Acceptance and commitment therapy with a young person runs on the same processes you use with adults, but what changes is the way into the conversation. If you ask a teenager about their values, draw them the hexaflex or debate their thoughts, you’ll more than likely get a shrug and a long look at the window. To engage with teens ACT needs to arrive through their own week.
This is where DNA-V comes in, because it provides a framework built for exactly this scenario. At its centre sit values and vitality: the people and moments that make a young person feel properly alive. Around that, the Advisor, the Noticer and the Discoverer map onto ACT processes in language a teenager can use without cringing.
We’ve worked through several examples here, starting with what many therapists will try first and then what we find tends to land better.
Find values through people and moments
Ask a 15-year-old “So, what are your values?” and the abstract nature of this will probably get an eye roll or an “I don’t know”. We know that teens reach values through specific people and specific moments of connection, so start there. Instead, you could try something like, “Who do you want to be for the people who matter to you?” Or come at it through vitality, as DNA-V does: “Think of a time you felt properly alive with your mates. What were you doing?”
The answers then can come back as a story. Maybe they were the one who stayed behind when a friend got dumped or they were the person who walked a younger sibling to school every day after their parents split. That’s a value in the client’s own words, attached to a moment you can both return to when things get hard.
Teach through their world
Drawing the hexaflex for a teenager usually means watching them study the floor. Alternatively, use the material already in their pocket, like the group chat they’ve left on read. This is a more relevant and practical teaching example: what did their mind say as the messages kept coming, and what did leaving it on read cost them? The client leans in, because it’s their life on the whiteboard.
Feelings check-ins can work the same way. If “How does that make you feel?” gets a “dunno”, ask “If that worry was a notification, what would the preview say?”. The format is familiar, and it puts a small gap between the teen and the worry. That gap is early defusion but you haven’t had to explain it to make it work.
Let the Noticer handle the surge
Your client has a meeting with their head of year in ten minutes, and their body is already in it. Telling them to calm down asks for something nobody can do on command. Try: “Where is the Noticer picking this up? Chest, stomach, hands? Let’s watch it for ten breaths.” The surge still comes. Noticer practice builds the capacity to feel it and still choose the next move.
Test thoughts by workability, and keep it playful
Try debating a thought like “I’m going to fail this exam” and you’ll both run out of evidence. Teens are good at arguing, and better at agreeing just to end the conversation. Instead, the Advisor gives you a lighter route. “Your Advisor has a forecast. Thanks, Advisor. Does the forecast help you revise tonight?” You test the thought by its workability and leave its accuracy alone.
This same move loosens rigid rules. An Advisor that has said “be perfect and people will like you” for years has shrunk a lot of behaviour, and a quick workability check gives the client a reply: “Cheers, Advisor. Noted. I’m sending the message anyway.”
Play can do the rest. Twenty minutes of reasoning with “I’m weird” goes round in circles but read the thought aloud in a football commentator’s voice and the client laughs. The thought is still there but with less grip on what they do next.
Swap prediction for data
If your client has been skipping the canteen all week because lunch went badly on Monday then the Advisor’s prediction is running things, and every skipped lunch protects the theory from being tested. The Discoverer can turn this it into an experiment. For one week, ask them to sit with a friend for ten minutes, then write down what happened. Once real data is on the page, avoidance begins to lose its main evidence.
Goals should get the same treatment. “Be more confident” is too vague to test. Swap it for asking one question in maths on Thursday, then noticing what the Advisor and the body do next. A small, observable step gives the Discoverer something to learn from, and the client builds confidence through doing.
Work with parents, and leave the rules to them
It’s tempting to hope the parent waits outside but with adolescents, the parent is often part of the work. Before they join, agree with your client what gets shared and what stays between the two of you. Then watch for the moment a parent reaches to fix their teen’s distress with reassurance or a solution. Invite them to notice that urge and sit with it next to their teen. The teen watches an adult make room for discomfort in real time, and the parent gets their own practice.
Phones are where many therapists slip into the parent’s chair. Negotiating a screen time rule in session makes you one more adult setting limits. Ask what the 11pm scrolling does for them, and what it costs them the next day. Now the client is weighing it up, and you’re on the same side of the table.
Let the session look less like therapy
Plenty of practitioners start out needing the session to look like therapy, with two chairs and a worksheet. Teens often do their best work side by side, with their hands busy so something as simple as a game of Uno can carry a full piece of ACT work. Losing stings, and that sting is exactly what you want the client practising making room for, in the moment, with you there. A client who can make room for a Draw Four played on them is rehearsing for next week’s lunch queue.
Why DNA-V is worth learning
ACT fits adolescence because its processes match what a teenager is up against: a loud mind and a social world that shifts by the hour. DNA-V is how you get those processes into a 15-year-old’s week. The Advisor, Noticer and Discoverer give your client names for what’s happening in their head and body, and they give you both a shared language that still works in the canteen and the group chat. That’s why it’s worth learning properly. The work has done its job when a teen says “that’s just my Advisor” without you in the room.