Dialectical behaviour therapy, my journey

  Heya ^-^ This post is a continuation to finding out how to maintain relationships and self-respect while being confident in asking for things or saying no. In the book Marsha Linehan described that there are three goals for any social interaction: the objective, the relationship and the self-respect goal. At first I found it difficult to completely understand these, but asking questions helped me to get a grasp. The objective or specific result that you want. For example an objective can be getting a person to do a thing, change how they behave, give information or say no to their request. I found it to be useful to answer the question: “What do I want/need?”. The relationship itself can be a goal. For example, having another person think positively of you or feel warm. It felt easy to find this goal by asking: “How do I want the other person to feel about me?”. The self-respect goal or how do you want to feel about yourself after the interaction, whether the other goals are m...

  Heya ^-^ I wrote a bit about myths / worries / assumptions getting in the way of asking for things you want or need or just saying no to people. This is the messy side, the side of how I am, in practice, trying to implement the information into my daily life. Associated with the book there were a bunch of worksheets and one of them was an exercise of picking the myths that you believe in and then challenging them rationally. Unfortunately there were no examples about the rationalization. I wrote down the myths which I recognized from the weight in my chest when reading them: Next, I tried to challenge them by making them extreme and generalised. This was actually mentioned in the book as a practice to have when teaching about the myths. It was an interesting exercise in the sense that it made my mind go “yea… doesn’t really make sense to believe this”. Here is how my battle went: In the book there were four ways mentioned for dealing with the myths. To my disappointment three of ...

 Hi ^^  I wanted to change my blog a bit! For now I have been summarizing what I have learned. However, I think it might be more fun to share a bit more. Things would get more messy, but maybe they would also be more me <3 I started learning DBT because my psycologist told me after 3 free sessions that it would be expensive. I don't know how expensive it could possibly be if a childless post poctoral reseacher is told this!  Anyway, I am confident that I can learn a new field of science. So I searched for a good book to start with. I decided a manual teaching the actual DBT skills would be the best. Especially when it was written by the person who came up with DBT...to fix herself. The beginning of the book described how to arrange the differrent health care professionals around the patient as well as which schedule to have.  To feel less overwhelmed and for having a feeling of progress I made myself a cute little study plan:  On the top I have my goals to re...