When Your Kid's Big Feelings Have Gotten Bigger Than Her
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Your daughter's big feelings are getting out of control. You watch her struggle to manage her sadness, her anger, the storms that move through her, and you do not know how else to help her. You have tried what you know to try. You have read the things, said the right words, given her space, given her structure, given her you. None of it is touching this.
You know struggling with big feelings is normal. You have told yourself this many times. But what you are watching is not that. What you are watching is something that has gotten bigger than her, something she does not know how to ride out.
The sadness goes deeper than it should and stays longer than it should. The anger comes faster than it should and lands harder than it should. She is the one in it, but the whole house feels it.
If you are the young person reading this for yourself, the same things are true. Your feelings are real. They are not too much. There is help that actually helps.
She is not broken. She is a young person whose feelings run bigger than her body has learned to hold. There is a difference, and it matters.
Some people come into the world feeling everything more loudly. With the right support, these kids, teens, and college students learn skills that help them ride the waves instead of being swept away by them.
You are not overreacting. You are seeing your kid clearly. That is the first step.
Little Dove Psychology is a small group practice. The work described on this page is provided by our three clinicians: Dr. Kristin Kroll, Dr. Meghan Kraenbring Comerford, and Antonette Anuwe. Meet our team →
The work is grounded in evidence-based approaches for emotion regulation and distress tolerance, along with parent coaching when family support is part of the picture. In practice, that usually looks like:
This is not about teaching her to feel less. It is about helping her hold what she feels, with skills she can keep for the rest of her life.
If your child or college student is in immediate crisis or having thoughts of harming themselves, please call or text 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or go to your nearest emergency room.
Our team works with kids, teens, and college students. The skills translate across all of these stages, but how we teach and practice them looks different for a nine-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, and a twenty-year-old.
DBT stands for Dialectical Behavior Therapy. It is a treatment framework developed specifically to help people regulate intense emotions and tolerate distress without falling apart. The skills include things like noticing what you are feeling before it takes over, calming the body when it is escalating, and getting through hard moments without making them harder.
If their emotions seem bigger than what would fit the situation, last longer than they should, or seem to take them over instead of move through them, those are signs worth taking seriously.
Often it is for young people who have all of those at once. Big feelings rarely show up alone. We will sort out what is actually going on for your specific kid or college student.
Both, when family involvement makes sense. For younger kids and teens, parent coaching is core. For college students, family involvement is on her terms.
That is great. If she is 18 or older, we can work together directly. She is the client.
If your young person is in immediate danger, call or text 988 or go to the nearest emergency room. If they have had these thoughts but are not in immediate danger, that is exactly the kind of thing skills-based work is built to address.
Yes, with the right setup. Online sessions work well for many kids, teens, and college students.
DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) was originally developed for adults with intense emotion dysregulation and is now widely used for kids and teens. It teaches concrete skills in four areas: mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. DBT is commonly used for big-emotion presentations — situations where feelings hit hard and last long, where small triggers produce big reactions, or where a young person’s emotional intensity is interfering with school, friendships, or family life. At Little Dove, we use DBT-informed approaches, meaning we draw from the DBT framework and skills set without delivering a manualized full-DBT program.
Three things tend to help. First, name the emotion — a teen who can label what she is feeling has more leverage on it. Second, validate before you problem-solve. Acknowledging the feeling actually helps it pass faster, not slower. Third, teach the skill of pause-then-respond rather than react. Specific DBT-informed tools like the TIPP skills (temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing, paired muscle relaxation) can interrupt intense waves of emotion in the moment. If the intensity is interfering with daily life — school, friendships, sleep, family — that is a signal that professional support could help.