Your teen comes home from school and emotions are high.
Your teen is teetering on bursting into tears as they tell you bits and pieces of their day and then runs up the stairs.
They hide in their room for the rest of the night.
Is this a crisis or an everyday situation?
In week 4 of Teen DBT Skills group, we orient teens to a new module: distress tolerance skills.
Group members learn the difference between crisis situations and everyday life stressors.
Teens typically define the term crisis as experiencing high intense emotions during an extremely difficult time.
In group, we help them identify everyday life stressors such as forgetting homework at home and understand the distinction between stressful situations and crises.
We help teens learn ways to skillfully cope when they experience inevitable pain.
The two main skills in distress tolerance are crisis survival skills and reality acceptance skills.
Crisis survival skills are all about using skills to get through the moment without making things worse. It's about getting through the situation by using distraction techniques. These skills will look different for every teen.
They could include:
Going for a walk
Journaling
Listening to music
Sitting in a quiet space
These are just examples to name a few. The purpose is to distract your teen so the situation does not escalate or become more intense for them.
Practicing distraction skills can also help teens avoid making impulsive decisions which they often regret later.
The second part of distress tolerance is: reality acceptance skills. These skills help accept the things we cannot change. When we accept painful situations, we can minimize suffering and better solve problems.
Our teens may experience this often. A loss of a relative, a change in schools, attempting to find a new friend group, etc. These difficult situations are painful and more long-term challenges that are often out of their control.
Reality can be hard for our teens to grasp. But with your support, and the commitment to DBT skills, our teens can slowly learn to practice acceptance through their mind and body.