Gillian Galen - DBT For Dummies

Are you thinking the best of the other person? While you may be feeling strong emotions, this will help you refrain from forming negative judgments about the other person. Judgmental thinking tends to drive up already intense emotions.

People disagree with one another. It’s okay to skillfully disagree, and to see the wisdom in why the other person feels that way and then simply let it be. It is “agreeing to disagree,” which isn’t uncommon. You may also agree that one or the other person is correct. This can happen when you have both been able to be curious and open to the other person’s perspective or information. A third option could be that you come up with a new perspective that somehow synthesizes each of your perspectives. What you’ll notice is that throughout the process, you’re continually looking to open your mind to see ideas or perspectives you may have missed.

Once you have come to an agreement, it’s important to move on. For some, it can be challenging to let go of the experience and the emotions that came with it. We discuss this more in Chapter 10. Holding onto these challenging experiences can keep you in a past that has already occurred and can make it very difficult to stay in the present. Be mindful of judging the other person, and most importantly, be mindful of your own self-judgments or regrets.

Accepting multiple points of view isn’t always easy, and when you get stuck, unable to expand your awareness, it can damage your relationships, interfere with work or school, and lead to you doing things that compromise your integrity or undermine your values.

While you learn to be more skillful and able to keep multiple perspectives in mind, it’s critical to remember that we all make mistakes and get stuck thinking and acting from an emotion mind. To build this skill, you must find compassion for yourself and know that we all get caught in an emotion mind. For many people who are emotionally sensitive, these types of challenges can feed self-hatred and self-judgment, and when you practice that way of being, you feed the very feelings that make it hard to be skillful. If you’re going to embark on this practice, it’s inevitable that you’ll get stuck and return to an old way of doing things. Being kind and forgiving to yourself will help you step back onto the skillful path.

For some, finding self-compassion is no easy task. We talk more about this in Chapter 10. A short practice that many people find useful is to think about a friend who you care for and ask yourself how you would treat them if they were in a similar situation. This can be a helpful exercise because most people are able to find compassion for friends and loved ones, but can’t find that same compassion for themselves. Treating yourself as you would your close friend can help you be gentle with yourself and find you own inner friend.

Chapter 4

IN THIS CHAPTER

Comparing impulsivity and spontaneity

Moving past your initial reaction

Opening up to other possibilities

Changing negatives into positives

Impulsivity is one of the main reasons why people come into DBT treatment. It’s also one of the distinctive features of emotion dysregulation conditions such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). These impulsivity aspects of BPD encompass some of the most worrisome characteristics of the disorder, including suicidal behavior, self-injury, drug and alcohol misuse, dangerous sexual behavior, erratic driving, and difficulties in controlling anger. (See Chapter 2for more information on emotion dysregulation.)

In DBT, we want you to move from impulsivity to spontaneity. In this chapter, you find out how to shift from impulsivity to spontaneity by moving past initial reactions, opening yourself up, and changing negative thoughts to positive ones. But first, we explain the differences between being impulsive and being spontaneous.

Impulsivity is a complicated behavior and considered to be both a personality trait and a component of chemicals and nerve cell connections in the brain:

From a personality trait point of view, impulsivity is a lack of restraint characterized by a disregard for social conventions and a lack of consideration as to the possible outcomes, particularly in potentially risky situations.

From a neurobiology point of view, impulsivity is seen as a lack of ability to inhibit certain actions.

Slightly different from impulsivity, which is the action of doing something without considering the impact of the behavior, is the related idea of spontaneity. Although in each case the outcome of behavior isn’t known, spontaneity has a different quality. Spontaneity is behavior that tends to be joyful, expansive, and dynamic. Whereas impulsivity tends to have a narrow focus, spontaneity has a big-picture perspective. Even though the outcome might not be known, spontaneity is uplifting in its nature — for instance, calling a friend out of the blue and meeting them for lunch, taking a French language class after seeing it advertised in a magazine, and breaking out into dance while pushing your cart down the aisle of the grocery store when you hear your favorite music being played.

In either case, the behaviors are impromptu. So, what makes one life-enhancing and another potentially destructive? One key element is the state of mind that you’re in when you do the behavior:

Typically, if the behavior is coming from strong emotions like fear or anxiety and it’s used to alleviate the discomfort of the emotion, it’s impulsive. When there’s fear of missing out on an activity, excessive boredom, or an insistence on needing something to happen right then and there, impulsivity tends to show up.

If, on the other hand, the decision comes from a sense of grounded stability, or when there is a recognition that there is an opportunity in the situation and we are in control of our behavior, that is the quality of spontaneity.

Impulsivity often leads to undesired consequences, and in retrospect it seems easy to consider that you could have done something other than what you did. At the time, you may have felt that there were no other options, and yet between an impulse and an action there is always a space, and it is when you linger in that space that other options unfold. Among the available psychotherapy options used to tackle impulsivity, mindfulness is especially helpful in changing impulsivity-driven actions, and so it is in the mindfulness module of DBT that impulsivity is most readily addressed (see Chapter 9).