href="#u26e35fda-8429-50c9-b0f5-b15e62373c9d">Chapter 11). When you use emotion regulation skills, you focus on dealing with difficult emotions without acting on behaviors that might have adverse consequences. On the other hand, distress tolerance skills are used for the tolerance and momentary acceptance of difficult situations without making the situations worse. Using all of these ideas on a regular basis is the DBT way to find emotional balance.
Identifying the emotion: SUN
Sensations: Focus on what you feel and the physical sensations in your body. Notice whether there is tension in any part of your body.
Urges: Do you have any urges to do anything in particular? Most emotions come with an action urge. For instance, people who are angry have the urge to attack, while people who are sad have the urge to cry or isolate.
Name (the emotion): When you put together the body sensations and action urges, it’s easier to name the emotion.
Riding out the emotion like a WAVE
Emotions are like waves: They will start to form, peak, and then come crashing down before petering out on the beach. The idea is to focus on the emotion, to notice it as it peaks, and then to ride it down until it is more manageable before acting on the urges.
NO NOT
Here, the task is to remind yourself that you are not your emotion. So, rather than saying “I am sad,” say “I feel sad.” By doing this, you aren’t making yourself and sadness equivalent. Also, if sad is who you are, then you can’t change that; however, if sadness is how you feel, then that is something that you can change. The task here is also not to enhance or suppress the emotion, because doing so makes a stressful situation even worse.
Practicing gratitude
Behavioral activation, a.k.a “get moving!”
Physical movement is a way to tackle emotional lows. Behavioral activation is based on the observation that, as a person becomes depressed, they increasingly engage in isolating and avoidance behaviors. The goal of behavioral activation, therefore, is to work with people who have unwanted mood states like depression by engaging in activities that have been shown to improve mood. Often, these are activities that a person enjoyed before they became depressed. These activities don’t need to be excessive. If a person enjoyed running before their depression, they don’t have to run a half-marathon to get moving. They might jog around the block or go for a 30-minute walk. The task is to make movement a part of their daily routine.
Opening Up
Opening up — the topic of this section — means realizing that you’re open to seeing other possibilities as a way of understanding situations and open to other ways of solving difficult problems. Rather than acting on impulse as a sole solution, when you open up, life becomes less one-dimensional and allows you to take greater control of your life.
Seeing different perspectives
The shift in perspective-taking is a powerful way that DBT uses to help people transform the way they see something. This can happen in various ways:
If a person feels that they have screwed up and are unlovable, the therapist might ask them what they imagine their best friend would say.
A person may reflect on whether the way they are treating themselves is consistent with their wise mind. Wise mind is the dialectical synthesis of rational mind and emotion mind — where these two states of mind integrate into a single state that leads to a more intuitive, values-based, and holistic course of action.
In some sessions, therapists might take a more concrete approach to perspective-taking by switching seats with their patient, so that the patient literally has a different point of view.
Other techniques go beyond simply imagining another person’s perspective by imagining what a person’s younger self would say about a certain situation, or what their future self would say about their current actions.
The following sections dig deeper into different methods of seeing different perspectives.
Projective and reflective perspectives
Perspective-taking is considered to be projective or reflective:
Projective perspective means projecting a point of view into the future; for instance, a therapist, or you yourself, might ask the question: “How do you imagine you will look next year after you have completed therapy?” Of course, you can’t actually know what you’ll look like, so the only way to think about this is to project your feelings and thoughts onto what you imagine your future self might look like.
When perspective-taking is reflective, it requires the observation of the current experience. So, the therapist might ask, “If you viewed yourself after you had completed a course of DBT a year from now, and could remember yourself as you are today, how would you describe yourself?”
The THINK skill
