Parenting a Teen Through Depression and Self-Harm with guest Katie May

About this Episode

About Katie May

Katie May is a licensed professional counselor and the owner and executive director of Creative Healing. She’s a national speaker and trainer specializing in therapy for teens with depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. As one of only 11 Linehan board-certified Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) clinicians in Pennsylvania, she’s an expert in this gold-standard treatment for life-threatening behaviors. Katie is committed to helping teens feel accepted for who they are while teaching them skills to build a life they love. She’s the author of the book, “You’re On Fire, It’s Fine: Effective Strategies for Parenting Teens with Self-Destructive Behaviors,” which came out in May 2024.

Connect with Katie

Website: www.YoureOnFireItsFine.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/creativehealingphilly
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creative_healing/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiekmay/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiekmay/
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@teensupportcenter

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Read the transcript for this episode:

DR. AMY:   Hi, smart moms and dads. Welcome to another episode of the Brainy Moms podcast brought to you today by LearningRx Brain Training Centers. I’m your host, Dr. Amy Moore, joined by my co-host, Sandy Zamalis, and Sandy and I are excited to have a conversation with our guest today, Katie May. Katie is a licensed teen therapist and best-selling author of “You’re On Fire, It’s Fine; Effective Strategies for Parenting Teens With Self-destructive Behaviors.” She’s the owner and executive director of Creative Healing and is a national speaker and trainer specializing in therapy for teens with depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. She’s an expert in dialectical behavior therapy, the gold standard treatment for life threatening behaviors. Katie is committed to helping teens feel accepted for who they are while teaching them skills to build a life they love. Welcome Katie.

KATIE: Thank you. 

SANDY: We’d love to have you start by asking you how you became passionate about working with teens, especially teens with self-destructive behavior. So what’s the story of behind your story? 

KATIE: Yeah, so I myself was what I would call a “troubled teen.” I struggled in my teen years with depression, with self-harm. And I used my strengths, my resilience, my coping strategies to make it through a very challenging time with very few natural supports. And what I realized later in life when I decided to go back to school to be a therapist is that I was doing a lot of things that I wanted to help other people be doing.

And I wanted to help teens and families shorten the struggle that I had been through so that they didn’t have to endure all the things that I did. 

DR. AMY: So what is happening with teens? Right? Like we frequently see these big behaviors and there are big emotions driving these big behaviors. What is going on?

 Why can’t teens get control of their emotions?

KATIE: I think that teens getting control of emotions … maybe I want to tweak that a little bit to say teens being able to feel their emotions. Because we don’t necessarily want to over control them, at least in my opinion. And so to the question, “Why can’t they better regulate them?” There’s a few things that come to mind for me. One is that teens have a not fully formed frontal lobe. So their brain is still developing. They’re hormonal, like all of these biological things that are happening. And then some of our teens, and this is what I talk about in my book, are fire feelers, or biologically sensitive beings who tend to feel things bigger, more deeply, quickly. They’re easily triggered. They’re your zero-to-hundred-in-ten-seconds-flat kind of kids. And so these are kids who really struggle to regulate their emotions, which they have all of these regular developmental challenges, and then they have this extra layer that just the cards are stacked against them.

DR. AMY: Well, what makes you a fire feeler? What would differentiate a teen who is more sensitive to whatever is happening versus someone who, you know, feels what they feel or regulates a little bit more easily? How do you, how do you determine if they’re a fire feeler?

KATIE: It’s interesting because I’ll have people say to me, “I’m not a fire feeler, but my husband is. I’m not a fire feeler, but I know that my child is.” So I have the sense that if you’re not biologically sensitive, you kind of already know that about yourself. And someone who is, someone who’s easily triggered, maybe they are, maybe, like me, they cry at puppy commercials or they’re just easily in tune with their surroundings or they are easily triggered, upset, reactive, maybe that if you’re a parent, you’re a yeller and you have a hard time not controlling that reaction or that urge to yell. So the markers of somebody who is biologically sensitive are that they are easily triggered. They go from 0 to 100 quickly and they take a long time to come back to their baseline or their ability to be more centered and calm.

DR. AMY: Yeah. So I’m one of those. Yeah. Just saying.

KATIE: Welcome to the club. Right.

DR. AMY: Right. Just ask my husband about my rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Right. So, but you keep saying biologically, what’s the term you used? Biologically ..

KATIE: Biologically sensitive.

DR. AMY: Right. So what is the biology behind that? Are there specific, I mean, is this a, you know, an epigenetic mutation snip that’s flipped on? Is there a collection of, what does that, what does that mean?

KATIE: The reason that I use the term “biologically sensitive” is because it is something that is innate to the individual. So I don’t have like the DNA word for it, but I do know that it is somebody who is born this way. Some kids are born naturally good at sports or music, and some kids are born naturally more in tune with their emotions. And so that term for me is affirming in the sense of this is the way someone is. It’s not a choice that they’re making. It’s not, it’s not something that they’ve learned in their environment. Their environment can certainly dial it up or down based on how parents, coaches, teachers are responding to that teen. But it’s something that is an innate part of who they are.

SANDY: I noticed that you’re not really using the word empathic because I kind of like in this form of conversation. I usually that word comes up for me like, “Oh, they’re empathic. They’re an empath.” Is there a reason why you’re not using that terminology? I love the fire feeler imagery of that. But why not that empathic part? 

KATIE: I intentionally have chosen my words because there are some emotionally charged words in these communities. For example, the word “highly sensitive,” Elaine Aron. So there’s a lot in the neurodivergent community that feels very non-affirming about that because, you know, a lot of people in the autism community are highly sensitive and so it feels like we’re not using the right labels or the right names to explicitly say who people are and what their lived experience is. And so I try and steer away from these other buzzwords because they have this emotional charge to them and they don’t feel authentic to how I’d like to describe, which is essentially just an objective description of a characteristic versus attaching it to anything else. And that’s why I came up with my own term “fire feelers” as well, which really does help with that imagery for parents to understand what it’s like for their teenager.

DR. AMY: Yeah, I actually when I when I teach parents about ADHD in workshops, I have a slide on co-regulation and how the parent actually has to hug the fire, right? And it’s just kind of this amazing analogy right with, you’ve got a dysregulated kid and you can’t co-regulate from another room, right? You literally have to hug this fire. And I’m talking about younger children at that, but when you said “fire feeler,” I immediately went there to that. So you talk about rigid thinking patterns in teens. So what makes them have this all-or-nothing view of a situation? 

KATIE: Yeah, when somebody is activated, when they’re triggered, when their emotions are in extremes, their thinking also follows those extremes, and so when you’re extremely angry, it’s hard to decipher between somebody hating you or loving you, because you go to these extremes. You can’t see that gray in the middle of that maybe they’re upset by the situation, but in the big picture, they still love me or value me as a friend. So when our emotions are in extremes, our thinking goes to those extremes as well. And that’s why I always recommend that you don’t solve problems when you’re in emotion mind. That you can’t teach someone to swim when you’re drowning. So when we think about parents, don’t try and solve the problem when your teen is stomping up the stairs or having a meltdown. This is the time when we want to co-regulate or use our coping skills, but it’s not the time when we want to try and change our teen’s mind or help them solve a problem because they’re just not aligned for rational thinking in those moments.

DR. AMY: So in those moments, rather than trying to get them to change their mind or see things another way, what is the response that we should have? 

KATIE: Validate. Validation. And I will explain examples of it, but it makes your brain more flexible to problem solving. Because what it does is it communicates this message that “I see you, I hear you, your experience makes sense in this situation, and I’m here for you.” And so if a parent, for example, sees their child melting down because they didn’t get invited to a sleepover, instead of trying to say, “Why don’t you text Johnny and see if you can sleep over his house?” Instead say, “Hey, that’s really sad. I can see how hard this is for you.” It helps the teen to feel understood. It helps them to then take a breath or regulate a bit. And then maybe we can look at texting Johnny. But we don’t want to skip that part where we’re acknowledging the emotion. 

DR. AMY: So that validation lowers the temperature a little bit on that reaction.

KATIE: Absolutely. Yep. 

SANDY: So let’s talk about the steps of that then, like you alluded to. What would that look like?

KATIE: Yeah. So the steps to validation, the first step is being willing and open to it and being willing to try something differently, which I think is always step one when we’re talking about parents acknowledging that they play a role in how their teens present differently or regulate their emotions differently. What I would say is, you see the teen in front of you, you either receive information if they’re talking to you, or sometimes they’re not, you just see them come home from school, their faces distressed, their fists are bald, you notice that something is off or different in their emotional expression. And then it’s being open to you naming that emotion or taking a guess at what you think it is. So it’s really reflecting back in the simplest terms. It’s being a mirror for what your teen is experiencing. “I see how frustrated you are right now.” And guess what? If your teen is not frustrated, they’re going to be so willing to be like, I’m not frustrated and tell you that you’re wrong, but it’s still okay to take that guess rather than to jump in and oversimplify problem-solving or disengage because it makes you uncomfortable that they’re having an emotion.

DR. AMY: Yeah, I have many experiences of getting that emotion wrong, right? Like if I’m trying to identify and trying to validate and then being snapped at, right? Because I’m, either they’re not willing to admit that that actually is what they’re feeling or I got it wrong. 

