it works:
Think: Think about the situation from the other person’s perspective. How might they be interpreting the situation, including your words and actions? If you put yourself in the other person’s shoes and hear what you’re saying, what would you imagine?
Have empathy: What might the other person be feeling or thinking? Are they afraid of your aggression? Are they sad, feeling that you’re drifting apart? Are they feeling misunderstood?
Interpretations: Can you consider alternative interpretations or explanations for the person’s behavior? Make a list of alternative explanations, including positive or good reasons as to why the person responded in the way they did.
Notice: Try to reflect on how the other person has been trying to improve the situation. Notice attempts by the other person to be helpful and notice how they may themselves be struggling in their life in the present moment.
Kindness: In considering the perspective of another person, remember to be kind toward them in the way that you would hope that someone would be kind to you.
Widening your range of emotions
It’s in our nature as human beings to feel emotions. For people who are emotionally sensitive, emotions are the very experiences that make them suffer, and often all they want to do is to get rid of their emotions. Because they want to get rid of their emotions, the last thing they want to do is to examine them deeply, but that is the very thing that DBT requests of people.
If you’re emotionally sensitive, it’s possible that you feel a huge range of different feelings in response to situations. So, for instance, if you’re depressed, you may feel sad, but this sadness will often come with feeling lonely, misunderstood, hopeless, and so on. The reason why it is hard to identify exactly how you’re feeling is that the emotions seem to come on really quickly and they are then blended with other feelings as well as thoughts. As a result, the experience can be confusing.
To deal with what is actually going on and to address the main emotion being experienced, DBT gets patients to recognize the emotional experiences that occur most often and to separate out primary emotions and secondary emotions. In so doing, you’re more likely to describe how you are truly feeling:
Primary emotions: A primary emotion is the first emotion experienced, which is connected directly to the event that generated the emotion. The emotion is typically short in duration; however, as time passes and we get away from the event that caused it, the primary emotion rapidly dissipates and starts to take on other elements, such as thoughts or other emotions. Primary emotions are like a snowball that begins to slide down a steep mountain. Without slowing down, the primary emotion can gather steam and become an avalanche of secondary emotions that can be more overwhelming and harder to stop. It rarely stops and just stays as the snowball, and it is in the gathering of more snow and other things like rocks that it can become an avalanche. Primary emotions are less complicated and easier to understand. From a DBT perspective, there are ten primary emotions, and we review these further in Chapter 10.
Secondary emotions: Secondary emotions are essentially emotional reactions to primary emotions. These are learned emotional reactions that we typically develop as a result of the experiences of early childhood and observing our parents and their reactions. There is a wonderful explanation of secondary emotions from the movie Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, when Master Yoda says, “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” A way to know whether an emotion is primary or secondary is that if the emotion lingers long after an event has happened, it’s likely to be secondary. If the emotion is complex and hard to define or identify, it’s almost always secondary.
Breaking free of rigid choices
People who have conditions like BPD often have the experience of black-and-white thinking or make rigid all-or-nothing decisions. For some people, this way of living can lead to a pattern of recurring automatic negative thoughts that become increasingly destructive. So, a thought like “I can’t do anything right” can become “I am worthless” and then “I shouldn’t be alive.” The following sections help you break free of rigid thinking.
Moving from either/or to both/and
In DBT the key is to move away from a polarized position to a synthesized position, meaning that the truth in each position is acknowledged. The synthesis comes from what Dr. Marsha Linehan, who developed DBT, described as the recognition of truth in seemingly opposing positions, which she termed thesis and antithesis. Take the earlier example:
Thesis: “Because I make a lot of mistakes, I can’t do anything right, I am worthless, and so I shouldn’t be alive.”
Antithesis: “Making mistakes is not a big deal. Everyone makes mistakes. I shouldn’t really care about making mistakes.”
These are either/or types of statements. The first one is extreme and filled with all-or-nothing type thinking, and the second one invalidates the truth about what a person might actually be feeling.
Dialectical synthesis is the integration of a thesis and its antithesis in a way that acknowledges that change is the only constant in the universe and that it’s an enduring process. It further recognizes that all things are made of opposing forces, and particular to the context of DBT, dialectical synthesis integrates the most essential and core parts of two polarities in order to form a new meaning, a new understanding, or a new solution in a given situation.
Dialectical synthesis isn’t compromise. Whereas compromise is typically an agreement that is reached by each side making concessions, in dialectical synthesis, the agreement is reached by each side integrating the wisdom of the other side’s perspective, an understanding derived from genuine curiosity. The following is the dialectical synthesis of the preceding thesis and antithesis:
Dialectical synthesis: “It is true that I make mistakes, and also that others make mistakes. It is true that when I have such an experience, I think that I am worthless and that I should not be alive, and it is also true that everyone who is alive has made mistakes and they are not worthless. So, by acknowledging that I make mistakes and committing to learn and improve on the situations that lead me to make mistakes, I become a more skilled person, and the mistakes that I have made do not diminish my value and worth as a person.”
Choosing instead of reacting
We often react without thinking. This is most likely an evolutionary response. If a snake were to cross our path, we wouldn’t want to stop
