High school students are navigating pressures that did not exist in quite the same way a generation ago.
A conflict with a friend does not end when school does. It continues through texts and group chats late into the night. One embarrassing moment can be captured and passed around before they have made sense of it themselves. Academic pressure, changing friendships, family expectations, college decisions, and uncertainty about the future can all arrive at once.
Some teens respond by shutting down. Others react fast and regret it later. Some look completely fine while privately working very hard to hold everything together.
Riding the Wave is a twelve-week DBT skills group that gives high school students concrete tools for intense emotions, stress, impulsive reactions, relationships, and conflict.
Students learn a specific skill each week, practice it together, and try it in real situations before the next meeting. There is a curriculum, a workbook, and weekly practice that gets reviewed.
The move is from “I know I shouldn’t react this way” to “I actually know what to do instead.”
Each ninety-minute session follows the same shape: a brief mindfulness practice to arrive, a review of diary cards and how the week’s practice went (including the times it did not go well, which are often the most useful), direct instruction in a new skill with modeling and examples, then in-session rehearsal applied to something happening in a participant’s actual life. A fight with a parent. A group chat that turned on someone. A grade that came back lower than expected.
Students leave each week with a specific skill to practice and a way to track it.
Noticing what is happening inside and around them without getting swept away by it, including putting the phone down long enough to know what they actually feel.
Getting through crisis moments and urges without doing the thing they will regret: sending the message, posting it, walking out.
Understanding emotions, reducing vulnerability to overload through sleep and routine, and shifting emotions that do not fit the facts.
Asking for what they need, saying no, handling conflict, and keeping self-respect in relationships that live partly online.
Balancing acceptance and change with parents, teachers, and peers, and navigating the gap between what is expected at home and everywhere else.
Students navigating family expectations shaped by culture, immigration, or being first in their family to move through the American school system are especially welcome. That context is treated as real clinical material, not something to set aside.
Some groups run on set schedules, and some need enough interest before a new cohort starts. Joining an interest list does not obligate you to enrol.