KATIE: And I think it is so much of learning a new language. So I look at it like you might be, again, going back to this innate trait of sensitivity, you might be parenting a tulip, but you’re a family of roses. And so it is not natural for you to learn this way of communicating. I’ve heard feedback that “it feels scripted when my parent tries to validate me because they’re trying to get the words right, but they’re kind of missing the function underneath of it.” I’ve heard feedback that, “This is, you know, my experience as a parent is that verbal validation does not land, but nonverbal validation does. Sitting in the room, nodding, being present and just holding space.” So you have to, or handing a tissue, covering with a blanket, you have to really know what the child in front of you needs and you can only know that by trying and failing, maybe multiple times before you get it right.

DR. AMY: So I love the term “holding space” and I use it all the time but I’ve had several people recently say what does that mean? Talk to us about what that really means.

KATIE: Oh, it’s such a therapist word, isn’t it?

DR. AMY: I know.

KATIE: Things we use. I would say in the context of parents and teens, what I would see as holding space would be being willing to be in the same space as your teen.

When they are experiencing an emotion and almost imagining like your presence is a container, right? Like you can expand the container to hold any amount of emotion that your teen is experiencing, but you can’t put a lid on that container. You can’t try and fill it with something else. You just have to be the container and be willing to sit and hold the emotions of the child that is in front of you. Because that is the most important step. If you can’t  see, feel, hear, experience your child’s emotion without trying to make it go away or freaking out yourself, they’re not going to come to you with things. 

DR. AMY: Right, so you have to have this facial expression, this body language that says “nothing you can do or say right now is going to scare me or drive me away.”

KATIE: You got it. And that’s actually a great point because in our parent group at my therapy center, that’s something that we’ve had to coach on is like, “Well, I’m saying the right words to my teen. I don’t know why they’re not responding the way that you said that they would” when we learn this skill in group. And so when we dig deeper into it, oftentimes it’s like, you know, it was said in a hurried or frustrated tone. There was a facial expression that was not calm or not open and supportive. Or it was the timing was way off. Like they were rushing from one thing to another and the teen didn’t have the ability to really take in what the parent was trying to do or say. And so there are so many variables. No wonder it’s hard to get it right the first few times.

SANDY: I’m glad you brought up tone, because I was going to ask that question of like, how important is tone? Like, how important is timing? There’s a lot of critical pieces a parent might miss in that, those baby steps of learning how to be validating, right?

KATIE: It’s kind of like a recipe, right? Like, I know all the ingredients to bake a cake, but I could not bake a good cake because I just don’t have the way to put it all together. Or at least not yet. I haven’t got my reps in to be able to make a really good cake. But yes, that timing is critical. Making sure it’s a time when you’re both in a regulated state or regulated enough. Tone is super important. And, especially for somebody who’s a fire feeler, they’re so much more attuned to nuances in tone or in facial expressions. Like, you mentioned rejection sensitivity, that could be the, the tiniest slight difference in the way something is said that could trigger rejection sensitivity and that’s something that’s a common theme for fire feelers as well. 

DR. AMY: So talk to us a little bit about, you know, a lot of parents have this knee-jerk response to big emotions. And that response might look like yelling or tightening the reins on their discipline, right? So strict rules. Talk to us about why that doesn’t work.

KATIE: It’s common when we’re trying to figure out how to reel something in that’s not working, or how to manage a situation, that we’re getting more rigid in that process, that we’re yelling, we’re putting more rules in place, all of the things that you mentioned.

 And yet, I often find myself wondering if that actually works, first of all. Is it working to punish your kid every single weekend and take the car away, or are they just doing the same thing or getting sneakier at it? So on one hand, we’re making the relationship less secure when punishment is our only strategy. And on the other hand, I think about how kids follow rules because they align with family values, because the relationships are strong, because it makes sense. And so what we really want to be doing is equipping our children, our teens, with the tools to be effective, independent, fulfilled, successful in how they define as adults. And that doesn’t mean just putting so many guardrails in place that they can never make a mistake or they can never get in trouble because that’s not actually teaching them and it’s not a sustainable strategy if your goal as a parent is for your child to be an independent, fulfilled, successful adult.

SANDY: I love that thought, Katie. And I want to kind of dig in a little bit on that in terms of, I love how that you shared you were a self-destructive teen. I was also a very self destructive teen and did some things that really scared my parents. So a lot of the things that ended up coming into our relationship was out of fear. So let’s talk about that from that perspective. So, you work with kids that are deep in depression, are showing signs of self-harm, maybe some suicidal thoughts. How do you help a parent who’s operating on fear at this point. They’re just trying to make sure that their kids are safe? Because that changes this dynamic a little bit, doesn’t it?

