DBT is for Everyone

Oftentimes it can feel like we aren’t in control of our own lives and that our emotions are the ones running the show. When we’re overwhelmed, scared, angry, or upset to the point of having a breakdown, we’re prone to making decisions, saying and doing things we later regret because those extreme emotions have taken the reins away from us.

Emotional regulation (being able to manage and regulate our most intense emotions) is the core principle behind DBT, or Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. DBT was originally designed for people with Borderline Personality Disorder, since having BPD means you’re often struggling with trying to restrain your intense emotions and impulses.

However, DBT is not exclusively for people with BPD. Everyone needs help with emotional regulation at some point, and DBT skills and techniques are useful for anyone who wants to have a bit more control over their mind and body.

What is DBT?

DBT as a therapy is made up of loads of different tools and skills that can be used individually and collected together. It’s basically a smorgasbord of techniques that you can choose from, buffet-style, to help you manage and regulate your emotions in one-time tricky situations and over the long-term.

Mindfulness

The first and most foundational skill in DBT is mindfulness. Being mindful means being aware of yourself and your emotions as you experience them. By practicing mindfulness in your daily life, you can learn to approach any situation, good or bad, with awareness and acceptance.

It’s easier said than done, but when we’re able to notice what emotions show up for us when someone says something hurtful or things don’t turn out how we expect them, we’re able to move from feeling outraged and overwhelmed to a mindset of willingness and openness.

You don’t have to be perfect at it, but just attempting to think mindfully is essential for better understanding your most extreme emotions and working with them, rather than

against them. Getting a handle on being mindful opens the door to lots of other DBT tools to use in any given scenario.

No one technique is going to work for everyone, and not everyone will benefit from all of them, so a lot of the process of DBT involves trying out different skills to see what works for you in different circumstances and environments.

Calming

For example, the Self-Soothing technique is a great way to calm yourself down ahead of time if you know you’re going into a situation where you’re likely going to be stressed or upset. Self-soothing is a Distress Tolerance skill, which means it’s most effective for dealing with overwhelming situations that put you in crisis mode. It involves finding different things for each of your five senses that help you feel calm, relaxed, and confident.

For some people, that involves a warm bubble bath with slow music and scented candles, but for others it’s better to go out in nature and start a campfire. In either situation, you’re focusing on feelings, sounds, and smells that sooth you and put you in the best possible state of mind to deal with whatever comes next.

Self-soothing can be great when you want to plan ahead and rejuvenate yourself ahead of difficult moments, but it’s not terribly useful when you’re dealing with the unexpected. When you’re going about your day and something suddenly goes wrong or a major change happens out of nowhere, you probably don’t have the time to draw yourself a bath or hike out into the woods with some firewood.

Distracting

This is where something like the TIPP skills is more useful. TIPP is a great set of Distress Tolerance tools to use immediately when you’re overwhelmed, caught off guard, and feel like your emotions are about to explode.

TIPP stands for Temperature, Intense exercise, Paced breathing, and Paired muscle relaxation. Each of these techniques is designed to be used right away to avoid acting rashly based on sudden, intense emotion and to use all that energy in a productive way.

• Temperature involves changing your body chemistry by changing your body temperature. It can involve throwing cold water on your face, clenching ice cubes in your hand until they melt, or just running outside when it’s chilly out. The purpose of this is to regulate your emotions by regulating your body. All your energy goes into focusing on the sudden change in your body rather than reacting to what’s happened to you.
• Intense exercise is exactly what it sounds like, but instead of packing up to go to the gym or putting on your running shoes, you find a quick and intense exercise you can do right away. Whether it’s jumping jacks, push-ups, or just running in place, you focus on building up a sweat rather than putting all your energy into an emotional outburst.
• Paced breathing, which is also known as box breathing, is just like breathing to calm yourself down, but you set a specific time limit on inhaling and exhaling so you don’t go too fast or breathe too heavy. Paced breathing usually goes 4 seconds inhaling, holding your breath for another 4 seconds, then 4 seconds exhaling followed by another 4 seconds of holding before you repeat. This type of breathing forces you to slow down and breath but it still requires more focus and attention rather than if someone told you to ‘just breathe.’
• The last one, Paired muscle relaxation, works a lot like Intense exercise but can be done seated or even lying down, so it’s incredibly useful when there’s no space to get up a move. You go through your entire body, starting with the toes, clenching and unclenching every muscle as hard as you can, one at a time. By the time you get to your face and forehead, you’ll find you’ve already used up a lot more energy than you thought.

So, when you’re so angry you see red, so anxious you start to have a panic attack, or get so overwhelmed you want to harm yourself or someone else, the TIPP skills are incredibly useful for moving your focus away from that intensity of that emotion. There’s a good chance you’ll find one of the skills more useful than the others, but it’s worth trying all of them out to see which one is the best fit.

How Everyone Can Benefit from DBT

Everyone at one point or another has struggled with their emotions taking control and doing or saying something they regretted. With so many different tools, DBT is a great way to help you understand what you’re experiencing and gain more control in how you anticipate and react to whatever difficulties come your way, no matter if you use one or two tools or rely on the entire toolbox.

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