What is Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)?
The Overcomers Place offers a DBT program over 38 weeks from mid-January to December and covers all four core concepts of DBT as well as Dialectical Abstinence. The Overcomers Place clients who practice these skills and go on to apply them in their daily lives, are able to meet the challenges of being human!
D is for Dialectical (the D in DBT) which means two seemingly opposite truths are possible such as acceptance and change. DBT is a structured therapy that focuses on teaching four core skills.
1. Mindfulness
2. Distress Tolerance
3. Emotional Regulation
4. Interpersonal Effectiveness
Each of these core skills help individuals create a life worth living - an essential element for sustaining recovery long term.
DBT is a type of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT focuses on helping people change unhelpful thought patterns. DBT takes those CBT ideas or challenging unhelpful thought patterns, but also adds additional elements like mindfulness, acceptance and distress tolerance, and interpersonal skills to give you more tools for dealing with hard situations. We find behaviours of addiction creates a lot of hard situations. At The Overcomers Place our client’s primary presentations are typically Substance Use Disorder (SUD) and/or Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD).
Each set of core skills help you create a good life for yourself. Putting the work into these skills through a series of lessons offered at TOP, clients go on to apply them in their day to day lives, meeting challenges and riding the wave of being human!
In this post we explore and explain Emotional Regulation and Distress Tolerance.
What is Emotion Regulation?
Consider this: You start your day feeling energized and optimistic. Your morning coffee tastes exceptionally good, and everything seems to be going your way. But as the day unfolds, you encounter a series of frustrating challenges – a missed deadline, a critical email from a client, or an unexpected personal setback.
Life is unpredictable, and such emotional upheavals are inevitable. These regular emotional storms often trigger intense feelings like excessive worry, disappointment, or frustration.
This is where the importance of Emotion Regulation comes in.
Emotion regulation is the process of managing and responding to your emotional storms in healthy and constructive ways. It’s about recognizing and understanding your emotions and choosing how to express and act on them.
Developing strong emotion regulation skills is crucial for navigating life’s ups and downs effectively – and aiming for the results you want to achieve.
Emotion Regulation vs. Distress Tolerance
Does the definition sound like Distress Tolerance? Let’s explore the difference….
Both skills are crucial, and they help you handle your emotions in different ways. Emotion Regulation is more about managing your emotions on a day-to-day basis, while Distress Tolerance is about getting through those high-stress moments without falling apart. Here is an analogy:
In Emotion Regulation, you are a chef. Instead of food, you are cooking with your emotions. Like ingredients, you identify your emotions, know where they came from, peel them, prep them. You get to know what triggers your emotions and you learn to identify them. You also follow a recipe to cook your emotions, maybe turn down the heat at intervals and add some seasonings of various activities to find the balance. As a chef, you are also in charge of preventing kitchen accidents by employing habits like sleeping well, eating nutritious food, and avoiding your emotional triggers.
In Distress Tolerance, you are the captain of a ship. Your emotional crises are the storm, and your aim is to get through them. Like the tools and parts of the ship, Distress Tolerance also equips you to brave through the storm without the ship sinking. It also helps you employ techniques to not panic or become too emotional and make things worse. In essence, they both let you deal with emotions but in different ways.
Through uniquely created exercises, video content and lessons specifically targeted towards Emotional Regulation, these skills are designed to be easily learnt and therefore easily adapted into your day-to-day life, no matter the challenge or intolerance!
How Do These Emotion Regulation Skills Help?
These skills are especially beneficial if you are experiencing overwhelming emotions, as they provide strategies for recognizing and labelling emotions. Once you can recognize and label your emotions, you can reduce your vulnerability to emotional swings and decrease your emotional suffering.
Additionally, they aid in increasing mindfulness towards current emotions and offer techniques to change unwanted emotions. By learning these skills, you can improve your emotional resilience, leading to better mental health and relationships.
These skills are essential if you have previously used unhealthy strategies to avoid experiencing emotions. Initially any emotional experience will feel overwhelming, and having these strategies for recognizing and labelling emotions, can engage the prefrontal cortex to avoid relapse. Once emotions can be recognized, individuals’ vulnerability to emotional swings can be decreased.
Additionally, they aid in increasing mindfulness towards current emotions and offer techniques to change unwanted emotions. By learning these skills, individuals can improve their emotional resilience, leading to stronger mental health and relationships.
Contact The Overcomers Place today and start your DBT journey with us
We are a private charity offering therapy groups for anyone overcoming any addiction.
All our groups are provided FREE of charge!