KATIE: Absolutely. And it’s important to validate that there’s a kernel of truth in that fear. If your child has suicidal thoughts or if your teen is self-harming, of course you are afraid that they’re going to hurt themselves or distract in some kind of way that is really scary or dangerous. So it makes sense that you have that level of fear. And some examples of things that I’ve seen by history that are not effective are taking doors off of rooms, sleeping in your teen’s room so that they don’t act on things. Again, these are kind of like over control measures that maybe in the short term, if I had a client who said, “I absolutely cannot keep myself safe tonight, I’m very scared.” Yeah, parents sleep in their room, but that’s not a long term viable solution. And so working with the parent as well. When we think about working with kids, when we think about working with teens, they don’t change in a vacuum. And so parents need to make changes as well. And part of that is facing their own fears around how little control they actually have over a teenager. I mean, it’s something that I’ve had to come to terms with. Like you can influence with your strategies, but you cannot control what your teen does. And that’s really scary when your teen has really scary behaviors. So helping parents feel their feelings around that and gain support and validation around that is helpful in the process.

DR. AMY: Awkward silence. I thought you’re, I thought Sandy was going to speak. And so—

SANDY: No, I’m processing.

DR. AMY: Now we’re talking on top of each other. So I’ve worked with several families who have been in that situation, right? Where their teen is engaging in self-harm behaviors and they have discovered that this has been influenced by friends, right, as well and not or there’s been a situation where there have been negative interactions with friends that have created these big emotions. And so their first reaction is to cut off all communication for their teen by taking their phones away, by taking their laptops away. So that then they can’t communicate with friends or anyone outside of the home who’s contributing to some of these behaviors. Talk about that. What’s your reaction to that?

KATIE: I have judgments about that. Is that okay?

DR. AMY: I have huge judgments about that so, yeah.

KATIE: Alright, so I have a few thoughts. I mean, first of all, as a DBT therapist, the kind of therapy we do is that we offer phone coaching to our clients. So if you take away a teen’s phone, you’re taking away one of the modes of therapy. So that’s, I mean, kind of isolated for the work I do. It’s very frustrating when that’s a parent’s knee-jerk response. I think it goes back to this, “This is what I can control.” And that’s why parents do it. It’s not skillful. It doesn’t work. And I think about if your teen is hurting so much that they’re hurting themselves, maybe they learned that from a friend. But a teen who’s not hurting is not like, “Cool, you hurt yourself, I’ll go hurt myself.” So there’s something already there that has led to that. And I, the frustration comes in for me at parents kind of like burying their head in the sand a bit and wanting to blame that on technology or blame that on peers. I think it takes a little bit of looking in the mirror and figuring out what’s happening in our home that’s contributing to this issue. You can’t change the situation until you take some responsibility for it. And I’m not blaming parents, but I am saying that it’s not, it’s not peers. It’s not technology. They might be contributing factors, but removing those things is not changing the situation. You’re cutting them off. They’re probably going to be more angry at you. I think it increases risk.

DR. AMY: Right. You know, I always talk about how connection is the number one buffer against mental health crisis. And sometimes a friend, it has a stronger connection with the teen than the parent because of whatever this dynamic is that’s happening. And so to cut off that ability to connect with people who understand you or you think understand you more than your parents do, I feel actually aggravates.

KATIE: I agree. I mean, all teens developmentally gravitate towards their peers. It absolutely makes sense that they’re telling their peers things that they’re not telling parents. And so when you find out as a parent, your first response should not be to punish but to be thankful that now it’s out in the open and you can do something about it.

SANDY: And I would imagine, yeah, that the key is to really rebuild connection. So it’s like what DR. AMY was saying. If you punish and start removing, you’re going to further hurt that connection when the root cause may be that there’s a little bit of a connection issue between the child and the parent. 

KATIE: The more trust we can build, the more connection we can build with the child and the parent, the more safety is in place because part of the work is helping parents learn the skills to be open and validate, so teens can come and say, “I’m having an urge to self-harm, or having these really scary thoughts.” And instead of being afraid to say that because they’re going to get in trouble, or they’re going to get something taken away, they feel really safe and secure to do that, and their parent can help them, right?

Then you’re on the same side, facing the problem of suicidal ideation or self-harm, rather than facing each other with the problem.

SANDY: How do you help parents really deal with that guilt? 

KATIE: The guilt of?

SANDY: It might, it might be an at-home issue. This might be a connection issue. I mean, I think parents in general have a lot of parental guilt towards their kids and things that are happening. But like you mentioned earlier, getting them to have some ownership in the problem, they have to kind of come to terms with the fact that they might be part of the problem. So there’s some work there that has to be done.

