Parenting a Teen Who Has Intense Emotions: DBT Skills to Help Your Teen Navigate Emotional and Behavioral Challenges

Parenting a teen with intense emotions can be extremely difficult. This much-needed book will give you the tools needed to help your teen regulate his or her emotions. In addition, you’ll learn the skills for managing your own reactions so you can survive these difficult years and help your teen thrive.

The teen years can be daunting for any parent. But if you are the parent of a teen who lashes out or engages in troubling behavior, you may be unsure of how to respond to your child in a compassionate, constructive way. In this important book, two renowned experts in teen mental health offer you evidence-based skills for dealing with your teen’s out-of-control emotions using proven-effective dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT).

Helping your teen to effectively deal with their feelings now can have a lasting, positive impact on their future. After all, honing skills for emotion regulation will act as a foundation for your teen’s overall mental health. This book will help your teen gain awareness of their emotions, and offers tools to help them choose how to respond to these emotions in effective ways.

If you’re at your wit’s end and are looking to end the drama while keeping yourself sane in the process, this book will be your guide. It is a must-read for any parent!

Pat Harvey, ACSW, LCSW-C, has over thirty years of experience working with families, and now coaches parents and family members of youth and adults with emotion dysregulation using a dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) framework. She facilitates trainings and workshops for mental health professionals on DBT concepts, skills, and parent/family interventions throughout the United States and at national conferences. She is coauthor of Parenting a Child Who Has Intense Emotions, Dialectical Behavior Therapy for At-Risk Adolescents, and Hey, I’m Here Too!

Britt H. Rathbone, MSSW, LCSW-C, provides mental health services to adolescents and their families in the Washington, DC, area. He has decades of experience working directly with adolescents and families, is consistently voted a “top therapist” for adolescents, teaches graduate students, trains therapists, and leads a highly regarded and successful clinical practice. Rathbone lectures often on the value of using dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and other evidence-based practices with young people. He is coauthor of Dialectical Behavior Therapy for At-Risk Adolescents and What Works with Teens.