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“Talking about teens is one of my favorite things,” therapist and author Katie K. May told me at the start of our conversation. Katie is the author of You’re On Fire, It’s Fine, and her work centers on helping families understand what’s really happening beneath intense teenage behavior. In our conversation, Katie unpacked why some teens experience emotions as overwhelming and all-consuming, what parents often do (with good intentions) that accidentally makes it worse, and how to communicate in a way that builds trust, safety, and emotional skills over time. Katie’s Story: Pain, Coping, and Breaking the Cycle Katie’s expertise comes not only from clinical training, but from lived experience. She shared openly that she “struggled as a teenager,” raised by a single dad who “didn't have the skills to parent, let alone parent a fire-feeler, deep-feeling teenager like me.” To survive, she used what she now recognizes as coping strategies –“self-harming, using substances, doing anything I could to escape the pain that I was feeling inside of me.” The turning point came in her mid-20s: “It wasn't until a surprise pregnancy… that I really had the motivation… to realize that there was a world that was bigger than the pain inside of me.” That realization led her into healing and eventually into the work she now does with teens and parents.  Who Are “Fire Feelers”? Katie coined the term fire feeler because she “really wanted a way to illustrate for people who are not fire feelers what it is like to have the experience of having these big and overwhelming emotions.” A fire feeler is a teen who feels intensely, reacts quickly, and takes longer to calm down. In Katie’s words, these are “your zero to 60 in 10 seconds flat kind of kids… and who take a really long time to calm down once they are triggered.” And the internal experience can feel consuming: “The way that I describe this is that your feelings are so big that it feels like you're on fire with your emotions, that you're all consuming.” This framing matters because it shifts the lens. If a teen feels like they’re on fire inside, of course their brain searches for relief. As Katie put it: “It makes sense that a person's brain would come up with solutions to make that fire go out.” Those “solutions” often look like the behaviors parents fear most: “self-harm, self-destructive behaviors, drugs and alcohol, binging, scrolling, numbing out, lashing out, cutting off relationships.” And her reframe is crucial: “So what most people see as the problem is actually a solution for a fire-feeler who's overwhelmed with their own emotions.” Why “You’re Fine” Can Backfire Katie made an important distinction between invalidation and validation and emphasized that many invalidating responses come from loving parents who are trying to help. Invalidation can sound like minimizing: “that's not a big deal,” or “everyone has friend troubles.” Or it can sound like quick fixes: “Go take a walk… take a nap… go get a snack.” These are well-meaning, but for a fire feeler, they can land painfully. Katie used a metaphor that sticks: “It's so easy to make this feeling go away… it feels like a little squirt gun of water for this person. Like it's not helping make the fire go out.” Worse, the teen may internalize the message that something is wrong with them: “It's giving this underlying message that it is easy to make these feelings go away, but it's not for me. So, there must be something wrong with me that I can't make this go away.” What Validation Actually Looks Like Validation is not agreeing with everything a teen thinks or does. Validation is communicating: I see you. I hear you. Your feelings make sense. Katie said it starts before words, with presence: “The first is just presence and paying attention.” She shared a memorable line from her work with younger kids that applies to teens too: “Your attention flows where your nose goes.” In practice, that can mean pausing what you’re doing and showing you’re listening, even when the topic seems small. Because, as Katie reminded us: “They're not going to come to us with the bigger things if we can't show that we're there… for the smaller things.” Then, scripts can be simple: “That sounds really hard.” Or: “We're just naming, we're paraphrasing and repeating back… I see that you're really sad about this.”  Raising a teenager with big emotions can feel overwhelming, especially when nothing you say seems to help. In this episode (Season 2, Episode 31) available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, author and therapist Katie K. May shares strategies for how parents can help their teens. Katie introduces the concept of “fire-feelers,” teens who experience emotions intensely and struggle to calm down once triggered. Drawing from her own lived experience and years of clinical work using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), she explains why common parenting strategies like minimizing, fixing, or pushing for conversations often backfire. The Escalation Trap Between Parents and Teens Katie described a common dynamic where parents and teens unintentionally trigger each other: “We call it the transactional model and it's this idea that what I do or say influences you and what you do or say influences me.” A familiar pattern: teen is overwhelmed and says, “leave me alone,” then heads to their room. A parent follows, thinking, “They're being disrespectful,” or feeling urgency to fix things now. The conflict escalates until it reaches “a crisis point.” Katie’s alternative is simple, but not easy: regulate yourself first. Let things cool. Then return to problem-solve. She summed it up with a line that applies everywhere: “I like to say that you can't teach someone to swim when they're drowning… you can't solve a problem when you're both flooded with emotions.” A “Text Check-In” Instead of a Face-to-Face Blowup Katie also offered a concrete strategy for reconnecting after cooling down, especially with emotionally sensitive teens who may “read the nuance in your facial expressions and your tone of voice.” Her suggestion: “I like something called the text check-in.” And she gave the script verbatim: “Text check-in, hey, I'm a little bit calmer, how about you? Are you ready to talk about this yet?” The goal is collaboration, not control: “You're inviting them to be collaborative in when and how we problem solve.” Validation and Boundaries Can Coexist For parents with a more authoritarian background, Katie emphasized that warmth does not eliminate limits: “Having the ability to validate your teen… does not change the fact that teens still need limits and boundaries and expectations.” But boundaries work best when they focus on what you will do, not demanding a teen’s emotional performance. Katie offered a clear example: “Hey, I really don't like the way that you just talked to me. I don't feel good about that. I'm leaving the room when you're ready to talk to me in a different way.” And she reinforced why: “Removing yourself from situations like that are going to be more effective than demanding a different response.” What to Say When a Teen Shares Suicidal Thoughts When the stakes are high, Katie was very direct. If a teen discloses suicidal thoughts, start with: “Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for telling me.” Then: “Mind your face. Mind your tone. be a calm presence.” If the teen has acted on an urge, the first step is safety: “We wanna make sure that we're getting medical or emergency support… as a first step to stabilize.” “Trying to Hold a Beach Ball Underwater” Toward the end of our conversation, we returned to a question many parents ask: how can teens feel intense emotions safely instead of suppressing or numbing them? Katie’s answer was one of the most powerful metaphors in the interview: “It's like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. Like you can only control it for so long before it pops out of the water and you never know who it's gonna hit in the face at that point.” She explained why quick-fix strategies are tempting: “We use these short term strategies to make emotions go away quickly because it works in the short term but it makes life harder in the long term.” The real work depends on capacity and safety. For some teens, emotions spike so intensely that moving too fast can increase risk. That’s why she focuses on skill-building and support: “wanting to make sure they have the right skills to manage emotions and then having the right guide, which in my opinion is a therapist, to help them build tolerance… over time.” The Core Message: “Parents Go First” Katie closed with a point she wanted parents to hear clearly: “I really like to drive home the point that parents go first.” If teens are learning skills, parents have to model them: “It is a parent's responsibility to learn how to manage their emotions, to model better management of their emotions if they expect the same of their child.” And she added one more clear recommendation: “If teens are in therapy, parents need to be in therapy too so that they can all be working on feelings and skills together and separately.”
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