Tag Archives: Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Holding Fear

Posted on by
6

I submitted my ballot today, November 3, 2024.  The US Presidential Election is two days away.

So many people fear not only the outcome, but the process.  Confidence in election integrity flags severely in recent years, for myriad reasons.  People of any political persuasion suspect their fellow humans of nefarious motivations and acts, both in general and individually.  Trust flickers and wanes like a candle in a hailstorm.

We cannot be reasoned out of our fears.  The more someone tries to convince us that our fears are unfounded, the more our fears escalate, and we get frustrated and often angry on top of that, further inflaming the encounter, risking damage to relationship. 

Emotions are, by nature and definition, irrational.  This does not mean they are unjustified, unhelpful, or unimportant.  Emotions are signals that something important to us is at stake—often relating to our survival, at least as far as our limbic brains are concerned.  Fear is a primal instinct and emotion, conserved over millennia of evolution to keep us alive.  As I described yesterday, fear often sublimates itself into anger, without help from outside forces.  This inner rage can then manifest in ugly words or actions, harming others, our relationships, and ultimately ourselves.

When we see someone on ‘the other side’ acting out like this, of course we feel fear and anger.  Of course we rail at them as horrible people and want justice for their abhorrent actions.  And of course, we see them as representative of everybody we grossly identify as their tribe (see image below from the @startswithus Instagram account).  That is the lens that fear places before our eyes, so we may be alert to threats—to our safety, security, and identity, among other things.  We separate from and divide people into groups deemed ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’.  But this is an oversimplification that can lead to destructive patterns of perception and interaction. 

Fear is a vitally important emotion, necessary for safety and survival.  And we must manage it, for our own well-being and that of our social integrity.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, teaches simple and accessible (though not necessarily easy) skills to help us do just this.  The goal is not to discredit or eliminate our fear.  Rather, DBT skills help us gain and maintain perspective, so we may hold our fear more stably, then think more clearly and make decisions with balanced emotional and rational input, in accordance with our values, goals, and integrity.  The four pillars of DBT are Mindfulness, Emotional Regulation, Distress Tolerance, and Interpersonal Effectiveness (communication).  The method is founded on the concept of the Wise Mind: the effective integration and balance of the emotional and the rational.  I won’t describe the individual skills here, but I have studied them at length and recommend them to patients every week.  In essence they teach us to monitor our emotions, identify them, accept and validate them, and query their consequences.  We are challenged to be honest about what’s objectively true versus a story we make up.  In the case of fear, DBT skills help us make and maintain the distinction between real potential risk (even if high) and imagined foregone catastrophic inevitability.  The latter belief makes us act impulsively; holding the former reality helps us slow down, set strategy, and execute with intention.  Unbridled fear separates us; appropriately restrained fear helps us form coalitions and act more effectively. 

Fear well managed allows agency to emerge and effect positive change.

People fear on all sides of politics right now.  It’s not going away—I think ever.  And it’s natural.  We just don’t have to let it drive all our thoughts, words, and interactions.

In the coming days, I Hold Fear for Us this way: 

May we see one another as whole human beings, each and all with both unique and shared experiences, hopes, loves, and fears. 
May we recognize that all our fears are valid simply because all emotions are valid, regardless of their origin.  We feel how we feel and ignoring, dismissing, denying, or comparing one another’s fears gets us nowhere. 
May we sit and be with each other’s fears in empathy and compassion, and solidarity if we can muster it even (especially) if we do not share the same fears or even understand them.
May we vote according to not just our fears but our values, our goals, and our hopes.
May we meet one another with our fears leashed, and our love in front.
May we speak and act in ways that give nobody reason to fear us.

Deep breaths, friends.  We’ got this. Hang in there. I’m right there with you.

https://www.instagram.com/startswithus/?hl=en

Judgment

Posted on by
6

How do you feel about judgment? When/what are you most likely to judge quickly and negatively? Do you notice when this happens? Is it okay? How does it affect your mood, conversations, and relationships? How does your judgment help you and those you love? When does the judgment of others hurt you? How do you think we could all do it better?

