How DBT Helps Teens Struggling with Self Harm

Discovering your teen is engaging in self-harm can be a terrifying experience. It can often leave parents feeling helpless, and unsure how to address such a sensitive and serious topic. It can be overwhelming to try and approach the issue, or to know where to start, and a lot of this overwhelm comes from not understanding the purpose behind the behavior. Often the concern is that self-harm automatically indicates suicidal tendencies or ideations, but this is not the case. 

Self harm, like many maladaptive behaviors, is a coping mechanism gone awry. When faced with difficult situations, our brains naturally try to find ways to adapt and seek relief from whatever discomfort or pain it’s experiencing. These behaviors are sometimes intrinsically healthy: running, journaling, meditation. However, this is not always the case. For teens, the parts of their brains that could help them access healthy tools and coping mechanisms is not fully developed, and this makes it them more likely to build up stronger and stronger emotions, and feel more and more need for relief, until they take an action meant to be a coping mechanism, a relief– like self harm. What starts as a means to feeling better becomes a part of the problem. 

DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, helps teens who are struggling with self harm by teaching the skills and tools that they need to transition into using healthy coping mechanisms. By teaching these skills, as well as providing psychoeducation to address the shame and frustration around self-harm, clinicians can use DBT to help their clients replace their unhealthy coping mechanisms with healthy skills that allow for the adaptation to the situation that teens need.

If you’re worried that your teen may be self harming, or you would like to help your teen develop healthy alternatives to self-harm, you can contact Mindful Healing for more information about how our DBT program helps teens.