KATIE: There’s some work there. I think I agree. I mean, parent guilt is so real. And in this case, I call it the “blame and shame continuum.” So on one hand, there’s the blame. “Why can’t my kid get better? Why aren’t they using their coping skills? They’re not trying hard enough. They’re in with the wrong crowd.” All of these blame type behaviors. And on the other hand, we have the shame. “Where did I go wrong? What did I do?  I can’t believe I deserve this. Maybe it’s karma.” That was my thought. So we have these two sides of blame and shame, but what’s in the middle of that continuum is actually grief. And so when we talk about how do we help parents, a lot of the times it’s helping them acknowledge, “This is not the life that I imagined when I held my child in my arms.

I didn’t imagine that they were going to be depressed or hurting themselves or cutting their own skin. This is not what I wanted for my child. This is not the life that I imagined as a parent, but this is the life that I have.” And that’s sad. That takes some grieving and it’s not a one-and-done process. And so I always go back to that validation. Like, “This is really hard for you as a parent. Of course, you feel guilty if you wish you had done things differently. Of course, you feel sad that this isn’t what you thought was going to play out in your life.” And parents also need us to hold the space, as we were talking about for the teens.

DR. AMY: So can we talk a little bit about what parents should do if they have a teen who is exhibiting self-harm behaviors or suicidal thoughts?

KATIE: First step, if they find out, “Thank you for trusting me,” or “I’m so glad that I know now so I can be here to support you.” Remembering tone, remembering facial expressions, body language. We want to, we want our teen to look, you want your teen to look at you as a parent and have this felt sense of safety, security on being taken care of rather than any kind of it’s fear or I disappointed them or any of the other fears that teens have when they’re afraid parents will find out. The next step I would say is you do want to reach out to a professional. It’s not something that I believe that you can contain or fully work on in the home without an outside perspective. And part of that is just that it’s so emotionally charged, right? Like I am a teen self-harm specialist and if my teen were self-harming, I wouldn’t try and treat that at home without a professional in the mix. So we want to make sure we have that outside perspective. And the most important thing I would say is validating emotions. And then the other part of that is reinforcing the behaviors that we want to see. So oftentimes self-harm gets reinforced in many different ways. It’s because the teen instantly feels better, it regulates their emotion, and then the parent jumps in with warmth, with taking care of them, all of those things that they should be doing, but on the front end before the self-harm. So we want to be really mindful of, “How am I connecting with my teen? How am I supporting them?” And not just in times when they hurt themselves, but in times when they’re actually not doing anything, what am I giving to them? 

DR. AMY: How often should parents be checking in and checking on them and asking how they’re doing? Or should you just create an invitation that you’re there if they want to talk to you? What are those conversations and what are the timing on those conversations look like or should look like? 

KATIE: I think it’s so dependent on the teen as with anything. We need to know the child in front of us. And so what I would say instead is checking in with how you as the parent feel. If you’re checking in eight times a day because you’re scared your child is going to do something to hurt themselves, or like I remember when my child was, you know, an infant and I would go in like five times a night and just put my hand on their back and make sure they were still breathing. Like that was an anxious behavior. But so if you’re doing the teenage equivalent of that, then I would say you need to regulate yourself rather than check in more with your team because you’re then creating a dynamic where your team telling you that they’re okay is the thing that makes your anxiety go down. And we don’t want to put that cycle of anxiety in place. So if you’re checking because you’re anxious, it’s the wrong time to check. Obviously follow your intuition. But other than that, I really do think it’s knowing the child that’s in front of you, knowing how they operate. Again, I go back to like, if I ask my teen a bunch of questions, they disengage and shut down. They don’t want me to approach, but if I drive them to school and I stay perfectly silent, I all of a sudden get so much information. And so you need to know who your child is, and it is such a dance. So if you notice that when you ask questions, they shut down, stop asking questions and see if they come to you. You need to kind of gauge it based on the person. 

SANDY: My daughter was always the 11:30 at night when I was going to bed. Check in.

DR. AMY: Those were my boys for sure.

SANDY: Gotta wake up. Okay!  But it’s like what you were saying before. It’s that holding space. And I think of it as just being present when they need you to be present too. Like that’s, that can be hard, especially when there’s an agenda or something’s happening or you’re tired— to push your needs aside for a second and just be present.

 It’s really, really important. You talked a lot about validation. Let’s be super practical for our listeners. What are the different types of validation? You kind of talk about a couple of those in your book.

