Dialectical behaviour therapy, my journey

Emotions exist for a reason . They have an actual functional role in our daily living.  The functional role of emotions is to motivate us to do things. They motivate us to fight and flee, care and share. You know that feeling just before presenting in front of an audience? Or preparing to meet your crush? Or joining a new group of people? Or stepping into a dark alley? These are all situations where our emotions are signaling us. Signaling us about the importance of our performance or a potential danger. Emotions do not just happen to exist. Emotions are something far more logical (wait, what?) and complex. Emotions are an evolutionary alarm system triggered by signals of importance. And what is a signal of importance changes from person to person. Each of us has different emotions towards the same situation. This is why one can learn much about oneself by capturing their own emotions as they happen. Understanding which emotions are taking place and why, will allow us to gaze dee...

Heya ^^ Asking for things or saying no can stir up a lot of anxiety. For me personally, I can feel unworthy or not deserving of the thing I need to ask for.  This time I wanted to share my experiments with the most practical tool from the book so far. The d.e.a.r.m.a.n system. In summary, it is a checklist that you can lean on when asking for a thing or saying no. Interestingly having a protocol can give confidence for asking or for saying no. I have found that the best part of this technique is exactly that, it gives you confidence and makes you more confident in asking what you need or saying no to a thing you want to refuse. D - describe what is the situation, but just the facts that can be observed For example, I have (legal) vacation days remaining E - express, about how you feel and think For example, I really need a vacation right now and I think now is a good time to have it. Just a side note, I am really hesitant to bring up my own feelings. However, other people won't kno...

  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...

You have probably also been faced by a situation where you need to ask someone for something or when I have to say no to a person? For me these situations often feel stressful. Sometimes so stressful that I need days in advance to mentally prepare and after the situation I find myself sweaty and shaking. It would be great to avoid these horrible situations altogether! Unfortunately that is not really a sustainable solution.     I recently read something relieving. Apparently it is a skill to maintain relationships and self-respect while being confident in asking for things or saying no. Yes please!  I had never thought that one could treat social behavior as skill, but it makes sense I guess? This magical skill of better tomorrow consists of two key abilities, 1) analyzing social situations and 2) determining one's goals. Sounds so … doable. But what does it mean in practice?  In a nutshell it is mindfulness in a social context. In which, to be honest, maybe the...

Heya, and happy new year ^-^ Have you  tried doing something while worrying about it might seem out to others? Quite some time ago, when I was a young adult, I was faced with the horror of the dance floor. The thought of dancing in public got my gut all twisted up and occasionally made me skip social events. If I did get to the dance floor, I would be awkwardly moving my legs from left to right and back while feeling very much out of place. Then once, after a firm refusal to join the others, I was watching the dancing crowd. I was particularly fixated on people who seemed to be one with the music. That was so mesmerizing and I was curious, so I tried to analyze their strategy of dancing. There were no patterns to be seen. Some seemed to have obtained the ability to move completely chaotically, yet so perfectly. The only common denominator seemed to be their enjoyment of the motion and the music. I decided to give this a chance, to just focus on enjoying the motion and the music. In...

Eyo ^-^ Mindfulness contains tools to take control of your mind. Describing allows you to become separate   from your thoughts and feelings. Describing also allows one to deal with the feelings of others as well as external pressure. You can't control what happens externally, but you can take control of what will follow internally. ~ Mindfulness is a set of tools to claim the control of your mind. These tools are  1) Wise mind skills, the  2) how  and the  3) what  skills. Wise mind is your guide and connection to your values, while how-skills deal with how to practice mindfulness and what-skills are what to actually practice. Sometimes it can be easier to understand the whole instead of trying to understand each of these two (how/what) aspects separately. What-skills,  observing ,  describing  and  participating,  build onto each other, like steps on stairs. To climb to the next one, you need to stand on the previous one.  ~ T...

Heyy ^-^ I wanted to continue some on the mindfulness by describing the other two aspects of it. Mindfulness can be seen to consist of three sets of skills. 1) Wise mind , described in the previous post , and the 2) how and 3) what skills. How-skills are about how to practice mindfulness and what-skills are what to actually practice. The how and what skills are quite intertwined. For me it was easier to understand the whole instead of trying to understand each of these two aspects separately. What-skills are observing , describing and participating . The what skills build onto each other, like steps on stairs. To climb to the next one, you need to stand on the previous one. To be able to describe, you need to be able to observe, and to be able to participate, you need to be able to describe.  ~ I will start with with the base of the stairs: observing , and doing it along the how, which is non-judgmentally, one-mindfully and effectively.  Observing non-judgmentally , is...

 Hello ^-^ The first thing I immersed myself with was mindfulness. Mindfulness helped me to get rid of my stress and calm myself. Mindfulness is a bit tricky to explain, but I will do my best to convey my understanding of it. In short, mindfulness could be described as the mastery or control over your own mind. However, in my experience, mindfulness was not quite as unallowing and as disciplinary as this description might sound. One helpful way to see the mindfulness, is to think of your mind as a young puppy being enthusiastically all over the place. This would be your mind being 'mindless' and to become mindful would mean to learn the skill of patiently guiding, steering and motivating your mind in a kind manner, as you would do with a puppy. Mindfulness can also be seen as a practical skill, with the notion that it is not enough to know the components, but it is important to bring them together by practice. I think a good parallel can be drawn to drawing. Similar to the skil...

 Heelo ^-^ I am the many of nu and this is my journey through self-therapy to mend my broken mind. I guess I have always been breakable? There has always been something wrong with me? Maybe I never learned to be kind to myself? Sounds more depressing than it actually is, I assure you :p Something happened during my twenties. I let another person stab me where I was vulnerable and now I am scarred for this. This scar in my mind forces me to jump to painful conclusions. I will look at people and interpret that they think I should not be allowed to exist, that I am useless. I often get anxious for not getting things done in a blink of an eye. This anxiety, I have come to understand, is learned. Learned from being repeatedly told during my early adulthood that I was unwanted, had no value, was useless and lazy, if I did not achieve things within a given schedule. No matter how Ludacris this schedule was. I want to believe in a world were every person born has value. I want to end this ...