The Skillful Podcast

Today I'm talking with Dr. Kelsey Harper, a clinical psychologist and DBT therapist who works with trauma, PTSD, and chronic emotion dysregulation. With over a decade of work spanning varying settings and clientele, Kelsey has established a private practice in Santa Monica and observed time and again, that many clients reported extensive histories of trauma leading them to seek therapy and healing in their adult lives. With her own personal recovery as a survivor of sexual assault and experience working with the unique needs of survivors in their recovery journey, she built a new community called Warrior Reclamation to offer survivors support, connection, and skills for reclaiming their lives.

Kelsey talks about her own experience of isolation and confusion following sexual assault and how this inspired her to create a space so others don't have to go through this alone. Listen in as we discuss DBT skills, sitting with emotions and how to survive rape culture.

To learn more about this podcast and full show notes, go to bayareadbtcc.com

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

In today's episode, we discuss your relationship with yourself, focusing on the skill of Loving-Kindness.

• When you are having a hard time, are you kind or harsh with yourself?
• Do you berate yourself for real or perceived mistakes?
• Do you try to motivate yourself with criticism?

These tactics tend to not work in the long-run and erode your sense of self.

What if you had permission to be gentle and compassionate with yourself?

The DBT skill of Loving-Kindness meditation is based on the Buddhist practice of Metta, which can help you cultivate a gentle, loving relationship with yourself. Although the roots of this skill lie in Buddhism, we offer a secular version of the practice here.

To learn more about this podcast and full show notes, go to bayareadbtcc.com

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

Instead of making New Year's resolutions this year, think about using the momentum of the new year to make changes in your life that are aligned with your values.

Often New Year's resolutions come from a place of shame or deficiency, a place of trying to fix what's "wrong" with you. What if you made changes in your life based on what's most important to you rather than "fixing" what's wrong? This is where values come in.

The DBT skill called Accumulating Positive Emotions in the Long Term can help you experience more positive emotions more often by aligning your life with your values. In today's episode, Marielle and Ed take a deep dive into the skill.

• Access your Wise Mind when assessing your values
• What's actually important to you vs. what you think SHOULD be important
• Your values and priorities can shift as you go through different seasons in your life
• This skill outlines a step by step process to make your values a reality in your life
• Avoid avoiding
• Pick one value to focus on at a time
• Identify a few goals related to this value
• Bite-size action steps
• Take action!

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

To learn more about DBT and therapy in general, read our blog.

The holidays are a time where there is often a lot of pressure to have a certain kind of experience - one that is about family, friends, joy, and celebration. For many folks, this is more of a fantasy than a reality.

If you are fortunate enough to enjoy time with family and friends during the holidays, the expectation of constant togetherness and merry-making can be a set up for disappointment.

This episode discusses common themes that come up during the holidays as well as ways to take care of yourself.

Show Highlights:

• The mythical family gathering where everyone is happy creates a lot of unrealistic expectations
• Travel can add pressure and stress
• Even in the most functional families, it's often a lot of concentrated time together
• Old dynamics between parents and adult children arise
• Dealing with judgmental family members
• Cope Ahead is a great skill to use for the holidays
• Cope Ahead requires you to describe the situation that will prompt a problem response in you, anticipate the problem behavior or emotion ahead of time, and then plan out what skills you will use
• The skill of Radical Acceptance - that you have the family, friends, and social life that you have right now
• Acceptance does not equal approval
• Adult children can often think that they are going to go back to families and change them and this rarely works
• Loneliness, isolation, and grief gets amplified
• Creating your own rituals and traditions
• The Distress Tolerance skill of Contributing can be especially helpful during the holidays

Recap of Skills Discussed:

• Mindfulness
• PLEASE
• Cope Ahead
• Radical Acceptance
• Mindfulness of Others
• Contributing

Links & Resources:

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

To learn more about DBT and therapy in general, read our blog.

Do you have a hard time doing nice things for yourself? The DBT skill called Accumulating Positive Events in the Short-Term is all about doing small, regular self-care. Putting effort into building positive emotions on a regular basis helps build emotional resilience so you won't get as thrown when hard things happen.