KATIE: Yes. So, as I said, the basics are being a mirror and reflecting back. And that’s really the being present and being able to reflect back are those building blocks. But in addition to that, we want to be able to communicate that their behavior makes sense given the situation. So one of those types of validation would be timeline validation. Let’s say that Susie got rejected and wasn’t able to sit at the lunch table on Wednesday. And she came home from school and told mom this. And so mom using timeline validation might say, “It makes sense that you’re feeling really sad about this based on your history of being left out in social situations.” So you know your child better than anyone else. You know why these things bother them. Being able to bring that in and say, “Hey, this makes total sense based on where you are and what happened to you.”

That can be really powerful. And then we can kick it up a notch from there, and we can generalize that to the human struggle. And this is an important kind of validation because oftentimes fire feelers feel like they’re different. They feel like their emotions are wrong. They’ve constantly gotten the message that your emotions are too big or too much, and so they question the reality of their experience. But when we can say, “It makes sense that you’re really anxious right now, I think everybody’s anxious and unsure of what’s going to happen next.” And you’re not dismissing it and saying, “Everyone’s anxious. You’re fine.” You’re saying, “No, it’s normal that you’re anxious. We’re all anxious.” So you’re giving them this feedback that their emotions are real and valid and make sense. And they’re not out of the ordinary for having this experience. 

DR. AMY: What would you say to parents who are not on the same page, where you’ve got one parent who is completely on board with validating big emotions, holding space, and then you’ve got another parent who thinks that this kid needs to just suck it up.

KATIE: I mean, my knee-jerk reaction is to say to the suck it up parents, “How much of a relationship do you want with your teen after they leave this house?” And that is the harsh reality, is that If you are not able to give your child what they need, especially a fire feeler, you may not maintain a relationship with them because it is traumatic to consistently be invalidated throughout your life when you have a biological sensitivity.

And then on top of that, I would say that the parent who’s doing the work, keep doing the work because it means so much. And, you know, every seed you plant is going to bloom, even if there are weeds on the other side of the garden. 

DR. AMY: I like that analogy. So, we need to take a break and let Sandy read a word from our sponsor. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit about invading our teen’s privacy. When we come back. 

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DR. AMY: And we are back continuing our conversation with Katie May. So, Katie, you write in your book, “the impulse to seek answers through invasion of privacy stems from a place of desperation, a parent’s quest to ease their teen’s anguish.” And so, this was a little bit about what you were saying earlier, right? That sometimes we act out of our own anxiety, and then the way to allay that anxiety is to be told by our kid, “I’m okay.” Right. So talk to us about how this can backfire. You know, is there a time when invading their privacy is okay? Or is there an alternative that you would suggest? 

KATIE: Yeah, so I want to play it out for you. Let’s see. So I think it’s important to say that you are worried about your teen safety or you’re worried about the crowd that they’re hanging out with. And so when they’re at school, you go into their room, you search their room, you find their diary, and you read things that they later find out that you invaded their privacy. Yes, you may have been very worried about their safety. And you may have been very worried. Is it going to be effective now that they know that you’ve breached trust? Now they’re not willing to come to you, they’re more upset with you. Again, we’ve increased that level of risk, and more impulsive or self-destructive behaviors may come on the back end of that. So the biggest reason that I say invading privacy is ineffective is, again, it goes back to that connection and breaching the trust, and when we do that, we increase the level of risk of our teenager. And so, Is there a better way? Yes, and it is direct communication. “I’m really worried about you. Here’s what I’m concerned about. Is this happening?” You might not get a direct or even honest answer from your teen, but I guess I’m wondering when a parent reads a diary or reads someone’s texts, and I’ve seen all variations of this in my work, is it actually changing anything? Is it actually changing the behavior at all? And so, I always come back to “What’s effective?” Now, I also don’t want to speak in finite terms that never, ever, ever do this. Let’s say something like very emergent is happening and this is the only way to solve the problem. So I don’t want to invalidate that one in a million parent that’s out there that was like, “This was the only way to get my child to this point.” So I can’t say for all variables, but I can say for the large majority, direct communication, getting your teen a therapist, acknowledging their feelings, not invading their privacy are all better success recipe components than circumventing that and doing the indirect breach of trust. 

DR. AMY: Yeah. We’ve had Clint Davis on a couple of times. He’s a trauma therapist who specializes in protecting kids from sexual abuse or predators or, you know, online abuse. And he talks about the importance of starting those conversations early, right? So, as early as possible, you start having conversations, you know, about your body and about, you know, privacy. So that it doesn’t seem uncomfortable when you get to age 17, right? Like if there’s something happening with pornography, you’ve already been having these conversations. And so my pushback is always what if we have parents of teens who are listening right now, who didn’t start those conversations at age eight, nine or 10, right, and, and are now having to repair, you know, ruptures of where they’ve blown up because they’ve been snooping and their kid no longer trusts them? How do you go back and repair broken trust? 

