Self Help - Part VI in the Self Injury series

eventually it becomes just a memory. The process is like building tolerance to a drug. Narcotics users take a little bit more of their drug every day as tolerance builds, until eventually they're routinely taking amounts of drug that would kill an ordinary person. The poisonous events in your past work in a similar way. Exposure (with the help of a trained therapist) over time will build your tolerance to these events and enable you to lay them to rest. The key is learning to tolerate distress.

DBT-related skills Marsha Linehan's Skills Training Manual has several helpful worksheets for getting through crisis situations. Though they are best used as part of a DBT program with a trained therapist, you might find some of them helpful. Accepting Reality This concept focuses on learning to accept reality as it is. Accepting it doesn't mean you like it or are willing to allow it to continue unchanged; it means realizing that the basic facts of the situation are even if they aren't what you'd like them to be. Without this kind of radical acceptance, change isn't possible. Letting Go of Emotional Suffering In this worksheet, you learn ways to observe and describe your emotion, separate yourself from it, and let go of it. One of linehan's basic principles is that emotion loves emotion, and this worksheet is designed to help you experience your emotions with amplifying them or get caught in a feedback loop. Distraction Distraction is simply doing other things to keep yourself from self-harming. Most of the techniques mentioned above are distraction techniques; you bring something else in to change the feeling. Using ice, rubber bands, etc, is substituting other intense feelings for the self-injury. Other things Linehan suggest substituting include experiences that change your current feelings, tasks (like counting the colors you can see in your immediate environment) that don't require much effort but do take a great deal of concentration, and volunteer work. Improve the Moment This worksheet focuses on ways to make the present moment more bearable. It differs from distraction in that it's not just a diverting of the mind but a complete change of attitude in the moment. Evaluating the Pros and Cons of Tolerating Distress As the name implies, this worksheet leads you through an evaluation: what are the benefits of doing this self-harming thing? What are the benefits of not doing it? What are the bad things about

Go To Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic