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Indiana Counseling Association Presents The Conversations that Shape Us Conference: What You Wish Other Mental Health Counselors Understood

Stop Fixing Teens! How Systems Create Safety, Change, and Lives Worth Living

Katie K. May, LPC, DBT-LBC
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Pricing

Information

Date & Time

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  • Apply a framework for seeing teen behaviors as communication.

  • Utilize the Teen-Support Person Safety Rating Scale to to practice relational safety

  • Develop tools from the Teen Coping Code to decode behaviors and guide interventions.

Educational Goal

The educational goal of this workshop is for attendees to learn why survival strategies like self-harm and substance use persist; see how caregiver stress, therapist burnout, and unclear roles create cycles of crisis and how alignment prevents them; discover why assessment, role clarity, and transactional awareness are more effective than rushed solutions; and build relational safety that works in real life, reduces hospitalizations, and strengthens the system around the teen.

Description

Teens don’t need to be fixed; they need systems that can understand, support, and hold them long enough for real change to happen. This presentation reframes high-risk teen behavior as communication and shows how treating the whole system — teen, caregivers, and therapists — improves outcomes. Katie introduces the Teen Coping Code™ to decode behavior and break cycles that keep families trapped in the revolving door of hospitalization.

Target Audience

  • Addiction Professional
  • Counselor
  • Marriage & Family Therapist
  • Psychologist
  • Social Worker

Presenters

Katie K. May, LPC, DBT-LBC
Katie K. May is a licensed therapist, author, speaker, and group practice owner. She founded Creative Healing, a multi-location teen support center in the Philadelphia area, and wrote the #1 Amazon best-seller You’re On Fire, It’s Fine. Her second book, Teen DBT in Practice teaches clinicians her framework for treating high-risk teens. Katie is one of the few Linehan Board Certified DBT Clinicians in Pennsylvania, which is the gold standard treatment for self-harm and suicidal behaviors. She equips parents and clinicians with practical, trauma-informed tools to decode behavior as survival and create lasting change.

Financially Sponsored By

  • Indiana Counseling Association