KATIE: I think repairing harm is such a powerful thing for a parent to do with and for a child to be able to say, “You know what? I messed up. I wish I hadn’t done that. Here’s what I wish I had done instead, and here’s what I’m going to do to make sure that we do it differently next time.” And I see this a lot, and I’ve done this as a parent myself, where sometimes I yell and I didn’t intend to yell. I’m a recovered yeller. It slips out sometimes still. But other parents as well who will say, “And now I’m going to therapy to work on my anxiety,” or “Now I’m joining this parenting skills group so that I can learn new skills and how to parent you,” or “Now I’m reading this book so that I can learn a different model for how to do things.” So it’s the same as any kind of apology or repair. We want to acknowledge the harm that we did. We want to be genuine in acknowledging why it was harmful. And then we want to plan. And telling that other person “This is my plan for how to learn and do it differently” because the apology without the action isn’t really that meaningful.

SANDY: And you want to model this, right? You’re modeling how to do this for life. This is how we, because everyone’s going to make mistakes. Everyone’s going to, you know, when they become parents, they’ll have seen you model how to repair relationship and, and get to the root cause of any connection issues in the family as well.

KATIE: You got it. That’s so important. 

DR. AMY: How much self, how much self-disclosure do you think is okay for parents, right? Like, so for example, you know, Sandy talked about, you know, having experience with self-harm herself, you know, would a parent who had experience with it themselves, is that helpful for them to say, “Gosh, when I was a teenager, look, I get it because I did it too.” And, you know, we talk about this in terms of drugs and alcohol and trying things and partying and being a terrible teenager or whatever. What are your thoughts on self-disclosure?

KATIE: I’m a fan to a point. And so there’s a couple places that that point comes in play. So I can use myself as an example. I have self-disclosed to my child, my history of self-harm, my history of some of my partying behaviors, things like that, because I want to be able to say, “Hey, nothing you do is going to freak me out, you know, and I want to be able to talk about it with you.” But there’s also a point at which right now I haven’t self-disclosed because I almost don’t want to be like, “Well, I did all these things and I’m fine and I’m successful, so you can do all these things too!” And so there’s, there’s kind of like this developmental dripping out of information as it makes sense. You know, when my kid was seven, I wasn’t going to share things that I would share when they were 14 because it would be scary or cause more anxiety to them. And then the other piece of the, you know, it depends, is the when. You don’t want to say when your child is sharing vulnerable information, like, “Same girl, me too! I did that when I was a teen!” Because that’s just going to take the focus off of them and put it onto you. So it has to be in a different conversation, it has to be in one of these, “Hey I want to talk to you about being sexually active,” or whatever the conversation is. It has to be intentional to that topic, and not at a time when your teen is sharing things with you.

DR. AMY: I love that you brought that up about turning out okay despite all of our own mistakes, because that was always my concern, right? That if I disclosed, right, that I was a partier and you know, how all the bad stuff that I did as a teenager, that my kids would look at me and go, “Well, mom did all this and she turned out great. So I’m going to turn out great.” And so I would think that your teen would already be in a place of wanting to do that, desiring to do that or being in the middle of something that you just sharing is not going to cause them to do it because, “Oh, my mom did it so I should too,” right? 

KATIE: I think it’s also being honest about the struggle behind it or, you know, what was difficult about it or, you know, pros and cons of it. And that’s part of helping our teens scaffold healthy behaviors. Understanding. What is the consequence if I go out drinking or, you know, how does this interact with psychiatric medications? We need to just have those conversations because the more information they have, the better judgment they can have about their specific situation.

SANDY: I know it was really helpful for my kids just to, when these topics did come up and I was willing to share, it was helpful for them to maybe take me down off the pedestal that they had me on.

KATIE: Nice they had you on one. That’s great. 

SANDY: Like, “Oh, Mom, you never do anything wrong.” “Well, hold up. I have a different attitude now. But I do mess up and I, as a teenager, I was not, on my pedestal.”

KATIE: I don’t think any teenager is on their pedestal though, right?

SANDY: No, no, but yeah, yeah, it’s come up in lots of different conversations, but I do think it’s that it’s that ability, when it’s done correctly and it’s done in the right timing, to build connection and to just share that you are a real human. Yes, you were Mom or Dad, but you know, you’ve made mistakes and this is what you, you know, you’ve done since then. And if I’m making a choice now, it’s because I can see the bigger picture and I’m a little more afraid. Things are different today than they were when I was young, right? Like you can just help explain where you’re coming from and have that connection in a really real moment of communication with your child.

KATIE: Absolutely.