Many folks believe that they have to "earn" doing something nice for themselves or that they don't deserve to do things just for pleasure. If this is the case for you, it might be surprisingly hard to take time to engage in regular pleasurable activities.

This skill won't change things overnight - that's why it's called accumulating! Slowly, though, you can build up your emotional resilience which can act as a buffer when life gets challenging.

To learn more about this podcast and full show notes, go to bayareadbtcc.com

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

Sometimes it's better to not act on our emotions. The DBT skill Opposite Action helps you act opposite to what your emotion is telling you to do. Use this skill when your emotion doesn't fit the facts or when your emotion does fit the facts but acting on the emotion isn't effective.

This skill can help you act the way you want to feel instead of the way you do feel. Make sure you use this skill to change emotions you want to change, not emotions that other people want you to change. This skill has several steps so listen in to learn how to fully change the way you feel.

To learn more about this podcast and full show notes, go to bayareadbtcc.com

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

To learn more about DBT and therapy in general, read our blog.

In Episode 15 of The Skillful Podcast, Marielle and Ed discuss checking the facts. When you have a painful emotion that you want to change, using the DBT skill called Check the Facts can be very helpful. Sometimes strong, painful emotions aren't a reaction to what has actually happened but are based on beliefs, interpretations, and assumptions about what has happened. Use this skill to help you change emotions YOU want to change - not emotions other people in your life want you to change.

Show Highlights:

• Emotions might not be based on facts
• Sometimes just checking the facts can bring down a painful emotion quickly
• Start by naming the specific emotion that you want to change
• What event brought on the emotion?
• Be non-judgmental when describing what prompted the emotion
• Name your interpretations, judgments, assumptions, and thoughts about the prompting event
• Identify the stories your mind is telling you
• Ask yourself what you're scared of
• Imagine the worst-case scenario and think about how you would cope
• Often painful emotions are based on assuming a threat and minimizing our ability to cope
• Assess whether the intensity of your emotion fits the facts
• Assess whether how long your emotion is lasting fits the facts
• Remind yourself that you have the capacity to get through very painful things
• Sometimes the emotion fits the facts but acting on it isn't effective

Links & Resources

To learn more about DBT and therapy in general, read our blog

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

Many sensitive people have wished at times that they could just get rid of their emotions. They may try to dampen, suppress, or deny emotions. Although these efforts may work partially, at least in the short-term, they never really work in the long term. Plus, often the things sensitive people may turn to in order to lessen the sting of painful emotions, such as addictive or impulsive behaviors, create additional problems.

In this episode, Marielle and Ed talk about the purpose of emotions and things that make it hard to regulate them. They talk about how emotions send a message to ourselves, letting us know that there is something we need to pay attention to. Emotional expression is also a powerful communicator to other people, whether we like it or not. Emotions move us to take action when we need to. Without emotions, we wouldn't run from tigers, tend to a sick child, or fall in love.

Show Highlights:

• Emotions motivate us to take action quickly when we need to
• Emotions keep us connected to others; they motivate behavior that is good for the "tribe"
• Emotions can be infectious or contagious
• Body language and tone of voice also communicate our emotions to others
• Emotions may be based on assumptions rather than facts
• When anger is really strong, it tells us that someone or something has gone past our limits
• Anger can feel very self-righteous at times
• Anger might fit the facts but expressing it may or may not be effective
• So much of the work with emotions is about slowing down
• Some people feel like they don't have a right to express anger
• Our relationship to anger can be very gendered
• Anger is one of the few emotions that men are typically allowed to have
• Men are often socialized to not feel fear or sadness
• Women are often socialized to not express or even feel anger
• Class, race, gender, and sexual orientation can influence which emotions are ok to express publicly and how they are expressed
• The different factors that make it hard to regulate emotions
• Some people just feel emotions more strongly than others
• Things like lack of sleep, being sick or not eating enough can make it harder to regulate emotions
• Telling someone to "just get over it" doesn't help
• Sometimes our expressions of intense emotions get reinforced
• Moodiness also gets in the way of being able to regulate emotions, meaning that your current mood dictates what you do (rather than your wise mind)
• Mood-dependent behavior can take us out of line with our goals and values
• It takes willingness and effort to work on regulating emotions

Links & Resources

To learn more about DBT and therapy in general, read our blog.