How do I do judgment well already?
–I make evaluative judgments a lot less often now than in the past. For instance when I dislike an outfit, I say it’s not for me rather than call it outright ugly. I keep my individual, subjective opinions as such, rather than declaring them mindlessly as universal objective truths.
–Similarly about people, I identify behaviors and actions separately from people themselves. A kind person can do unkind things; an honest person may sometimes tell a lie. When I witness one unkind or untrue thing, that does not necessarily define the person’s whole character. At my best, observing a nonvirtuous action by someone I know to be virtuous prompts me to check in with them and see if they are okay.
–I can withhold judgment a long time; I tolerate uncertainty and stay open for any interaction or relationship to evolve toward connection, even if it starts out far from it. I attend conscientiously to my lack of complete information to minimize misjudging, which too often leads to hurting people and damaging relationships.

How could I do better?
–Once I make a negative evaluative judgment about a person, group, or institution, I let that bias lead thereafter. In many cases I can keep the door to changing my mind open at least a crack, but I know which doors are shut and locked today. I could open my mind to the possibility that people and organizations can change; I could unlock those doors.
–I can mitigate my meta-judgment. I value open-mindedness and curiosity and loathe narrow-mindedness and knee-jerk early closure. Thus, I judge others’ (and my own) judgment acutely and strongly in the negative. Funny how this makes me exactly what I hate. Working on it–with mindfulness, self-compassion, forgiveness, accountability, and perspective taking… This is my work.

How does society do judgment well today?

Dialectical Behavior Therapy. More and more, DBT integrates into mainstream talk therapy, and some places are even incorporating DBT skills into school curriculum. DBT teaches us to distinguish between evaluative and discriminating judgments:
–Evaluative: “stating something as a whole and objectively. It is taking the facts of a situation and adding personal preferences, values, and opinions to make it an objective truth. This type of judgment is ineffective because others may view the same situation differently, whether it is marginally different or completely different.”
–Discriminating: “reflect personal preferences and subjective opinions. They are considered judgments that are effective in terms of not projecting one’s perception as a complete conclusion.”
The more this distinction enters general consciousness and awareness, the less our differences and disagreements may escalate into outright opposition and hatred.

How can we all do better?

Stop reinforcing click-bait, incendiary soundbites, oversimplification, and overgeneralization. Before forming and rendering an opinion on anything:
–Ask whether an opinion or position is even necessary–is it worth the time, energy, and resources?
–Vet the information: How reliable is the source? What is their motivation?
–Look for contrary examples of an initial judgment; evaluate honestly the merits of both/all sides of a debate
–Commit to disengaging from information sources–including people–that/who incite, amplify, and perpetuate hair-trigger judgment

BREATHE. Take time. Most things are not an emergency, and additional information is readily available. This is the harder, longer, more complicated path, this slowing and elevation of judgment. And certainly some situations require immediate decision and action. But knee-jerk is too often our collective default judgment setting, and we need better balance.

Make more generous assumptions, at least initially. I would rather regret being too kind than not kind enough. The proverb that people rise or descend to our expectations of them is at least partially true. Since we all make evaluative judgments anyway, why not show up to people in a way that invites–calls–their best selves forth? We can sense one another’s judgments, verbalized and overtly expressed or not. Body language and tone of voice reveal us. So let us be less judgmental, so that we can seem so, also. It’s the honest thing to do.

I really enjoyed thinking about this topic tonight. It reminds me how easily we can fall into oversimplified, dichotomous thinking (and judgment, HA!) about judgment–that it’s all bad and we should eliminate it altogether, or that it’s always necessary in all situations lest we don’t know what we think about anything. Maybe we can think of judgment as a tool, a skill–something we can exercise mindfully to help us make sense and meaning, both individually and collectively. At its best, judgment provides clarity, direction, and connection. At its worst, it polarizes, instigates, and leads to violence. We can each and all do our part to bend the long, human, moral arc toward the former.