DBT Philadelphia: Don’t Make Things Worse & Use Crisis Survival Skills

You wish you knew how to find relief from your misery and yet every time you try, you end up doing things you later regret. You’ve messed up relationships and felt even worse about yourself. You often ask yourself why your feelings, emotions, and relationships have to be so hard; why do relationships seem to always bring you pain?

DBT can help you find more effective ways to solve your problems that don’t end up making things worse.

So many people have never learned how to get through an emotional crisis, that when they experience one, they end up doing things that don’t help them in the long run or make the situation worse. For some people, when they are experiencing high stress, or going through a difficult, challenging time, they do things that they later regret, often leading to more suffering.

For some people, this could be “above and beyond” expressions of anger, such as violence, verbal abuse, self-harm, or binging on food or booze. These behaviors, while may have helped provide some brief relief from the emotional pain, more often than not, cause other people to not want to be around them, additional relationship problems, more shame, guilt, etc.

In my last blog post, I examined the importance of learning how to tolerate and experience emotions- all of them, instead of endlessly trying to avoid or escape the pain and misery.

DBT Crisis Survival Skills

Today, I’m going to dig a bit deeper into DBT Skills Training, specifically of distress tolerance skills, that target crisis survival.

As a Philadelphia DBT therapist, I view an emotional crisis as a short-term, emotionally stressful, often traumatic event, that causes you to have an urgency to fix or solve whatever it is right away. I’m going to guess you’ve probably been in a situation in which you just couldn’t “think straight”, felt an intense pressure to take care of whatever it was immediately.

When learning about crisis survival skills, it’s important to know that these skills are not designed to necessarily make you feel better. They may produce positive feelings, although, they are intended to just help you get to a point where you can “think straight”. You know, so you don’t make things worse for yourself, cause more problems in your relationships, or destroy what you want to happen.

When to use DBT Crisis Survival Skills?

When I teach my clients about using crisis survival skills, I make sure to explain when to use them. It’s necessary to know that these skills are for surviving emotional crisis situations. That means, when you’re under stressful, emotional duress, you’re fighting the urge to do something about it right away and not thinking clearly. In other words, it has to be a problem that can’t be solved right away, and/or a situation in which you simply cannot afford to make it worse for yourself.

For instance, let’s say you’ve made plans with your bestie to meet up for lunch. It’s been a while since you two have been able to get together and you’re really looking forward to seeing her. Plus, you’d really like to talk with her about your ex, who’s been giving you a hard time. About an hour before you’re scheduled to meet up, you get a text from your friend, telling you that something’s come up and she needs to bail on you. You’re crushed, livid, and hurt. What you want to do is let her know how hurt and rejected you feel, by calling her a bitch or accusing her of being selfish.

Let’s break this down a bit. Yes, this could be considered an emotional crisis, because it’s bringing up stressful, painful feelings and there’s an urge inside of you to fix this problem right away; to let her know right now how upset you are. Your urge to let her have it will most likely make things worse for you. It would most likely really upset your friend, could severely damage your relationship, which would probably leave you feeling even more abandoned and rejected.

DBT Skills Training can help you learn how to effectively and skillfully deal with your problems so regret your behavior.

Want to learn some actual DBT skills that can help you tackle these sorts of problems? Next week, I’ll share with you one of my favorite DBT skills that I teach my clients to help them learn to tolerate distress.

Philadelphia DBT Therapist

If you’re struggling to deal with painful life experiences and ongoing relationship problems, please know that there are practical ways you can learn to help you get through the mess. DBT can help you climb out of your personal hell and create the life that you want.

DBT Therapy in Philadelphia

As a DBT therapist, I offer free, 15-minute consultations for DBT Therapy, treatment for BPD, and anxiety therapy. If you’re ready to make changes in your life, maintain your relationships, and create a life worth living, reach out today. DBT consultations can be scheduled HERE.