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

Today Marielle and Ed discuss the 10 most common myths about emotions. These myths can come from the culture around us and from the families we were raised in. Asking yourself where you learned some of these myths may be helpful in debunking them. Some myths have to do with a fear of being out of control with emotions and other myths are more about equating emotions with the truth of who you are.

Myth 1: Having strong emotions means I am out of control.

• Feeling the emotion and the behavior get conflated
• It can feel like strong emotion automatically equals out of control behavior
• Intense emotion can be very physical
• Taking action on our strong emotion makes it feel out of control

Myth 2: If I start crying, I'm never gonna stop.

• We always start crying, often sooner than we think
• Under all circumstances, we do eventually stop crying

Myth 3: I need to push down my anger or it will become dangerous.

• Anger also has a life-span, if we let it move through us it will dissipate
• We can feel angry and not act on it in a dangerous way
• We have a lot of power over how to handle our own anger

Myth 4: If I am feeling very emotional, I must do something to change it.

• Emotions give us information
• We don't necessarily need to change emotions

Myth 5: Reason is better than emotion.

• Another way of stating this myth is: it's always better to be rational than emotional
• Sometimes it sounds appealing to not have emotions
• Emotions connect us to others

Myth 6: Emotions can just happen for no reason.

• Emotions are a response to something even if we don't know what that is
• If you're having a strong emotional response, it's a signal to do a little exploring

Myth 7: I am my emotions.

• We are so much more than our emotions
• It's not uncommon to feel more than one emotion at once
• If you are basing your identity on your emotions, it will be hard to have a stable sense of self because our emotions are in continual flux

Myth 8: It's inauthentic to try to change or question my emotions.

• Sometimes it's not effective to feel or act on an emotion
• Sometimes our emotions are not aligned with our goals or values so the most authentic thing to do is to work to change it
• Our emotions don't always fit the facts

Myth 9: My emotions speak the absolute truth.

• Sometimes our strong emotions are based on interpretations or assumptions rather than actual facts
• Just because you feel something doesn't mean it's true

Myth 10: I need to be very emotional to be creative.

• Emotions help support creativity but we don't have to be overwhelmed by emotions to be creative

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.

Marielle and Ed continue their conversation about Distress Tolerance focusing on Distraction and Self-Soothing. While these skills won't solve any problems, they can be super helpful when you are caught up in painful emotions.

Distraction in DBT is broken down into separate skills that go by the acronym ACCEPTS (as in Wise Mind ACCEPTS).

Show Highlights:

• Choosing distraction is very different than unconsciously avoiding
• Sometimes it's wise to not fully experience your emotions
• These skills can be used when you have a strong urge to fix a problem immediately
• You can also use these skills when you feel an urge to engage in a behavior you are trying to stop
• A - Activities
• C - Contributing
• C - Comparisons
• E - Emotions
• P - Pushing Away
• T - Thoughts
• S - Sensations
• Different activities redirect your attention to something else - away from the painful emotion
• Figuring out what activities hold your attention when you're upset
• Contributing can have a secondary benefit of creating a sense of purpose or meaning in your life.
• Comparing our pain to others can put our pain in perspective
• Comparing your current situation to other hard times in your life can help you feel like you can get through
• To use emotions to distract, first figure out what you are feeling and then do something that evokes a different emotion
• Pushing away is shutting out or blocking your painful emotion
• Self-Soothing with your five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell

Resources:

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition

SUDs (Subjective Units of Distress) Scale

We'd love to hear from you! Where are you getting stuck with your skills application? Ask us a question for the chance to have it answered on the podcast. Submit your question here.

Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.