for their own progress in therapy; this responsibility proves to your teen that they can do hard things. And when they try a skill and don’t quite get it right, their therapist and group members are there for them, sharing how to try again, and empathizing authentically, since they’ve been there themselves!
Multiple forms of support make DBT-A uniquely helpful for teens
Teens are often impulsive and driven by emotional responses because the parts of their brain that regulate emotions and impulses are still developing. Therapy that provides a consistent, reliable external structure that meets their needs in multiple ways can help teens cope with impulsivity and emotional overwhelm, helping them find stability while they mature. DBT not only focuses on skills in multiple categories, but it also provides multiple modes of support for teens.
Individual therapy provides a confidential space for introspection and validation of life experiences, emotional investigation, and better self-understanding, and learning about how to use DBT skills when emotional dysregulation disrupts their lives.
DBT skills group therapy gives your teen a sense of community and connection with peers who are going through the same challenges they are, giving them space to practice the life skills they learn in DBT so they’re more comfortable using them in everyday life.
On-call therapist support gives your teen help in the moment, with brief phone coaching sessions available between regular therapy sessions to help your teen through a crisis. Their therapist may remind them of DBT skills that can help in the moment, while also giving your teen a moment of coregulation to help them through a tough emotional trigger.
Keeping parents involved is Key To a Teen’s Success
While the confidentiality of individual therapy is crucial to helping teens open up to their therapist, teens also need therapy that includes active parental involvement. Parent involvement in therapy has been shown again and again to improve outcomes for teens. Teens are less likely to drop out of a therapy program if their parents are involved, and parents who learn therapy skills and use them at home mean treatment doesn’t stop after leaving the therapist’s office.
Teens in therapy also shine a spotlight on difficult family dynamics, and parents who prioritize their teen’s wellbeing will usually acknowledge and work to change those dynamics. When teens and parents work together in DBT-A, it tends to lead to better communication and relational improvements.
DBT-A involves parents directly in their teen’s therapy process from the start. Parents attend group DBT therapy sessions with their teens, where everyone can learn DBT skills, practicing them as a family as well as practicing with other parents and teens in the group. This learning-focused style of group therapy empowers teens to engage directly with their parents, and equips parents with practical tools to help their teen (and themselves!) through disruptive life events and difficult moments of emotional overwhelm.
DBT-A therapy for teens in Nassau County provides the consistent, empowering support teens need to thrive
Teens are still learning how to handle their emotions and work through life’s challenges, at a time in their lives where they’re often faced with more new, and sometimes difficult, experiences than ever before. DBT therapy for teens in Nassau County guides teens in expanding their skills and increasing their self-confidence, giving them a solid foundation that will serve them throughout their lives.
Suffolk DBT’s experienced, empathetic therapists provide quality dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents at offices in Manhattan and Long Island, New York, and online. Through the thoughtful structure, supportive connections, and life-changing skills learned in DBT therapy in Nassau County, teens and college students struggling with anxiety, depression, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, and self-harm can find relief.
Suffolk DBT welcomes you to schedule a free screening call today, so you can get started right away on building a life worth living!