Teen Extremes: Regulating Moods in the Age of Anxiety with Dr. Marsha Linehan & Dr. Laura Kastner

The teen years are tough ones, for both the teens and their parents! So many exciting things are going on in the brain as it develops during the teen and young adult years. Due to advances in medicine, particularly the availability of functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans, researchers have been learning so much in the last two decades.  The field of psychology has been studying this information and working to shape it into practical recommendations and approaches for parents, teachers, and the teens, themselves.

In the video below, we get to benefit from the knowledge from two insightful and gifted people in the field.  The first is Marsha Linehan, PhD.  She is the psychologist who developed Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and is highly regarded in the field of psychology.  DBT was developed to work with people who meet the criteria for Boarderline Personality Disorder.  (Note: If you haven’t yet read my view of the strengths and limitations of labeling a person with a diagnosis, I encourage you to check that out.)  Over time, research has shown that DBT concepts also work well with other people who generally experience intense emotions that make them feel out of control.  Not surprisingly, a lot of her ideas apply quite nicely to raising teens, particularly those teens who are having a difficult time keeping their emotions in check.  Not an unusual concept in the world of adolescence, right?

The second presenter is Laura Kastner, PhD.  This is the first I’ve come across her but I enjoyed her approach and her presentation.  She is a developmental psychologist and able to talk a lot about what the latest research is telling us regarding what the strengths and challenges of the developing teen brain are.  She goes on to give examples of how parents can most effectively intervene with their teenagers, particularly during high emotion times.

Note: I want you to be aware that Dr. Linehan’s speaks extensively about suicide.   This is because, in its original form, DBT was developed to work specifically with individuals who had frequent suicide attempts. In the clinical world, these are individuals who are often intolerant of their own intense emotions and have no coping strategies to help them through. DBT helps them through. Now that DBT is an established form of therapy, research is starting to show that the techniques are just as powerful a way of helping people who struggle with intense emotions for a variety of other reasons not the least of which being the turmoil of adolescence. Just because you or someone you love struggles with “regulating” their intense emotion does not mean that they are suicidal or risk of committing suicide but because Dr. Linehan set out to make her life’s work out of working with people who experience the incredibly deep emotional pain, it is through that framework that she describes some of the many techniques that are a part of DBT therapy.

This talk explains some of the concepts you will find in a book that I recommend and  wrote a review on, Parenting a Child Who Has Intense Emotions: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Help Your Child Regulate Emotional Outbursts and Aggressive Behaviors by Pat Harvey, ACSW, LCSW-C.  The talk does get fairly technical at times because both of these women are not only therapists, but research scientists too.  Try to not sweat over some of the more complex terms they use and just focus on the stuff the more concrete examples they give.  This is a talk that was given to an audience of parents and professionals.

This is the first time that I have come across Dr. Kastner and I enjoyed her perspective so much that I’ve added her (and a co-author, Dr. Jennifer Wyatt’s) book, Getting to Calm: Cool-Headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens + Teens, to my (increasingly long) reading list. I am grateful to both of the speakers for allowing this talk to be available for free to the general public.