Philadelphia DBT: Skills for When You're Going to Lose Your Sh*t

Philadelphia Dialectical Behavior Therapy: when you’re about to lose your sh*t or Need to accept reality.

Have you ever felt so unbelievably horrible, that you’d do anything to make yourself feel better? I have.

What about, have you ever done something to make yourself feel better or acted on your emotions, that you actually created more problems for yourself and made things worse for yourself? Yep, me too.

Acting on Your Emotions- It happens to everyone.

Case in point.

For those of you who know me, I hate vacuuming. I absolutely HATE it. And yet, it’s something that needs to be done periodically- It’s like a necessary evil. That being said, I usually do whatever it takes to not vacuum. However, on one given day, I found myself vacuuming because we were expecting company later that day. As I was scurrying around trying to clean up last minute, I kept having problems with the old vacuum we had. It wasn’t getting underneath the sofas and it didn’t seem to have very much suction. Jump forward several minutes and I found myself slamming the vacuum around, attempting to somehow squeeze it under the sofa and get it to magically fit into smaller spaces.

Then, a piece fell off the front of it. A minute later, the vacuum lay in pieces everywhere outside my house in my yard.

Did it feel good to take out my wrath on the vacuum? F*ck yeah it did. Did I cause more problems and make things worse? Absolutely. I now had all of those vacuum parts/pieces to clean up AND I had nothing left to use to finish vacuuming.

Hopefully, you can see my points in this example. One, that I too, as well as most everyone else, “has moments”, and two, that while I felt better for a brief moment while beating up the vacuum cleaner, it only created more problems and made things worse for me.

Maybe for you, it’s something completely different. Maybe when you feel like sh*t, you try to avoid feeling like that by spending money, or maybe you yell at your spouse or maybe you spew off on social media.

For many of my clients, this tends to happen a lot. They will often go to extremes to not feel any emotional pain or “negative” emotions, which may include acts of self-harm, violent arguments, or reckless driving.

People aren’t taught how to experience or tolerate painful emotions.

Here’s the thing.

Emotional Pain is part of life.

Pain is inevitable; long-term suffering is not. Yet, more often than not, we aren’t taught how to effectively manage or experience emotional pain. Instead, we are taught how to avoid the pain; the challenges; the hardship.

We aren’t often taught how to skillfully survive painful sh*t; the painful stuff that inevitably is part of life; that comes up during a crisis. And, honestly, I don’t know anyone who wants to experience emotional pain, so it makes perfect sense that we are so often told how to avoid the painful stuff, instead of experiencing it. In fact, most people try their very best to avoid anything thing emotionally painful. I mean, who wouldn’t want that? 

DBT Skills Training in Philadelphia

DBT Skills Training consists of four modules. Distress tolerance is one of the modules. DBT Distress Tolerance Skills focuses on how to experience painful experiences effectively and skillfully.

DBT Distress Tolerance Skills: What are they?

DBT Distress Tolerance Skills are the skills you use to help you get through really, really painful sh*t, the emotionally intense stuff, those ever so yucky, negative feelings, without making things worse or remaining miserable.

Remember my above examples? Yep, those would all apply. Also, sometimes the stuff we do to feel better works, but then also creates even more painful problems, right? Think about drowning your sorrows with booze, gambling away your paycheck, or flipping off that police officer… 

Distress tolerance means being able to skillfully navigate really painful, challenging situations and scenarios without making things worse for you or causing more misery. They aren’t meant to make us feel better. I mean, they may help elicit positive emotions, but the idea isn’t to feel better.

They’re designed to be used for short-term problems and to help you effectively get through the crap. The idea is to survive the sh*t, not make things worse or cause more problems.

Why are DBT Distress Tolerance Skills important?

Simply put, they help us survive crises. They also help us to accept reality, instead of demanding that things need to be different. As a side note, accepting something doesn’t mean we agree or support something. Accepting reality helps us not remain stuck in our endless suffering (but more on that later in a future post).

Distress tolerance skills also help us become free from the urges and demands that painful, negative, intense emotions can cause us to want to do. You know, when your emotions are screaming at you to act a certain way.

DBT Distress Tolerance Skills have two different categories of skills.

Specifically, the two different sets of skills are Crisis Survival Skills and Accepting Reality Skills.

In subsequent posts, I will dig deeper into what each of those skill sets. For now, I hope this helps you gain a bit more of an understanding of the importance of tolerating distress, instead of endlessly attempting to avoid inevitable hardship and pain which is part of life.

BPD Treatment in Philadelphia

If you’re someone who wasn’t ever taught how to tolerate painful life stressors, or are stuck feeling miserable in your own personal hell, DBT can help bring you out of hell. Learning how to effectively and skillfully get through life’s painful sh*t is hard. It isn’t impossible and there is hope.

Philadelphia DBT

As a DBT therapist in Philadelphia, I offer standard, outpatient DBT for Borderline Personality Disorder treatment. DBT has been shown to be effective in helping people solve the problems in their lives that are causing them so much emotional pain, such as relationship issues, and intense, out-of-control anxiety.

If you are ready to begin finding the relief you so desperately want and are ready to learn how to tolerate life’s inevitable pain, please reach out today. I provide free video consultations for DBT. You can schedule a therapy consultation by clicking HERE or by calling me at 717-685-5074.