In our last several +1s, we’ve been spending time with Marsha Linehan and learning more about her breakthrough work with Dialectical Behavior Training.
As you may recall, but I’ll deliberately repeat for the spaced repetition Learning 101 win… 😉
We defined a hallmark of DBT as: “The dynamic balance between acceptance of oneself and one’s situation in life, on the one hand, and embracing change toward a better life, on the other.”
I encouraged you to consider ONE thing you could ACCEPT in your current reality and ONE thing you could CHANGE to create a better future reality.
(You do the quick thought exercise?!? 🙌 )
We’re going to continue our exploration of how to apply DBT to our lives TODAY.
Let’s get straight to work.
Marsha tells us: “DBT skills fall into four categories, each of which is designed to solve a different set of problems. The first two offer the path to acceptance of reality as it is, while the last two, taken together, are change skills that help clients embrace the changes they need to make in their lives.
- Mindfulness skills, which help reduce pain and increase happiness.
- Distress tolerance skills, which teach you how to tolerate crisis situations so that you can effectively find a solution to whatever is causing the stress.
- Emotion regulation skills, which, as the name implies, teach you how to control your emotions so that you don’t react to what’s happening around you without reflection and don’t say things or do things that make the situation worse.
- Interpersonal effectiveness skills, which help you to be effective in relationships with others—relationships with people close to you and with people you interact with day to day, at work, for instance.”
I repeat…
DBT “skills” fall into those four categories: Mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness.
As we briefly discussed, Marsha reminds me quite a bit of my Yoda, Phil Stutz. They have a LOT in common. They both revolutionized their respective fields and both of their philosophies are super-practical. What Phil calls “Tools,” Marsha calls “skills.”
(Check out our Notes on Phil’s Lessons from Living, The Tools, and Coming Alive. And, of course, if you haven’t seen the Netflix documentary on him called Stutz yet, check it out.)
And…
As we discussed, another thing they both have in common is a love for “radical acceptance.”
But...
The thing they are REALLY aligned on is the fact that the process of building a life worth living won’t be easy.
In Lessons from Living (check out those Notes!) Phil says we need to embrace the three inevitables of life: pain, uncertainty, and hard/constant work.
As you know if you’ve been following along for a while, I had fun adapting that into these +1s: I Love PUH (You?) and I Love PUCW (Pronounced “Puke”).
Marsha discusses this in the context of “distress tolerance.”
And, she says… “The goal of DBT is to help people find the path to getting out of hell. I know it works, because I’ve seen it happen for clients countless times. More important, that’s what research studies—mine and other people’s—demonstrates. But it is not an easy journey, going on that path. This is what I tell my clients:
‘If you want to get out of hell, you have to get through the fire to the other side. It’s like you are in a house, and it’s on fire. There are flames all around, especially at the front of the house, surrounding the door that is the only way out. Your impulse is to retreat into the house, try to find someplace safe. But, of course, you will just die there. You’ve got to find the courage to go through the flames at the front of the house, the flames around the door. Then you can get to the other side. You have to go through your anger, open up to your therapist, keep going through the pain. It isn’t overnight that you are going to feel better. But you will.’”
That’s Today’s +1.
Want to get through the fire of the current challenges you’re facing?
Well…
Have this in mind…
“If you want to get out of hell, you have to get through the fire to the other side.”
Let’s do that.
TODAY.
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