DBT: Here's How You Might be Practicing It

Therapy has become an integral part of our culture. With its terms utilized in our daily expressions, and therapeutic practices becoming part of our habits and daily routines, we've unknowingly become its practitioners, too. 

DBT is no exception to this cultural phenomenon. While its core tenets may not sound entirely familiar to us in their official terms, the five tenets of dialectics, mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness, have become well baked into our daily lives. Here’s how:  

1. Dialectics

   
   

We’ve all heard of acceptance, right? And if we were lucky enough, we got to practice it too. Take, for example, a psychology student who fails to get into the graduate school of her choice. While her passion for psychology still remains, the experience of rejection is likely to be intensely disappointing, perhaps even making her feel inadequate. However, our student, being passionate as she is, decides to accept the rejection and its accompanying emotions, and continue in pursuit of her degree through whatever avenues she does have available to her. That, in a nutshell, is dialectics in DBT: combining two opposite ideas, emotions, or beliefs. Most often, the synthesis is between acceptance and change. In our student’s case, the acceptance was in acknowledging the feelings of rejection and disappointment, while the change was in deciding to move forward in pursuit of another available avenue.

2. Emotional regulation

   
   

While emotional regulation may sound like an advanced behavioral skill, it’s just another tool we utilize on the daily. Did you ever ask yourself why it is that when something ticks you off, or you’re really upset, you don’t simply explode? One common example: you’re late to work, start driving and end up behind a school bus. Somehow, you manage to hit every light on red, and then get stuck in rush hour traffic. You feel yourself tense up with every hiccup, and just when you feel you've hit peak tension, you take a deep, long inhale and exhale and feel yourself relax just a little bit. Why is that? 

That's you subconsciously regulating your emotions. The buildup of mishaps on your way to work left you tense and anxious. By taking that deep breath, you acted in a way that countered those negative emotions, thus helping you regulate them. Emotional Regulation in DBT helps teach this technique of identifying emotions and opposite action, as well.

3. Distress tolerance

   
   

Distress tolerance is one of those things that are highly individualized. It's a question of how you handle stress. When things get super overwhelming, one person might choose to listen to a podcast as a distraction, another to go out on a walk, finding it calming, while yet another, perhaps more easygoing personality, will have no problem accepting, “it is what it is,” and move on. These, seemingly every day “coping mechanisms,” are, in fact, also DBT techniques used to help individuals handle stressful and overwhelming situations. The tools used in our cases were distraction (listening to a podcast), self-soothing (going for a walk), and radical acceptance (“it is what it is”).

4. Mindfulness

   
   

This tenet hardly needs an introduction at all. As a word, mindfulness has made its way into so many of our conversations, and has also become an ideal; a golden standard so many of us want to achieve. It's not uncommon to be told, tell others, or wish ourselves, to be “be mindful,” or to “live mindfully,” that is to say, “be present.” What we’re also, perhaps unknowingly, implying in being mindful, is the virtue of objectively listening and paying attention. This word, ideal, and for some, practice, of developing a nonjudgemental, present-focused, self-awareness is also exactly what mindfulness means in the practice of DBT. 

5. Interpersonal effectiveness

   
   

While this tenet may sound completely out of the realm of daily-practice, it’s perhaps the most practiced of them all. Interpersonal effectiveness in simple terms, is developing and maintaining good relationships. What, for example, goes into leaving to school at the same time as your siblings? It’s the sharing of counter-space for making lunch, asking them for help to get your bag since you don't have time, and of course, it’s the getting into an argument and (hopefully) resolving it before getting on the bus. 

That, besides being a daily routine, is also practicing interpersonal effectiveness. Our daily relationships involve maintenance, which, in turn, involves the communication and expression of our needs, boundaries, and the resolution of conflict, all mentioned in our example above.

So, it turns out that the tenets of DBT are well practiced by many of us, and can even become a habit sometimes. Nonetheless, there are times when we may feel stuck or unsure of how to utilize those skills we have, or even feel we need to learn new ones. In those moments, reaching out to mental health professionals and getting help can be highly beneficial!