DR. AMY: Well, it seems to me that that would sort of shrink the power differential gap, right? Right. That just naturally exists between parents and kids, right? Like when you can have open, honest, vulnerable conversations, you know, reparative conversations with your kids, right? Then it will kind of close that gap so that connection doesn’t seem so distant. 

KATIE: It decreases judgment, too. If you’re able to say, “I understand your urge to want to go try smoking weed.” Like, it makes sense, because whatever, it helps your teen feel less judged, which is so common for our teens to feel judged by their parents.

So when they can see that you understand and have had some lived experience, it does help with that connection piece. 

SANDY: My mom used to be like, “I’ve never even had a speeding ticket!” And I’m like, “I cannot relate to you.” My mom is one of those, never did anything ever. Even to this day, you know, when we talk about things as being adults, you know, she’ll do that and I’ll say, my mom’s a therapist too, which is funny to me, just because of our own familial dysfunction sometimes. But like, I just laugh at how do you relate to, and she does like sex offenders. Like she does like some pretty heavy stuff. And I just don’t know how she can kind of be in that headspace as a therapist. She’s a wonderful therapist. But like, from a mom perspective, it’s like, “Oh. Really? You’re going to be mad at me because I’m speeding? Like what’s happening?”

DR. AMY: Okay. My mom told me that I will never lose weight if I don’t eat protein for breakfast … last week.

KATIE: Last week?

DR. AMY: My mom was visiting and I was only making toast for breakfast only because I had a stomachache. So I didn’t, you know what I mean? I don’t need to like go into details, but I was intentional in my choice to only make toast. And I like, I have gained a few pounds this year and I am trying to lose that weight, but she looked at me and said, “You will never lose weight if you don’t add protein for breakfast.” Thanks for fat shaming me at 54. Anyway. And she’s a child development specialist.

KATIE: Look at this. 

DR. AMY: Hi, Mom.

SANDY: I love you, Mom. 

DR. AMY: I love you, Mom. Thanks for fat shaming me at 54. Okay, so speaking of, there is no such thing as a perfect parent. There is not. And when we try to hold ourselves to that standard, that is a recipe for disappointment, right? And so you talk about being a good enough parent. What is that like?

KATIE: When I was in grad school, and my child at that point was like 18 months, and we were learning different psych theories, and I had this moment of panic that was like, “Wow, everything I do is going to mess up my child. That is, be all end all, it’s me. I’m gonna mess them up.” And so I had this really lovely teacher who said, “You know what, there’s this theory of the good enough parent, which means that, which suggests that you only really need to be quote unquote “perfect” 20 percent of the time. And that the older your child gets, the less perfect you need to be because the less of their full needs you need to meet anyway.” And so, what’s more important than meeting every need, than being perfect, than never making a mistake, is knowing how to repair harm. And also knowing how to tolerate it, when you mess up, when they mess up, when things don’t go as planned, because they need those mishaps and mistakes in order to develop along a healthy timeline, right? If their environment is wholly perfect and they’re in a bubble, that’s not setting them up for that successful life. So the message that I took from that was, I only need to be good enough. And 20 percent of the time is good enough, and the rest of the time I’m going to repair harm or figure it out along the way.

DR. AMY: I love that. I think it’s such great advice that we need to return to again and again and again. For sure. So, Katie, what would you like to say that you haven’t gotten to say? Do you want to tell our listeners how they can hear from you, more of you, learn more of what you have to say? 

KATIE: Yeah, so if parents are interested in learning more about the strategies that I talk about in my book, they can head to youreonfireitsfine.com where I have free resources, a free webinar, as well as a parent membership where we dig deeper into these strategies with support and accountability. And I think my takeaway message that I would share from everything we’re saying is that being a parent comes with a lot of being willing to look at yourself, what you’re doing, what you’re saying, what you’re feeling, and making sure that you’re looking in the mirror to work on your stuff as much as you are supporting your teen through their own development. So we can’t rely on our teens to regulate our emotions. We need to be the stable force so that they’re okay.

DR. AMY: Love it. Katie May, thank you so much for being with us today. This is a great conversation. We are out of time though, so we do need to say goodbye. But if you want more from Katie May, um, her website is youreonfireitsfine.com. You can also find her on Instagram at Katie K May, and we will put links to all of her social media handles in the show notes. Listeners, thanks for being with us today. If you like us, please follow us on Instagram and Facebook @TheBrainyMoms. If you liked our show, we would love it if you would leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple podcasts so that we can reach more smart parents like you guys. If you want to see more from Sandy, she’s on TikTok at the Brain Trainer Lady. That’s all the smart stuff we have for you today. So we’re going to catch you next time.