The Adolescent and Family Program is a six-month program for adolescents and their families. Parents/caregivers and their adolescents will learn powerful and evidence-based DBT skills in a dynamic and interactive educational setting. Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, Distress Tolerance, and the fifth module of Walking the Middle Path, are incorporated in this curriculum covering issues such as how to manage crisis within the family, and communicate effectively, learn ways to tolerate life’s stressors, problem solve difficult emotions and behaviors, and understand more about normal adolescent behaviors versus problematic behaviors.
Skills taught are:
Core Mindfulness: This is the foundation that all the other skills are built upon.
Emotion Regulation: Learn how to understand your emotions, and how to use them skillfully and effectively.
Walking the Middle Path: Learn how to create new behaviors in yourself and others.
Interpersonal Effectiveness: Learn how to communicate with each other in a way that is effective and validating.
Distress Tolerance: Learn effective ways to distract and soothe yourself while considering pros and cons of your actions.
Participation in the Adolescent and Family Program:
The program includes 1x weekly adherent DBT individual therapy session for adolescent and 1x weekly family skills training session with adolescent and their caregiver(s).
- Increases teens and family’s capabilities by teaching specific skills for self-regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance, and balanced thinking and acting
- Structures the environment to motivate, reinforce, and individualize appropriate use of the skills
- Improves the teens and family’s motivation to increase the use of new skills, reduce prior dysfunctional behaviors, and identify factors that led to the problematic behaviors
- Educates on the biosocial theory which helps to explain the vulnerabilities of the teen to the problematic behaviors
The Adolescent and Family Program is based on the curriculum of Alec Miller and Jill Rathus, and combines Dr. Marsha Linehan’s Skills Training Manual with an additional module, Walking the Middle Path which focuses on parent/adolescent dilemmas.
An initial 90-minute family assessment is required.
Program is 24-weeks / 6-months based on DBT adherent research. Research suggests lasting results are achieved from 6-months to 1-year of adherent DBT treatment in order to fully learn, implement and generalize skills learned within the DBT model.
