What Is DBT And How Is It Related To Mindfulness?

(online research)

Mindfulness is almost the structure of Dialectical Behavior Therapy DBT treatment for pervasive emotion regulation problems. Every DBT skill begins with mindfulness meditation. Every skill depends on mindfulness. Often when trying to understand when something went wrong during your day or when something went right, mindfulness is implicated.

What Is Mindfulness? Mindfulness is simply being present. This means paying attention to what is happening right now. Without judgment. Without overthinking. Without invalidating your experience. Mindfulness is just being willing to show up to the present moment. It is acceptance of the present moment.

What Is DBT? Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a cognitive behavioral treatment developed by Marsha Lenihan. It skills was formed to help people learn and use new skills and strategies to develop a life that they experience as worth living. DBT skills include skills for mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. DBT was created to treat chronically suicidal individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). It is now recognized as the gold standard psychological treatment for this population. Research has shown that it is effective in treating a wide range of other disorders such as substance dependence, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and eating disorders and many more.

How Does Mindfulness Fit With DBT? DBT is skill based program that targets emotion dysregulation. Often people get emotionally dysregulated by seemingly insignificant or trivial events, not because of the events themselves, but by the judgments people have about the events. For example, you may have a job that you are reasonable happy in. Lets say its working at a clothing store. You like clothes, and you like interacting with people, so it seems like a good fit. What you dont like however, is folding clothes. You find it boring. Now, you may only have to fold clothes for about 30 minutes of a six-hour shift, which is really just a small portion of the job. You may find that as you fold clothes, your mind starts to make all kinds of negative judgments about folding clothes. This is terrible. What a waste of time. This is stupid. This job is awful. Rather than spending the time focusing on folding the clothes, your mind is busy telling all kinds of disturbing stories about this task, and will likely trigger emotions such as anger, resentment, even despair. Whats worse, these emotions have a way of coloring the rest of your day. Now instead of tolerating 30 minutes of an unpleasant chore, you spend the whole day in a foul mood, judging all aspects of your job negatively, feeling worse every minute. Because being in a bad mood for most of the day, more days than not, is very unpleasant, you start having judgments about your mood, thinking, I cant take this anymore. So what started out as a relatively insignificant thing has caused a lot of suffering.

A mindful approach to this dilemma would be to approach the unpleasant task in the spirit of acceptance, willing to engage in it without engaging in a lot of judgments about it. The moment you notice a judgment, your turn your mind to folding the clothes, aware of the sensation of the fabric against your fingertips. Noticing the movement of your arms. Describing the smell of the new fabric as it reaches your nose in waves. By fully engaging in the task, repeatedly turning the mind to it, there is little room for negative attributions. You may now even find it to be a calming, soothing activity. This is one way mindfulness can help avert an emotional downward spiral.

Another good point is mindfulness can help with emotional dysregulation by way of helping to relinquish the struggle with painful emotions. One of the reasons people develop emotion dysregulation is because they try to squash or control their emotional responses to things. Trying to control an emotion is kind of like trying to grab tightly onto jello. The more you try, the more of a mess it makes. With emotions, the more we try to control them, the more intense they become, and the longer they persist. Unfortunately, due to an environment plagued by invalidation from others, there is pressure from the outside to control the emotions, leading to more intense emotions, leading to more invalidation, etc. This tends to become a self-perpetuating feedback loop.

I'd like to know from the community what you think of DBT and adding it to Mindfulness. Please share your thoughts, questions and ideas here

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