Course Breakdown

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a practice that orients you and brings you where you are.   There are three main goals of Mindfulness (1) to reduce suffering and increase happiness, (2) to increase control of your mind and (3) to experience reality as it is.

Mindfulness has you learn to take your time, give yourself space. really engage with and get to know other people, intimately.  Mindfulness skills allow for everything to be valid. The significance that you give to experience, though it might not be objectively true, impacts what and how you experience.  Where you are at this moment in time may have some increased validity around things that are not objectively true. You can fact check that but, coming from the place that it is valid and you are valid and you are in a process which is also valid, helps you stay here to work through it.

Mindfulness is intentionally living with awareness in the present moment.

It is participating, choosing and being responsible for how you show up in your life.  When you do these things you do not judge or reject the moment.  You will learn wise mind, “what” skills, “how” skills and other perspectives.

Interpersonal Effectiveness

Community and loving relationships, teamwork and supporting each other are some of the most centering, whole-hearted and satisfying parts of life.  Being seen and feeling you are a welcomed part of the environments you have is essential to feeling grounded.  If you do not have these connections, you tend to feel shame, alienation, separateness and anxiety.

You belong.  You are welcome.  You matter. 

Growing in your skills with others is the doorway to seeing and experiencing that in your depth.  Trusting this part of life and the people you surround yourself with creates security.  You will learn to manage and feel safe in conflict, ask for what you want, know what you need, get that “NO” is a complete sentence, feel courageous enough to use your “NO” while respecting yourself and others.  You will also learn how to accept when you, or others in your life, change and how to end destructive or toxic relationships.  One aspect of skillful intimacy is being able to leave with love.

Emotion Regulation

Difficulties in regulating painful emotions are central to the behavioral difficulties of many people. From their perspective, painful feelings are, most often, the problem to be solved.  Dysfunctional behaviors are, then, often used as behavioral solutions to intolerably painful emotions.  People with high emotional sensitivity and/or intensity or frequent emotion distress can benefit from learning skills to regulate their emotions.  So can everyone else. Emotion Regulation requires application of mindfulness skills, using nonjudgmental observation and description of your current emotional responses.  Much emotional distress is a result of secondary responses like shame, anxiety or rage in response to primary emotions.

Often, the primary emotions are adaptive and appropriate to the context.  The reduction of secondary emotional distress requires exposure to the primary emotion in a non-judgmental way.  This can be considered an exposure-based technique.

The specific DBT Emotion Regulation Skills are grouped into the following four segments: understanding and naming emotions, changing unwanted emotions reducing vulnerability to emotion mind and managing extreme emotions.

When you understand & name emotions, you understand their function, identify obstacles to changing emotions and identify and label emotions.  When you change unwanted emotions, you check the facts, problem solve and take opposite action.  When you reduce vulnerability to emotional mind, you accumulate positive emotions, build mastery and learn to cope ahead and take care of the body.  When you manage extreme emotions, you practice mindfulness of current emotions and learn to identify the skills breakdown point.

The goal is to reduce emotional suffering, not to get rid of emotions.

Emotion Regulation is the ability to control or influence which emotions you have, when you have them and how you experience and express them.  Regulating emotions can be automatic as well as consciously controlled.  These skills focus on conscious awareness and control of emotions.  You will have so much practice regulating emotions that you will over-learn the skills. ultimately, the regulation will become automatic.

Distress Tolerance

Distress tolerance skills enable you to survive immediate crises without making things worse and to accept reality when you can not change it and it is not what you want it to be.  The goals of distress tolerance include the ability to survive crisis situations without making them worse, the ability to accept reality as it is in the moment and becoming free.

The distress tolerance skills are ways of surviving and doing well in a crisis situation without resorting to behaviors that will make the situation worse.  They are needed when you can not, immediately, change a situation for the better or when you can not sort out your feelings well enough to know what changes you want or how you want to make them.

Acceptance of reality of life, as it is, in this moment, is the only way out of experiencing hell on earth. it is the way to turn suffering that cannot be tolerated into pain that can be tolerated. you can think of it in the following ways”:

pain + nonacceptance = suffering and being stuck

pain + acceptance = ordinary pain and the possibility of moving forward

Life is not all crisis. Living life as if it is always a crisis perpetuates the experience of crisis because it interferes with problem solving. Over the long term, it can actually backfire and create more crisis. At some point, you have to experience and accept the life  that you have in front of you.  This is, ultimately, the way to build a life worth living.

You are truly free when you can be at peace and content with yourself and your life, no matter what the circumstance you find yourself in. Freedom is an outcome of mastering both crisis survival and radical acceptance. The crisis survival skills are a lifesaver, keeping you from giving into cravings on the way to freedom. Radical acceptance skills quiet intense desires. When you are free, you can look in the face of your cravings and desires and say ‘I don’t have to satisfy you”.   The distress tolerance skill for becoming free is identical to the goal of freedom in practicing mindfulness, from a spiritual perspective. Both mindfulness practice and reality acceptance practice lead to a greater sense of freedom.

Emotions (a bonus module)

Cognitive Behavior Therapy states that your beliefs create your feelings and your feelings produce your behavior.  Changes in thinking can develop a healthy belief system. However, no matter how much beliefs and behaviors change, they remain stuck in one main area: handling emotions.

Certain times of distress seem too scary, overwhelming, anxiety provoking, intense and unbearable.  You fear allowing discomfort to break into consciousness because it might overwhelm you and plunge you down a deep well of depression from which you will never climb out.  What if you went crazy and could not function? What if people stop loving you because you were not upbeat and were often complaining?

It seems easier and safer to focus on preparing for harm reduction and lapse into unworkable behavior than to deal with emotions and allow for emotional suffering while feeling you have intrinsic purpose and value and being fully and deeply with your heart’s pain without fracturing into 1000 tiny pieces.

Success in overcoming the behaviors related to emotional avoidance is directly related to experiencing a full range of emotion.

You will be learning to explore your feelings and your fears about them to become emotionally unstuck. You may rage, whimper, howl and quiver AND you will dig up the past and lay it to rest.  You will learn to look reality squarely in the face and start to use your feelings to take care of yourself more effectively.

You will learn to stand up for yourself and say “NO” more often, become appropriately selfish and act as if you deserve good things in your life. You will learn to feel entitled to your emotions, to be able to grieve your losses and celebrate your joy and satisfaction, to articulate what you want out of life, stop taking care of everyone else’s needs instead of your own and move toward nourishing yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

There are two goals (1) to give you support in letting go of dysfunctional behaviors and (2)  to help you create a happier, more satisfying life. Achieving both of these goals depends on learning to handle your emotions effectively and appropriately. Although all feelings are important, we will examine seven specific feelings that are more likely than others to drive disorder behaviors these include guilt, shame, helplessness, anxiety, disappointment, confusion and loneliness.  Getting comfortable with these seven emotions is the way to end destructive behavior.  By creating a practice of acknowledging, identifying, experiencing, understanding and following the seven emotions you’ll be able to stop using behaviors to regulate them. You’ll learn to satisfy your deepest emotional longings appropriately and effectively.

There is a very large club of people who were never taught about their emotions when they were young. You can learn all you need to know as an adult.