Episode 10: Helping our Teens Manage BIG Feelings

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 Parents, today we're going to talk all about big emotions, big feelings, and how to help our teenagers learn how to manage those feelings and express those feelings in a way that is acceptable and not destructive. Because one thing that's true is that all emotions are valid and fine, not all behaviors are acceptable and valid and fine.

So we need to help our teenagers understand the difference. Let's talk big picture for a second. One thing that we know for sure about teenagers is that they experience big feelings, big emotions about everything. And we know this not just from our own experience with them, but from actual research about adolescent development in the brain.

We know that teens experience their emotions with more intensity than adults do. They really do feel higher highs and lower lows. The things that they feel come with more intensity. And we know that to be true from research. We also know that they often experience these big feelings all of the sudden. They come on like a wave crashing over them, and it can be very overwhelming and unsettling. And so they often take action to try to make that discomfort go away. They don't like how overwhelming the emotion feels, and so they do something drastic to make it stop.

The question for today's episode is, knowing all of this, how do we help our teenagers learn how to manage those big feelings?

We know that we want to let them express themselves. We know that we don't want to stifle their feelings. But how do we teach them to actually manage those big feelings? And how do we teach them that their big feelings are not an excuse for big, explosive behavior? Because I think sometimes that gets lost in this desire to let them express themselves.

Sometimes we forget that we do need to rein in and remind them that not all behavior is okay, even though all feelings are valid. So let's start with the first part of this. How do we help our teenagers manage their big feelings? So I want to walk through this with a scenario in mind because I always think that examples make things more relevant and helpful.

So let's imagine a scenario where your teenager comes home from maybe a sports practice where they found out that they're not going to be starting in the game this weekend. It's some kind of really disappointing news. Or it could be, they got cut from a team. It could be they tried out for the musical and didn't get the part they wanted or didn't get a part at all. But let's imagine a scenario where they are coming home angry and triggered and amped up because of some really frustrating, disappointing news that they received. So your child walks in the door, yelling, maybe crying, very angry, very upset, maybe cussing, talking trash about the coach, talking trash about teammates, throwing their bag down, maybe even yelling at a younger sibling, yelling at you, slamming doors, etc. Just a lot of intense anger. And a lot of yelling and heightened anger. They are really disappointed and angry about something, and they're just having the teenage version of a toddler meltdown.

Whenever I see this scenario play out, there are really three different ways that I've seen it go, with, depending on the personality and the skill set of the parents involved.

Scenario number one is the easily triggered, aggressive parent. And so this parent gets so triggered by the emotions and the anger that the teenager is displaying that they themselves become triggered and escalated and angry. This parent starts yelling back. And starts reacting to the behaviors that they're seeing. “You can't yell at your brother like that. How dare you talk to me that way. Stop slamming doors. You're overreacting!” What they've done now is they have risen to the intensity of emotion that the teenager is experiencing and now both of you are up here and elevated and very angry and yelling at each other. And often you start yelling about the moment instead of about the thing that happened. Although some parents might say things like, “you're overreacting. Your coach was right. You didn't deserve that spot.” It just becomes very ugly and antagonistic with a lot of escalation that was unnecessary and a lot of yelling.

And if you think about that, we know how that ends, right? One or the other person storms off. There's usually some silent treatment for a little while. But the main thing that happens is that teenager learns this lesson: I can't express my anger around my mom, or my dad, because they don't understand me and they can't handle it. What they internalize is this message: “There's something bad about how I did that. There's something wrong with me.” And so in the future they're either going to try to stifle their emotions or they're just not going to show it to you because they believe that you can't handle it and you're not going to respond correctly. And that's definitely not what we want them to learn. They also haven't learned anything about how to manage that big emotion and all that anger.

Scenario two is the opposite. Scenario two is where we have the much more passive, conflict avoidant parent who becomes so uncomfortable with the intensity of the anger that they go the other route. And they try to either deflect, or distract, or soothe without really addressing the problem. So these are the parents who are like “Let's get you a snack, right? Let's go have a treat. Let's pretend this isn't even happening. Let's, let me give you a hug, right? Just take a deep breath. It's all gonna be okay.” And it's a very appeasing and placating kind of stance that really comes from just this discomfort with the conflict. And also we don't like to see our kids upset. And so it comes from a discomfort with watching that and we just want them to calm down. And the problem with this is that this can look like a solution because sometimes the child will calm down, but they haven't really learned how to manage the emotion themselves. Instead, they've learned that they need to just distract themselves from it, and they need to go to something soothing. They need to have a snack or get a hug. Not that's a terrible thing, but they aren't learning how to manage it. They're just learning how to deflect and distract from it.

