If you have ever heard of DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy), you may have heard that it is one of the best treatments for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). And it is. However, since the creation of the treatment in 1993, it has been made clear that DBT is effective for many other life issues, specifically anxiety.
DBT is an evidenced based practice used to enhance the ability to cope with overwhelming emotions. Anxiety often occurs when you feel that you have lost control. The skills that can be learned through DBT will enable you to find healthier ways to cope with life, which will assist in easing anxieties and living life more effectively as you learn to cope with your emotions.
Between the recent election and the pandemic, we are living in a very stressful climate for many people. It is common to have a variety of emotions and thoughts during this time, and it may be creating difficulty in managing your emotions.
Anchor Therapy is a counseling center in Hoboken, NJ with psychotherapists specialized in helping children, teens, adults, and couples with anxiety, depression, relationship issues, trauma, and life transitions. Anchor Therapy is accepting new clients and is now providing telehealth (video/phone) sessions to residents of New Jersey and New York.
DBT utilizes 4 categories of skills to assist in managing your stress and anxiety:
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the practice of staying in the moment. We live in a hustle and bustle society. It is easy to take the focus off of the here and now, and project into the future. Mindfulness tools can help you stay grounded and stay in the moment. A common misconception about mindfulness is that you will not experience negative thoughts and emotions. You absolutely may still have some of those thoughts and feelings, but developing mindfulness skills will help you to feel confident and will help you to cope more effectively with anxiety and other uncomfortable feelings.
A common mindfulness technique is guided meditation. Youtube has an abundance of guided meditation videos varying from 5 minutes to over an hour. It is beneficial to begin with the shorter videos, and then work your way up. Some people have reported that once they have developed healthy mindfulness skills, they are able to block out external noises that otherwise would interrupt their thoughts or ability to focus. Can you imagine being in a crowded area, with hundreds or thousands of people, and being able to tune everything and everyone out to minimize anxieties? It takes time to develop those skills, but it’s possible!
2. Distress Tolerance
Life tends to throw some wrenches and obstacles in our way. It’s easy to let those obstacles overcome us, increase our stress and anxiety, and eventually lead us to coping with a situation in an unhealthy or ineffective way. If you find yourself becoming increasingly stressed over minor situations, you can benefit from increasing your distress tolerance tools. Effective distress tolerance tools can help to cope with these uncomfortable situations in an effective way that does not create self-destruction.
Increasing your distress tolerance can increase your self esteem, decrease anger towards yourself, and minimize or eliminate the burn out that your family members or loved ones may be experiencing in response to your stress.
One way to begin to cope with the distress, is to stay distracted and get active. Create a list of distractions and activities that take up a few minutes of your time. This can be anything from taking a walk, to scrapbooking. Writing this list is important to begin when you are not in distress, and when your mind is clear. When you find yourself in distress, going back to the list and having concrete ideas will help you to act quickly.
3. Emotional Regulation
If you have ever gotten angry, which 99.99% of people likely have, you may have expressed your emotions in an unhealthy way. The inability to cope with your emotions and regulate them in a healthy way can create difficulty in other areas of your life.
Often, we don’t even know what we’re actually feeling, and those uncomfortable feelings can translate to anger and aggression. Start taking note of the amount of times you tell someone that you’re “fine” or “okay”. These words don’t really describe how you’re truly feeling. Getting more in touch with your feelings is a healthy way to begin to regulate your emotions. It can be helpful to start asking yourself how you are really feeling. As you are starting to learn more about your feelings, you may start feeling overwhelmed. Positive affirmations can help to ease some of those overwhelming feelings. You can wake up daily and verbalize positive statements about yourself. Journaling is another way to begin to regulate your emotions. Writing your thoughts and feelings in a journal allows you to take those thoughts out of your mind, and place them onto a piece of paper, so that the thought and emotions are no longer circulating.
4. Interpersonal Effectiveness skills
Relationships can be difficult, and can lead to anxiety. Have you ever asked yourself why this may be? Ineffective communication is often a leading cause to difficulties in relationships.
There are 4 styles of communication:
Passive: a pattern of avoiding the expression of your feelings
Passive Aggressive: acting on your anger in a subtle way
Assertive: identifying your needs while also identifying someone else’s needs
Aggressive: expressing your needs and often negating other people’s needs
Assertiveness is the style to strive for to enhance healthy and effective relationships. Below are the steps of how to be assertive successfully:
The first step in developing assertiveness skills is to know what is important to you, and know what you want.
Once you identify that, it is important to work on communicating that information to your partner, family member, or friend.
Once you know what your wants and needs are, you will be able to describe the situation in a non-judgement way. This statement can be very brief, but the important part is to try to verbalize the statement with minimal emotion and intensity.
The next step is to explain how you are feeling about the situation. It is important to differentiate between your thoughts and feelings, and be sure to identify to the other person the feelings that you are experiencing.
The last step is to assert yourself and to identify that both you and the other person have thoughts and feelings, and to try to come to a mutual understanding.
Anxieties are expected to increase significantly over the holiday season, the winter months, and the next few months of uncertainty during the pandemic. If you are experiencing anxiety, depression, or other confusing emotions that seem to continue to increase, reach out to a licensed mental health therapist to begin to learn how to cope with and to decrease those feelings.
Michele Passman, LCSW
is a licensed psychotherapist practicing in Hoboken, New Jersey. She specializes in helping adults with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, relationship issues, and life transitions through counseling. Michele can help NJ residents through telehealth (video/phone) therapy sessions as well.
