What Is DBT?
It’s a set of tools for regulating emotion, reducing impulsivity, and improving relationships.
Wise Mind
Your thoughts can be charged with emotion, detached through reason, or balanced by wisdom.
What Skills
Observe your experience. Describe sensations. Participate fully in your current activity.
How Skills
Respond non-judgementally. Focus your attention. Behave effectively.
Apply the Skills
“Let's look at an example of how you can bring these skills into your everyday life.”
T.I.P.P.
Settle intense emotions using temperature, exercise, breathing, and muscle relaxation.
Distract and Self-Soothe
Divert your attention using seven activities. Be kind to yourself using your five senses.
Reality Acceptance
You can deny the truth, and suffer needlesly—or welcome it, and take effective action.
Model of Emotions
They have antecedents, give us urges and sensations, are acted out, and have consequences.
Opposite Action
Name the emotion. Identify the urge. Take an action that contradicts it. Repeat.
Reducing Vulnerability: ABC
Accumulate good experiences. Build a sense of achievement. Cope with challenges in advance.
Reducing Vulnerability: PLEASE
Treat illness. Eat healthfully. Avoid mood-altering drugs. Sleep well. Exercise regularly.
Mindfulness of Emotions
Observe your feelings. Notice sensations. Accept your experience with curiosity and love.
DEARMAN
Describe. Express. Assert. Reinforce. Be mindful. Appear confident. Negotiate.
GIVE
To strengthen your relationships, be gentle, interested, validating, and easy of manner.
FAST
Be fair to yourself. Apologize only if you’ve erred. Stick to your values. Tell the truth.
Summary
Like a new language, these skills are honed through practice, patience, and real-world use.
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DBT: Skills for Life
Plunge your face into ice water. Do mental math. Exercise intensely. These behaviors and many others can help us rein in our emotions when they get the better of us, says author and psychologist Shireen Rizvi.
In DBT: Skills for Life, she draws on her decades of clinical experience to teach Dialectical Behavior Therapy: a proven set of techniques we can use immediately when our passions surge—and which, over time, can bring us more clarity and better relationships.
to listen to all 17 sessions in this series.
Artwork by Kori Alan Fry