Then what is option three, right? If those are the two extremes — one is an equal explosion of anger, one is way too passive and appeasing, then option three is going to be a process that involves letting your teenager feel their feelings, giving them the space to move through those feelings and let them subside, and then processing it together.

And obviously it's a slower process. It's something that takes practice and a lot more time, but it's a lot more valuable. And so it would go something like this. The teenager comes in yelling, cussing, same scenario. Yells at their brother, yells at you, talks trash about the team, talks trash about the coach, they're very upset, they're yelling. So it's the same scenario. But as a parent, instead of underreacting or overreacting, you're just gonna meet that with some empathy and some validation by saying things like, “Wow, I can see you're really upset. I understand why this bothered you so much.” Just some empathy statements that show “I get it.” “Yeah, you're really mad. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's so disappointing.” And then we're going to offer “what do you want to do right now?” And After some practice your teenager will have some ideas in mind for how to get rid of this awful feeling, which is basically a stress response that they're experiencing. How do I get rid of this angry energy?

But until they learn how to do that on their own, you might want to offer some options. Now, we're not talking about solving the issue. This is not the time to talk call the coach, or try to fix it or come up with solutions. I'm talking about options for moving through this moment and letting the feeling wash over you and letting it pass.

There are two different options that I often encourage my teen clients to explore. One is to release that energy. Do you want to go for a walk around the park? Do you want to shoot some hoops? Something to get the energy out. And the other is to just be alone and to go to their room and maybe cry and just maybe be mad or listen to some music and eventually calm down.

So what we're going to do as a parent is just hold space. We want to give them the space to feel the feelings. And let the feelings wash over them and subside because here's the thing about big feelings —- it's like standing in the ocean at the beach and a wave crashes over you. That's how emotions arrive — it's just a big wave that crashes but eventually it pulls back and subsides. All emotions do that to varying degrees and it takes different lengths of time, but emotions come and go that way. And we need our teenagers to have experience with what that feels like. Without distracting, without trying to force it to go away, we need to let them just feel it. And so then they learn that feelings really do go away. They really do subside on their own. We just need to provide the space to let that happen. Most often, kids are just going to want to go to their room and listen to some music, or be alone, or chat with their friends for a minute, just to let the moment pass.

When I talk to parents about trying this, what I notice is that parents really struggle with this part of just giving them the space to work through it because it feels like you're so helpless. It feels like you're not doing anything to make it better. But here's the thing —here's the reality that parents need to hear — You can't make the feeling go away. That feeling has arrived, it has crashed over your child, and you can't do anything to stop it. All you can do is provide the environment to let your teenager move through it and let it pass. And that can be really hard because it just makes us feel helpless. We want to do something. But the most important thing you can do is allow your teenager to learn the lesson that 1)he or she can handle it, and 2)this feeling is temporary. It will pass. Teenagers don't fully grasp that because they live so much in the here and now moment. They don't understand that it's temporary. So the best gift we can give them is the space to just let the feeling wash over them. And then it will go away and then they realize, oh, feelings don't last forever.

The other reason that parents struggle with this appraoch is because it's messy. It might mean that you're letting your teenager have a full on meltdown. They might scream and cry. They might, punch their pillow. They might turn on some really loud music and just scream at the top of their lungs, and it can be really uncomfortable to watch. Especially if you're someone who is very conflict avoidant and those big expressions of any kind of anger or intense emotion just really make you uncomfortable. It's hard to watch and it's messy, and we don't like to watch our kids struggle. But the thing we have to realize is as long as they're safe that's what they need to do to move through it, to get that energy out of their body, to let that emotion pass. And they might need to cry, and they might need to yell not yell at someone —not yell in a hurtful way towards someone (we'll talk about that in a second) — but they might just need to yell or scream out some music or whatever they need to do to move through this moment.

Okay, so let's assume that we've gotten more comfortable with that, and we've let our child move through this moment, and they have finally calmed down on their own. So after the wave has crashed, so to speak, after the intense part of the emotion has passed, then you can approach your teenager to talk about what happened.

And to be honest, that might take 10 minutes, it might take a couple hours, or you might have to wait until the next day before the intensity of the motion has truly passed. But once it has passed, now you can go in and process what happened and work on some problem solving.

So here are the steps that you want to follow once you're in that phase of this process.

