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From Anger to Action
Powerful Mindfulness Tools to Help Teens Harness Anger for Positive Change
A comprehensive mindfulness program to help teens understand and channel anger into healthy expressions of creativity, advocacy, and empowerment.
Sometimes you just feel pissed off, and that’s okay. Maybe you missed a deadline in school, flunked a test, didn’t get invited to a party, or feel angry about something you saw on the news or online. We’ve all been there. It’s impossible to go through life never feeling angry. But what if, instead of letting your anger take control, you were able to harness it in constructive ways? This book will show you how.
With this guide, you’ll find powerful mindfulness tools to help you listen to your anger, connect with your core values and goals, and make positive changes that will truly empower you. Instead of resorting to outbursts, you’ll learn to channel the incredible energy of your anger into self-advocacy, social action, and productivity. You’ll also find stories from other teens just like you who’ve successfully redirected their anger into creating positive change.
If you’re ready to change your relationship with anger and transform it into fuel for change and creative possibility, this book will guide you, every step of the way.
The Challenging Child Toolbox
Working with resistant, oppositional, emotionally dysregulated, and angry kids can be exhausting, frustrating and leave clinicians feeling burnt out.
Dr. Mitch Abblett has created the remedy with a new guide that will take you step-by-step through mindfulness-based principles, pointers and best practices to ease your work and dramatically improve the lives of kids and their families.
- Build trust with tough-to-connect with kids
- Improve distress tolerance, emotion regulation and relaxation skills
- Heal the anxiety, trauma reactivity and depression-related issues which cause behavioral issues
- Strategies to make every intervention more effective and impactful
- Scientifically-grounded mindfulness and positive psychology-focused tools
The Five Hurdles to Happiness
And the Mindful Path to Overcoming Them
Five obstacles stand in between you and true happiness. What are they and how can you overcome them? Buddhist traditions teach that there are five negative qualities, or hindrances, that inhibit people from living an awakened life. Here, Mitch Abblett gives this teaching a modern, secular interpretation and helps you identify the hurdles that are blocking your contentment—desire, hostility, sluggishness, worry, and doubt—and how you can take your first steps to overcoming them. Combining traditional wisdom with contemporary psychology and using examples from his psychotherapy practice, Abblett uses the hurdles as a frame for engaging you in a process of contemplating your own life and learning to lean into your experience rather than merely repeating bad habits. By doing this, you can break free from the hurdles and live more mindfully, effectively, and compassionately.
Praise for the Book:
"This is a lovely, profound book. It takes the Buddha’s ancient teachings about the five primary blocks to happiness and inner peace and applies them to our modern, busy, stressful lives. Grounded in science, informed by the penetrating insights of an experienced therapist, and practical on every page, this heartfelt book will help change many lives for the better." —Rick Hanson, PhD, author of Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness
"Full of engaging, provocative insights based on years of both psychological and spiritual practice, Dr. Abblett brings to life the Buddha’s insights into how our minds create suffering and how we can transform this suffering into wisdom and compassion. Written with unusual honesty and wit, and full of practical examples and exercises, this book helps us let go of the self-protective habits that make us unhappy, and cultivate instead open, awakened hearts and minds." —Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD, author of The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems
"An honest and compassionate manual for relaxing the grip of our conditioned reactions. With humor and practical clarity, Mitch Abblett illuminates the painful responses we reinforce every day and offers kinder practices in return—ones that support the gradual, skillful process of opening our hearts." —Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Love
Helping Your Angry Teen
How to Reduce Anger and Build Connection Using Mindfulness and Positive Psychology
From the jacket cover:
Is your teen angry all the time? Do they shut down, lash out, or blame others - namely, you - when life's challenges arise? Parenting an angry teen can be extremely difficult. You may even have trouble keeping your own cool, or worry that your relationship with your teen is doomed. The good news is that there are solid strategies you can use to stay grounded when the drama rises, put an end to angry outbursts and re-establish a healthy, lasting connection.
Helping Your Angry Teen offers in-the-moment techniques based in mindfulness, compassion, and positive psychology to help you navigate your teen's explosive anger and restore peace to your household. You'll gain a better understanding of the psychological conditions that can contribute to teen anger, learn important skills for improving communication, and discover go-to mindfulness tips for staying calm and collected yourself. If you're ready to take control of your own reactions and start reconnecting with your angry teen, this guide will show you how.
Praise for the book:
"A compassionate, easy-to-read book providing practical guidelines while supporting parents who are almost certainly suffering along with their struggling teens."
--Mark Bertin, MD, author of Mindful Parenting for ADHD
“Helping Your Angry Teen offers clear, useful tools for parents, therapists and other caregivers to help the angry teenagers in their lives."
--Susan Kaiser Greenland, author of The Mindful Child
The Self-Compassion Card Deck:
50 Mindfulness Based Practices
The Self-Compassion Deck offers 50 mindfulness-based practices for use at home, in the classroom, or therapy office. Commit to these easy, yet meaningful exercises in kindheartedness and gain a deeper appreciation for yourself and your life.
The practice of self-compassion has been proven to:
- Improve well-being
- Regulate emotions
- Reduce depression and anxiety
-- "I received these cards as a gift and I am so happy I did! These cards are simple, yet powerful and are great for a quick self-esteem and self-compassion check. I have also used them with clients - kids, teens and adults suffering with low self-esteem, depression and anxiety and they have been well received by all. It's a nice little boost throughout the day and I really think everyone would benefit from using them in their day to day life!"
Mindful Reminders Card Deck:
52 Powerful Practices for Teens & Adults
Live your life more fully, reduce stress and remove distractions with the Mindful Reminders Card Deck. These 50 simple, yet powerful practices will help you build skills of awareness, compassion and presence for what matters in your daily life. Whether you are new to mindfulness practice, or whether you've been meditating for years, this deck offers fun, accessible reminders for bringing more mindfulness into your life.
