Maybe You Know My Teen by Mary Fowler

Author:Mary Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767909440
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2001-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

Assessment. Identify the triggers.

Education. Teach about the nature of angry feelings and how aggressive behavior creates trouble.

Skills acquisition phase. Teach skills such as problem solving, assertiveness training, relaxation training, verbal self-talk, and humor.

Application training. Give the teen increasingly more problematic situations to practice the techniques.

These techniques “help the teen look at the situations with different-colored glasses,” Dr. Nelson explains.

Parents may also need to wear different-colored glasses. Very often they come to view the teen as always angry. Adding some perspective, Dr. Nelson points out, “Even the most aggressive teens I see are not angry twenty-four hours a day.” Anger expressed aggressively creates such an intense impression that, understandably, parents see the teen as always angry. As with teen training, Dr. Nelson coaches parents to clear up any misperceptions by identifying the three or four times a day when things fly off the handle. Anger-producing situations, or triggers, need to be identified, too, and then steps to eliminate them must follow. A lot of ADHD management requires running some type of pass interference.

Initially when intervention begins, most teens do not see themselves as the problem. They think it’s the other guy’s fault. The teen may be partially or totally correct. Nonetheless, the teen has to get the point that he or she needs to learn how to react in a socially appropriate way, as do all family members.

It must be said that effective anger management for people with ADHD can be hard to accomplish. Characteristically, the teens may learn the skill and use it perfectly under training conditions. Once outside the practitioner’s office, however, they may forget to use the new skill because they function on automatic pilot. Researchers find that practice in the natural setting helps. Thus, parents usually need to be trained in anger-management approaches, too. Doing that goes beyond the scope of this book. My purpose here is more like quality control. It explains what a good anger-management approach for your teen would look like. From here a therapist can guide you in this approach.

INFORMATION LINK

The American Psychological Association (APA) and MTV have created a Web site for teens who are dealing with anger, either in themselves or in others. It has some excellent information, including warning signs, and some anger-management techniques.www.helping.apa.org/warningsigns/about.htm

As cited earlier, Lynn Clark’s book SOS Help for Emotions, Parents Press, Bowling Green, KY, is another source.

Parent Anger

While teens with little self-control may pop off, parents and other adults often create a climate that aids and abets these teens to lose their cool. Flappable teens need unflappable parents, teachers, and coaches. It behooves all of us to understand anger, our relationship to it, how we use it, what it does, and how to dump it appropriately.

We may escalate anger in a million little ways. In fact, researcher Gerald Patterson has identified what he calls an “aversive chain.” Basically, aversive chains occur when two people attempt to influence each other through a rapid exchange of punishing communication. Some of the communications may be verbal or nonverbal (words, sentences, tone of voice, hand gestures, facial expressions, body movements).

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