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.
Stop Fixing Teens! How Systems Create Safety, Change, and Lives Worth Living
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.
Many counselors struggle to understand why an adolescent's survival strategies like self-harm and substance use persist even after the client has been in therapy for a lengthy period of time. Additionally, counselors often fail to see how caregiver stress, therapist burnout, and unclear roles contribute to the creation of crisis cycles, and how proper alignment prevents them.
Participants will:
1. Apply a framework for seeing teen behaviors as communication.
2. Utilize the Teen-Support Person Safety Rating Scale to to practice relational safety
3. Develop tools from the Teen Coping Code to decode behaviors and guide interventions.