What is DBT Therapy?
DBT, or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. Its main goal is to help you transform negative thinking & behavioral patterns in order to improve your ability to cope with stress, stay in the present moment, regulate your emotions, and boost your relationships.
So how does Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) help us navigate change peacefully?
Use a DBT skill or technique called radical acceptance.
The purpose of radical acceptance as a DBT skill is to teach you to cope with any painful situations and emotions in the future. Instead of suffering endlessly because of distressing feelings or events, radical acceptance guides you to feel that pain and cope with it anyway. Radical acceptance is complete, total acceptance of what is happening, without trying to fight reality.
Radical acceptance, when practiced, allow you to refocus your energy only on that which you can control.
It give you the tools to see reality clearly, and accept the truth of what is happening. When faced with extreme life changes, it can be hard to live in that reality. We often have the urge to cling to what we know, resisting or rejecting what is really happening around us, which makes changes much harder to deal with.
When we learn radical acceptance, changes, when before they seemed insurmountable, become manageable.
Think about how you usually feel during big changes.
What are those big emotions? They are probably stress, fear, excitement, and anxiety. We are afraid to give up what we know, stressed to enter an unknowable environment, anxious about all of the things outside of our control, etc.
Many people are resistant to the idea of radical acceptance. When you hear the phrase, the assumption that it means suddenly agreeing with everything around you may come to mind. But that’s not what radical acceptance is. Rather than agreeing with or approving of everything around you, radical acceptance is merely about accepting the truth of your situation.
Even if you don’t accept reality, that doesn’t mean that reality is going to change. The facts are going to stay the facts, regardless of whether you recognize them or not. In order to make any sort of change in your life, you need to accept the facts as they are and not as you wish them to be.
So how can you start using radical acceptance as a DBT skill to navigate changes in your life?
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Identify the resistance:
Where are you fighting reality? You might not even recognize this resistance at first. Look for signs like: bitterness, resentfulness, feeling continually frustrated, feeling as though your life would be right if one thing would just change, feeling as though it is other people’s behavior that is the problem, etc. When you find yourself living through what you want rather than what is true, you are fighting reality. Identify when you are fighting this reality. Then…
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Remind yourself that you can’t change facts:
What are the facts of the situation? What events, from you or from others, led to this place or situation? What is the reality you are trying so hard to ignore? Remind yourself that ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, it just leaves you less equipped to handle it.
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Practice Acceptance:
Think back to step one. What are you resisting? What is going on in your life that you need to radically accept? What have you been struggling to accept? Write it down.
When you’ve identified it, check your facts. Do you have all of the correct information? Are you filling in gaps with your own assumptions, opinions, or judgments, or do you know that the information you have is true and ONLY factual?
Now, look at it as a factual statement. Remind yourself what you learned in step two: you can’t change the facts. So if these are the facts of the situation, how does that fit into your life? Remind yourself that you can be unhappy about something while still accepting it as true.
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Make a Pro/Con List:
If you’re struggling to radically accept things, make a pro con list. What are the pros of living in denial? How does rejecting the truth help you? How does it hurt you? How is it holding you back? While feeling better in a brief moment may be tempting, it won’t outweigh the stress, anxiety, and frustration that comes along with resisting reality.
“When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.” Tara Brach
