Building a Life Worth Living: Stabilizing Wild Emotions with Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)

If you have ever burst into tears out of frustration or anger or overreacted emotionally to a situation that really didn’t warrant that strong a reaction, you may benefit from exploring Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). 

That doesn’t mean much if you don’t know what it is! 

DBT was developed by Marsha Lineham in the 1970s, to help chronically suicidal patients, often those with borderline personality disorder. These people were not being helped with any of the standard methods of the day, usually cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) that works by changing unhelpful thought patterns.

DBT introduces four core skills of top of the CBT approach: 

• mindfulness
• acceptance & distress tolerance 
• emotional regulation 
• interpersonal relationships

It turns out DBT works wonders, and not just for suicidal patients. The DBT skills, when integrated into daily life greatly help regulate emotions and behaviours. 

How? By teaching clients how to identify the triggers that cause them to react, and by teaching a suite of specific coping skills and exercises that can be applied to help avoid the reactions and overreactions. 

Dialectical means the existence of opposites. DBT itself teaches two strategies that seem to be opposite:

1. Accepting reality as it is
2. Changing to improve that reality so you can build a ‘life worth living’

In other words, accepting your life and your experiences while simultaneously working to change your life and experiences. 

DBT rests on the foundation of mindfulness practices. Mindfulness means living intentionally with awareness of the present moment, but without judging, interpreting, or rejecting the moment - just acknowledging what is happening in the here and now. 

Mindfulness and mindfulness skills can be practiced anywhere, at any time, no matter what is happening. All that is required is to pay attention to the moment, the immediate here and now. Without judgement. Just with acknowledgement. That’s it. 

Mindfulness is critical to DBT because it helps increase control of your thoughts and your attention and it helps open your eyes to reality, not to what you want reality to be. 

When you are mindful, you can access your ‘Wise Mind’. This DBT concept enables you to slow down and find the space between your ‘reasonable’ mind and your ‘emotional’ mind. The reasonable mind is rational and cool, whereas the emotional mind is hot and ruled by mood, feelings, and urges. 

The Wise Mind brings the hot and cool together in balance on a middle path between the extremes. It allows you to assess the value of both reason and emotion instead of getting flooded with only one side of the equation.

Finding the Wise Mind takes practice, just like learning any new skill. It is a great idea to practice Wise Mind in situations that are not critical. For example, if you see an outfit that you love and want to buy, you can practice calling on your logic mind. This helps slow down your decision-making and allows you to contemplate if you can afford it, if it is something you will wear often or not, and if you really need another outfit. 

Maybe you buy it. Maybe you don’t. But either way, you used a solid decision-making process that makes it less likely you will spend time in the future ruminating over how you should/should not have acted. 

DBT can be a literal life-saver. And it can also be a valuable tool for less extreme situations like chronic emotional reactivity. If you’ve ever felt ruled by your emotions, explore some DBT. It doesn’t have to be expensive! There are free DBT courses available online that you can take to explore more concepts and see if DBT is for you. 

Enjoy!