Midwest Center for Youth and Families is a critical resource for children and adolescents with complex mental illnesses, offering residential treatment designed to help those with bipolar disorder, borderline features, depression, severe ADHD, suicidal and self-harming behaviors, and more. In a structured, educational environment, the Midwest Center for Youth and Families team utilizes Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to provide compassionate care for youths struggling with mental health.
DBT is a growing, evidence based form of psychotherapy that validates feelings and problems, while challenging patients to make productive changes. Midwest Center for Youth and Families deploys a full-immersion form of DBT, where residents are surrounded by individuals trained in DBT. It is an environment that builds residents up, helping them learn to manage their emotions and stress in healthy ways.
“It’s a 50/50 balance where we first acknowledge negative thoughts and how they’re hurting us or preventing us from reaching our goals,” said Valerie Rowe, program director at Midwest Center for Youth and Families. “After that, we work to reframe them into more motivating and understanding thoughts.”
Every trained DBT practitioner focuses on training four sets of skills that help accomplish this reframing: mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. These are skills that patients at Midwest Center for Youth and Families can apply to everyday life, long after they graduate from the facility’s care.
“What we’re learning through DBT is that emotional expression is helpful and keeps us more stable,” Rowe said. “We often constrict or blunt our emotions in order to match what we think other people expect us to do, versus expressing how an experience really makes us feel. DBT helps find ways to express those emotions while managing the intensity.”
Midwest Center for Youth and Families works to help youths focus on the present, using the moment to build resilience and avenues toward a stronger future.
“It’s important to live in the day that you have, rather than the past or the future,” Rowe said. “Today is the day that we can do something. Often, our kids are stuck thinking about things that have already happened or are stressing too much about the future and what might happen. ‘Today’ isn’t typically crisis-oriented, so being present in today and connecting our emotions to the moment is much more stable.”
DBT is incorporated into everything at Midwest Center for Youth and Families, including the lesson plans of its accredited on-grounds school, Midwest Academy.
“DBT is embedded into the culture here,” Rowe said. “In the classrooms, their journals and writing tasks might be related to emotional expression, for example, and all of our staff, even the maintenance team, are trained in DBT.”
Rowe explained that having team members other than therapists and psychiatrists is critical to full-immersion DBT. It gives residents a shoulder to lean on and a person to talk to who appears outside of their usual curriculums.
“Some of our maintenance people have been here even longer than me,” Rowe said. “They’re the ones who are cleaning the kids’ units and interacting with them out of the classroom or office. Sometimes they’re even the person who gets the kids back on track because they’re a friendly, understanding, validating face. Maybe they’re mad at all the staff that they’re working with that day, but they’re not working with Robin or Mama D, the housekeepers.”
She recalled an instance where one resident was having a particularly difficult time and was reluctant to go to his therapy session.
“He was really scared to go and was crying,” Rowe said. “We were all around him, giving him hugs and encouraging him – and it wasn’t just me, who was his therapist, it was our housekeeper, our HR woman who checks in on him every day just to say, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’”
Midwest Center for Youth and Families is open to males ages 12 to 18 and females ages 10 to 18. DBT therapy can treat a broad array of mental illnesses, and some signs to look for in your child when considering it as an option include: poor conflict management, an inability to maintain relationships (romantic or otherwise), and an inability to talk about emotions.
To learn more about Midwest Center for Youth and Families, its approach to DBT therapy, and how to enroll your child, visit midwest-center.com.