1) You want to let your teenager calmly now tell you what happened. Give you the whole story, how they found out, what the coach said to them, etc. The whole story, but now it's much more neutral. It's not flavored with all of this anger and emotion. And then you want to help your teenager label what they were feeling. Because so often, if you ask a teenager how they're feeling, all they can tell you is, “I'm sad, I'm angry, I'm happy. Maybe I'm scared.” But those are really the only emotions they can tap into. So we want to teach them things like “if that happened to me, I think I'd be feeling pretty disappointed. It sounds like maybe you were feeling jealous of the teammates who did get to play. You might have been feeling embarrassed that this happened.” Those are all legitimate feelings. But we want to help our teenager give more nuance to what they were feeling so that the next time something happens, they're able to put a more nuanced label to it.

Anger is not always anger. Anger is often embarrassment or feeling betrayed, feeling disappointed, feeling jealous, envious —all of that is behind anger and we want to help them label it. And then we want to remind our teenagers that having those feelings is totally okay. Your feelings are always valid. Feelings are feelings. You can't control how you feel. Those feelings wash over you and it's an experience that you have to work through and feelings are okay and they're valid. And I understand why you felt that way. It makes sense that you would have that reaction to that situation.

And then this next step is critical.

The feelings are valid, but some of the ways that you behaved are not okay. Talking to your brother that way was not okay. Talking to me that way, and some of the things you said, and some of the language you used, not okay. Slamming doors, not okay. So whatever the behavior was that came out of that moment, you address it. But do you notice how we're not doing it in the moment that it's happening because they're too escalated, and that's just going to create more conflict. We're doing it later, and we're saying that was not okay. And that some kind of repair needs to be made. So you're going to need to apologize to your brother. I would appreciate it if you would apologize to me. If they, slammed a door and a picture fell and it broke, you're going to need to pay to get that fixed, etc. So there's some accountability on their part. And this is really the secret sauce here. This idea that your feelings are valid. You're allowed to feel that. But you're not allowed to be hurtful to people or to damage property just because you're feeling that way. And so you're going to offer some solutions for how to repair that.

And then finally, you're going to move into “what do you want to do about this?” And very often, I would say eight times out of ten, nine times out of ten, they don't want to do anything about it because there's really nothing to be done. Now sometimes they do want to do something — they want to talk to the coach, they want to talk to the teacher, they want to talk to their friend who they had a fight with. That's fine. You want to offer “What do you need from me in this situation?” But I will tell you over and over again I've seen situations with my own kids and with parents that I work with where once they've gone through this whole process of feeling the feelings, letting that wash over you, repair any damage that was done — then they don't need to do anything about it. Often they’ll say “it was just a moment and it was disappointing and now I'm good”. And once you've done that a few times, now they're learning for themselves how to move through a big emotion.

So when I work with parents who try this strategy here are some of the reasons I see them struggle with it.

Some parents struggle because it's not quick. This doesn't resolve everything quickly and efficiently. Like I said before, it's messy. And some parents feel like they're letting their child get away with something. So if you're allowing that kind of big explosion to happen, it feels like you're not parenting well. It feels like you're not intervening. Especially if it's happening in public. If this happened at the game, where maybe they got benched in the middle of a game, and they have this kind of reaction, it feels so embarrassing for other people to witness this. And and you feel like you're being judged, and you feel like you're letting them behave badly.

But I just want to remind you, what is the goal? You want to teach your child how to manage those big feelings. The goal is not to make it stop or go away, the goal is to learn how to work through it. And, so we have to keep that in mind, right? We want them to be able to feel it, to label it, to move through it, and then take action on it.

And, I also want to ask you, what are the other options? Yelling at him, getting mad at him, es escalating this, does that work? Ignoring, distracting, appeasing, offering, here, have some ice cream instead of being mad, does that work? No, those things don't work. We get lulled into thinking that they're working because it makes the explosion stop, but it doesn't actually teach our teenagers any skills, which is the goal that we have at the end of the day.

So I just want to remind you that sometimes these strategies are difficult because they are multi layered and multi steps and they take practice and they don't just work the first time. I want to remind you that demanding obedience is easy. Teaching our kids the skills that they really need is much, much harder. It takes time and patience and repetition. You'll probably repeat this scenario that we just talked about five or six times. before your teenager really starts to learn how to manage it better on their own. But parenting is a long game, right? I don't know about you, but I want my daughters, as adults, to be able to manage their feelings and regulate their reactions for many years to come.

I don't want to focus on the one moment that feels difficult and maybe a little embarrassing. I want to focus on what skills they need in the long run. And when we can accomplish that and give them these skills and let them practice them in real time, oh my gosh, what a gift! So give it a try. And as always, I would love to hear how it goes and what you think.