Tag: DBT
Make Decisions Like a Ninja
Decision making can be difficult when we’re struggling with a strong emotion and can be problematic when we’re coping with depression and anxiety. Pros and Cons is a flexible, easy to use and effective CBT skill that can improve our decision-making skills and increase confidence when making decisions. Pros and Cons can be helpful in the following areas: 1. Distress Tolerance: Comparing the Maladaptive coping mechanism to the Adaptive Coping Mechanism 2. Life Skills (exercise, medication compliance, eating well): Comparing, for example, Working Out v. Netflix. 3. Social Anxiety: Comparing Avoiding a Social Event v. Attending 4. Depression: Getting out of …
Social Anxiety and How to Kick its Ass
One effective way of becoming more comfortable with Social Anxiety is to expose yourself to social situations over and over again. When I say this usually the response I get is “How can I practice when I’m too anxious to show up to the kinds of things that make practice possible?” Before I answer that question I encourage you to consider five points: (1) Social anxiety may mean having to do things differently than everyone else in the beginning. (2) Defeating social anxiety is a matter of skill (knowing what to do) over comfort (doing it). (3) Because social performance is …
Does Shame Work?
Before we get into whether shame is effective, we should probably talk about the purpose of shame. Shame has less to do with the morality of a behavior and more to do with the social impact of others knowing about it. The arbitrator of morality is guilt. Not a very effective or accurate arbitrator, but that’s its job. Shame is more about conformity. It is less likely to cause a person to change their behavior and more likely to increase a person’s efficacy in hiding it. Not because the behavior is wrong, just socially or economically harmful and its disclosure …
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
A couple of years ago I did a video on PMR and I can’t find it so I did another one based on a few requests from clients who preferred to be guided through the exercise. I used the cam on my computer (which is about 5 years old) so the quality isn’t terrific – also I hate doing video- but it’s a good exercise and might be worth checking out. If you are experiencing any pain or have an injury just avoid tensing that part of the body when we get to it during the exercise.
Loneliness. There’s a skill for that.
We are becoming lonelier and it’s hurting us. 1 This might come as a relief, you probably thought you were the only person without close friends. You’re not and there are plenty of reasons for it. One reason is the changing labor market.2 We have moved away from a manufacturing economy, most of us are in either a service profession or a professional environment. Both make it more difficult to create and maintain substantial relationships. We are constantly working as individuals serving other individuals or solving problems. Work environments have become more competitive, we are moving from one job to …
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Designed For Crisis
The term crisis tends to bring with it thoughts of difficult events and our worst fears including our own mortality. Part of what amplifies our distress is how we approach a crisis cognitively and behaviorally. There are a few things you can do to tap into your own natural ability to cope with a crisis and perhaps even capitalize on it. Rethink How You Understand the Term Many things we consider good or positive events are in fact crises. The birth of a child, going to college, starting your first job, transitioning from one developmental stage to another all involve …
Freedom to Fail
“SpaceX — which Musk touts as replacing NASA and colonizing Mars — has been a literal failure to launch. So many of its rockets have burned up or crashed that Musk, for reasons unknown, has made a blooper reel.” link I’m neither a fan or critic of Musk, I’m not looking to defend his politics, recent comments or his behavior, however, the author of the article made a common mistake – we confuse things not going as expected with failure. Musk, whatever you may think of him, doesn’t appear to fall into this trap. The “blooper reel” of SpaceX seems …
Drive the Feeling
Most of us tend to think about emotions as either good or bad, positive or negative but every emotion can be helpful and destructive. One goal of DBT and CBT is to help folks use emotions more effectively; to understand the purpose of each emotion and to decide how to use emotions (if at all) in achieving our objectives. One important step is to determine whether the context or situation reasonably connect to the feeling. If they do, then we work towards figuring out how to abide by the emotion effectively. If they don’t then we act opposite the emotion. …