Duriez, Nathalie

Addictive behavior and emotional regulation difficulties in adolescence - 2023.


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Adolescence is a time when individuals face many emotional, existential, and physiological challenges. Poor emotion regulation can lead to an inability to deal effectively with stress, anxiety, frustration, or other negative emotions. These difficulties, which often start in early childhood, can significantly influence the subjectivization process in adolescence, and increase the risk of addictive behavior. In this article, we present two clinical cases in family therapy: Flavien, an impulsive young man, and Eugénie, an alexithymic young girl. After exploring the relational context in which this emotion regulation deficit has developed, the therapist invites all family members to become more emotionally attuned and to discover together new, more adaptive emotion regulation strategies in order to improve the adolescent’s emotional functioning and reduce addictive tendencies.