Have you ever walked away from a fight with your teen feeling like you lost- lost not only the fight, but also most if not all of your dignity and self-respect?
Did you ever walk away from a fight with a teen feeling defeated?
What if you could walk away from a conflict with your teen feeling like you remained in control of your emotions and reactions AND competently communicated your point?
How to maintain your cool with your teen . . .
1. Opposite-to-Emotion Action
I’ve found that Linehan’s opposite-to-emotion action is a helpful mindfulness skill to employ during a conflict. Do the opposite of what your anger or frustration is telling you to do. If you feel like yelling, whisper. If whispering feels unnatural, talk with a calm and soothing voice. If you feel like slamming a door, close it gently. If you want to seek revenge and up the ante by increasing the severity of your punishment, do something nice for your teen (not rewarding), but nice.
Believe it or not, this works! Opposite-to-emotion action often results in reducing our negative emotions. Our minds have to resolve the cognitive dissonance between the negative emotion we’re feeling and our actions, which are communicating to our brain that we’re actually feeling calm, not frustrated, and the result is less frustration!
2. Be Mindful
Linehan’s interpersonal effectiveness mindfulness skills, ignore personal attacks and be a broken record, are also helpful when you find yourself in a conflict with a teen.
Ignore personal attacks - During a conflict, our teens will often throw out a personal attack. For example, when reminding your teen that picking up after herself is a house rule, she might remind you of a time when you didn’t pick up after yourself. Ignore this personal attack, as it’s intent is to deflect and side-track the conversation.
Be a broken record - If your teen is attempting to derail the conversation, simply repeat your instruction or request, rather than trying to convince them of the rationale for your request or defend yourself.
3. Validate the Valid
Another interpersonal effectiveness skill is validation. Validation often results in reducing negative emotion. There is always something we can validate. During the conflict, search for the nugget that you can validate and watch the frustration fade.
4. R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Do you remember that song by Aretha Franklin? I know I’m aging myself when I say that I have very fond memories of my sister and I singing the lyrics of the song in the back of our family car on long rides (my mom likely doesn’t have such fond memories of those days-ha!):
What you want
Baby, I got it
What you need
Do you know I got it?
All I’m askin’
Is for a little respect . . .
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Most everyone, our teens included, just want a little bit of respect! If we want our teens to communicate to us with respect, we need to speak to them with respect. What does this look like? Communicating to the other person with respect means that you refrain from cursing, belittling, threatening them, or shouting and yelling at them.
Easier said than done, you say? True! Many times, the longer we engage in the conflict with our teen, our frustration and anger increases, and our emotions get the better of us and we say and do things we later regret. So . . . .
5. Walk AWAY!
If you notice that your teen is not listening to your side of the argument and that your frustration is increasing, walk away. Quickly communicate your point (as concisely as possible) and walk away! Emotions rise and fall, ebb and flow. If you walk away, you give yourself AND your teen an opportunity to self-soothe and calm down.
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte-Taylor reports that the “physiological lifespan of an emotion in the body and brain is 90 seconds.” As long as we don’t fuel our negative emotions, our frustration and anger will subside.
You can revisit the conversation when both you and your teen are calmer and can speak rationally and civilly.
Someone once said that for every minute you argue with a teen or a child, your chronological age lowers, sometimes so much so that you can find yourself sounding awfully similar to your teen.
PARENTING IS HARD!
Feeling defensive and occasionally getting sucked into a downward spiral is normal when your teen speaks to you disrespectfully, challenges your authority, or willfully defies your rules. It’s important to recognize that you’re not a BAD parent just because you’ve regretted things you’ve said or done in the past. Rather, you’re an imperfect parent, just like the rest of us. Join the club. Parenting a teen can be hard.
Bad Habits can be changed . . .
Frequent shouting matches, power struggles, and threats and ultimatums are bad habits. The good new is that bad habits can be changed. Research indicates that we’re more likely to change a habit if we have an accountability partner. If you’re finding it difficult to make long-lasting changes in problematic parenting behaviors, reach out to a friend, family member, mentor, or therapist to hold you accountable.