What it is:
Emotional resiliency is a skillset that allows us to navigate both new and ongoing stressful situations in ways that both match our values and do not result in significant emotional exhaustion, numbing, or burn-out. It involves understanding our emotional experience, learning to soothe and heal our emotional pain, and developing healthy protective mechanisms to reduce the impact of ongoing stressors on our mental health. We like to say emotional resiliency is our ability to run emotional marathons in healthy ways.
While some teens find these skillsets quite intuitive and natural, many do not. For this reason, many adolescents may need help learning how to navigate ongoing stressors without either avoiding or collapsing under stressors.
Skills teens learn in an Emotional Resiliency (ER) Program:
- All about their emotions! Your teen will learn how to recognize, understand, and communicate their emotions effectively.
- How to restore their emotional bandwidth. When navigating ongoing stressors in life, it is important to learn those individualized habits or activities that help restore your teen. We encourage a decrease of short-term strategies (technology, avoidance) and an increase in long-term restoration (soothing your nervous system, building connection, finding joy, and taking time to be still).
- How to change unhelpful habits and patterns. We come by our patterns and habits honestly. They probably worked for your teen at some point in their lives! However, decreased resiliency in your teen is often a sign that what worked for them before is no longer working for them now. We can help your teen identify unhelpful or old patterns and begin to build new, more effective, and sustainable habits.
How to set and hold boundaries with others. So much of resiliency involves your teen knowing their own brains, bodies, and personal limits and then communicating this to others. This is easier said than done for those teens who hate to disappoint others, were trained to take on more than their share, or who get reinforced for having no boundaries. The resiliency program for teens helps find a balance between honoring their own values and limits (by setting limits or boundaries) while keeping close connections with others.
Therapeutic components:
Structure: Emotional Resiliency (ER) treatment with teens is a semi-structured and skills-oriented type of talk therapy. Your teen’s resiliency is an individualized skillset, so this means that we need to spend time understanding who your teen is, what matters to them, and what led them to this point. We also believe that it is important not only to talk about what got your teen here, but give your teen concrete skills to do something different. For that reason, the emotional resiliency treatment with teens has a skills focus and asks your teen to practice new ways to approach emotions, communicate with others, or create new habits.
Theory: Emotional Resiliency treatment with teens is anchored in a blend of the so-called “third wave” cognitive-behavioral therapies, which include CBT, DBT, ACT, and mindfulness interventions. The theory is anchored in the idea that your teen will not engage with their emotions effectively if they do not recognize them or have skills to address them.
Intervention: Emotional Resiliency interventions with teens involve teaching skills to help your teen better identify and communicate their emotions, as well as learn to both accept and change them, depending on their goals or values. It involves significant skills practice, both during and between sessions.
Modalities: The TAP clinic currently offers individual Emotional Resiliency with teens.
How are parents included in treatment?
We know from research and experience that treatment with teens is most effective when parents understand changes that their teens are making and help support them at home! We also know that many teens benefit from having a private space to process their emotions and take ownership over their resiliency building process. This balance between support and autonomy is particularly important during adolescence, and we seek to find the right balance for each teen.
When appropriate, parental involvement in individual ER therapy may look like periodic check-ins at the start or end of session and/or brief overviews of skills learned during the session.
Specialty Services at TAP: