Distress Tolerance Skills

Really felt disappointed with how my day went today and I totally blame myself. I over react so much but this thing that I’m dealing with in regards to a problem behaviour of my son’s is just grating on me and every time I’m with him I can’t help but be so mad about it. I will profess though I did not yell at him this time and I didn’t put him down (although when I look back I blamed him for the situation). Even though I did well not to yell etc I still went and cuddled up in bed and cried which I don’t want to do because it will lead me to depression which will keep me in bed. However I did notice that lying in bed gave me time to think about what was going on, how I felt and after a long while (20mins) I finally though ‘hey you should be using some skills from DBT here’, so that’s what I did, but not before realising that this situation caused another situation. We were meant to spend a family day out which I planned with my psychologist’s help and had to get a lot of courage up to actually want to participate in going and doing it. It took a total of 4 days for this to come together – just a movie but it was a huge outing for me. I felt so disappointed and sad about the situation with my son and then a touch pissed off because it took me all that effort to plan family time together doing something nice I realised it wasn’t going to come to fruition. I could tell that I was starting to cry a little too much and I was ruminating so I needed to do some distress tolerance skills so I did the following:

 I counted to 20

skill - Distress Tolerance (thinking different thoughts)

 

 I listed all the fruits and vegies I could think of

skill - Distress Tolerance (thinking different thoughts)

  I wrote a poem about how I felt

skill - Distress Tolerance (activity)

 I held ice cubes in my hand

skill - Distress Tolerance (feeling different sensations)

Doing these things all helped in a huge way. Because my thoughts were distracted it brought me down a few notches and I was able to be reasonable and not ruminate so much on the previous thoughts. I’m not saying that this solved everything but I will tell you that if I was to rate it on a scale of 0 being most calm and 100 being most frantic I would say I started at a 50 and improved to about an 80. 

These DBT skills really do help in so many situations I really can’t see myself turning back or quitting this type of therapy – so far it has done wonders. The best part of skills is that many of them don’t take a lot of effort though I am fully aware that if I did have a full blown horrible day it would take a huge amount of effort but knowing a lot of these skills are at reach just in my own mind gives me a lot of hope.