Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for Male Adolescents and Their Families

Adolescent has behaviors that are defined at social problems, thought problems, attention problems, conduct problems, rule-breaking behaviors, disruptive behaviors, or aggressive behaviors at school, at home, or in the community.
Adolescent is 11 -14 years old, Grade 6th - 9th
An adult is willing to participate with the adolescent
Willing to commit to 6 weeks of group for 1 to 1-1/2 hours each week.
Willingness to complete a survey about your group experience. (You will be compensated for survey completion.)

Mindfulness Skills - Mindfulness is the capacity to pay attention, nonjudgmentally, to the present moment while accepting and tolerating intense emotions, and identity confusion by emphasizing self-awareness.

Interpersonal Effectiveness - Interpersonal Effectiveness includes effective strategies for asking for what one needs in a manner that maintains respect for self and others, saying no, and coping with interpersonal conflict.

Emotion Regulation - Clients learn to regulate their emotions by identifying and labeling emotions, identifying obstacles to change emotions, reducing vulnerabilities, increasing positive emotional events.

Distress tolerance - Module focuses on using strategies to tolerate distress, without making it worse by engaging in impulsive, self-destructive behavior. It emphasizes techniques and strategies that help individuals "radically" accept traumatic events in their lives. This includes learning crisis survival skills, to help deal with immediate emotional responses that may seem overwhelming: distracting oneself, self-soothing, improving the moment, and thinking of pros and cons.

Walking the Middle Path - Parents and teens receive help with the dilemmas of choosing between leniency and authoritarian control, normalizing behaviors vs. pathologizing behaviors, and forcing autonomy vs. fostering dependence. Teens will also learn skills of self-validation and other forms of validation and principles of basic behavior change, including extinction, punishment, and reinforcement. Parents and teens will learn together in multifamily groups how to validate and effect positive change.