-- "Great cards for introducing mindfulness to everyday life. I've used these cards in my own life, as well as with clients, and people have really found them applicable and easy to use."
The Heat of the Moment in Treatment
Mindful Management of Difficult Clients
How to warm up to the clients that stop you cold.
Have you experienced the anger, fear, doubt, and frustration that most clinicians feel but rarely put words to? Have you ever overreacted to a client in session or found yourself overwhelmed by the work with that client in your caseload? Are you looking for tools to manage your most “difficult” clients? Chances are, you’re like all other clinicians: At times you play “tug-of-war” with those in your care.
The Heat of the Moment in Treatment is for clinicians looking to explore, reassess, and transform the way they treat their most difficult clients. With carefully designed mindfulness-based exercises, self-assessments, and skill development activities, this workbook helps clinicians understand their own role in therapeutic interactions, as well as how to proactively respond to tough client behavior in ways that improve the prospects for successful treatment.
Author Mitch Abblett acts as a sensitive, expert guide, laying out a roadmap for the toughest of clinical encounters that almost all therapists face, whether seasoned or just starting out. His use of relatable metaphors, rhetorical questions, and stories from his own experience allows readers to reflect upon their own psychotherapy practice without feeling like there is one right way to deal with challenging clients.
The Heat of the Moment in Treatment will help clinicians move beyond assumptions and reactive impulses to their “difficult” clients. Readers will gain proactive clinical leadership skills, while learning how to expand mindful awareness of self and others to access compassion and empathy for any client―even when the “heat” of moment-to-moment interaction in session is hard to tolerate.
-- “Written in a disarmingly genuine, humorous, and self-disclosing style, The Heat of the Moment in Treatment explores the barriers to effective communication that clinicians carry and how we can carry them in a lighter way. It is packed full of practical and highly revealing self-exploratory exercises, case examples, and easy-to-follow clinical guidelines for working with difficult clients in difficult situations. This book should be required reading in every graduate program for mental health and addiction training. Destined to become a classic!”
- Kirk Strosahl, PhD, author of Brief Interventions for Radical Change
The Mindfulness Skills
Activity Book for Children
The Mindfulness Activity Book for Children gives you the resources to help the children in your classroom, office or home learn and hone the crucial skills of mindfulness - for getting on top of stress and doing their daily best!
Inside this book you'll find dozens of activities, games, exercises, and puzzles to help the kids in your life:
- Increase focus and concentration
- Build calm and beat stress
- Come together as a group
- Learn to hang in with challenges
- Get excited about what's happening right here and right now!
Written by two psychologists with decades of experience working with kids, families and mindfulness, these fun, easy-to-learn and creative activities are awesome for all school-aged kids, whether they are newbies to mindfulness or not!
Growing Mindful: A Deck of Mindfulness Practices for All Ages
A deck of simple, effective mindfulness practices.
Some cards in this unique deck teach awareness, others help you make present moment contact, still others cultivate kindness and curiosity, and many do a combination.This deck can be used in any number of ways. Perhaps drawing a card as a morning check in for yourself, perhaps as a settling practice between transitions in your classroom, at the start of a therapy session or end of a yoga class, or in a moment of pause before a meal or another time of the day. Whether in classrooms or living rooms, kids and adults can use the deck to develop their mindfulness skills together, deepening awareness and connecting. However you decide to use the deck, the idea is to have fun in the process of fully engaging in the present moment.
-- "I’m a busy mom and professional and it’s really challenging to carve out enough time to just sit on a cushion and meditate on a regular basis. While I meditate “formally” when I am able, I also find these cards helpful to keep myself centered in the midst of my hectic daily life. To me, that is the point of meditation- to get more “in the moment” at all times of the day. These cards are a valuable resource!"
Growing Happy Card Deck:
Positive Psychology Practices for Teens & Adults
Teaching and incorporating positive psychology into your home, classroom and therapy session is easy with the Growing Happy card deck. Grounded in the modern scientific findings of positive psychology, the card deck features 50 unique positive practices that will leave you feeling happier, present and resilient. Perfect for teens and adults.
-- "Awesome tool to use with adolescents!"
--"Perfect for counseling."
Mindfulness for Teen Depression
A Workbook for Improving Your Mood
In Mindfulness for Teen Depression, Dr. Chris Willard and I offer powerful tools based in mindfulness and positive psychology to help teens ease symptoms, work through troubling thoughts and feelings, and thrive in all aspects of life.
If you’re a teen with depression, you may often feel sad, lonely, and unmotivated. And it can be especially difficult to do well in school, make friends, and take those important steps toward adulthood. But it’s important for you to know that your depression is not your fault, and that it doesn’t have to define you. Most importantly, there are steps you can take to feel better.
With this powerful workbook, you’ll learn effective skills based in mindfulness and positive psychology to help you manage difficult emotions, gain distance from negative thoughts, and enhance your awareness of the present moment. You’ll also discover tons of activities and exercises—such as mindful meditations, walking, yoga, healthy eating and sleeping tips, and more—to help you care for your body as well as your mind.
Depression can make it seem like you're viewing the world through dark or distorted glasses. When you're depressed, it’s even hard to see yourself clearly. This book will empower you to feel better, more energized, and start reaching for your goals—one step at a time.
-- “If you are a teen living with depression and ongoing negative internal chatter, this book is for you. It offers simple, straightforward, doable suggestions and practices for taming your internal critic, and moving from feeling down and out to being up and in—in touch with your best self, and engaged in a meaningful, satisfying life.” —Amy Saltzman, MD, author of A Still Quiet Place for Teens
