Diary Card

***Warning – may cause triggers in some people so take precaution in reading on***

Currently I am so determined to fill in my diary card that I receive in DBT (treatment program for sufferers of Borderline Personality Disorder). I go and read it about 5 times a day to see if there is anything more I can do or anything more I can learn. As part of DBT you get a diary card to fill in weekly. On one side it asks you on a scale of 0 - 5 if you have self harmed, what your urge is to commit suicide or take part in substance abuse and your urge to quit therapy. It also asks on the same scale what you rate your sadness, anger, love, fear, guilt, gratitude etc. This side of the diary you must discuss with your therapist, especially if you have rated more than a 1 in self harm, urge to suicide and urge to quit therapy (these are the closest thing related to death, my psychologist says, and therefore they are the first thing you talk about in therapy). On the other side of the diary there are the DBT categories/modules:

                 - core mindfulness

                 - interpersonal effectiveness

                 - emotion regulation

                 - distress tolerance 

Each of these categories has a set of skills that help manage the symptoms of Borderline. So for example within distress tolerance there are about 20 different categories of things you can do to try to get yourself out of distress or at least bring you down a little. You can observe breathing, half smile while listening to music, read a book, count to 20, have a chamomile tea, do some colouring in, do a puzzle, watch funniest home videos on You Tube, among many other things.

Distress Tolerance is the section I am learning about in DBT at the moment and I really am enjoying challenging myself by doing all different things but also by having things on standby for in case of an emergency where I am extremely angry or so sad to the point of despair. 
I admit I have had 2 major breakdowns since starting this course, where I considered being hospitalised, and I’ve struggled to put in place these distress tolerance skills, even if they have been right in front of my face. However, I did have access to phone coaching where one of the DBT trainers helped me to think about what skills to use by getting my diary card out and getting them ready to use. The other times where I’ve had little breakdowns I have been able to bring myself down by finding and doing the skills myself. 

I would like to think that as I keep doing these skills every day, even when not distressed, that they will become second nature. I am only 12 weeks into my course so I am pretty happy with how I am traveling along anyway. I’m not expecting miracles straight away but I am definitely seeing a change in the way this therapy works in comparison to all the others that I have tried. 
DBT gives me hope.