My therapist go-to phrase is "can you hold both at the same time?" A lot of things in this world are seemingly mutually exclusive. Humans behave in controversial ways all the time, making it hard for us to make an informed decision: Can I trust her? Does he love me? Are they right?

Turns out people can bring you joy one day and hurt you the other. They can teach you valuable things and also teach you to be racist. So... wassup with that? Are they good people or bad people? My therapist would say "yes, both". The scientist within me struggles with this, but less so after a lot of DBT. The whole point of DBT is learning to sit with two seemingly contradictory ideas: 1) I am ok as I am; and 2) I have shortcomings I need to work on. It's about working on yourself without the debilitating shameful thought of "there's something wrong with me".

A lot of what is taught in DBT is common sense. But it's the kind of common sense that gets overridden by bad habits if you don't put in the work to notice these habits.

Before DBT, I was not aware of the constant judging going on in my head and how it consumed my mental health. Silly thoughts like "If you don't constantly surpass expectations, you will disappoint your mentors and they will stop investing their time and energy in you. You must constantly prove you are worthy of training". The thoughts don't go away just because you notice them, but I can train myself to reply "thank you for your note, mind, but I will not do what you are asking for right now". Again, it's not a magical "happily ever after" situation, but you do get better at resisting bad habits with repetition.

My vocabulary for feelings and physical sensations was also pretty poor. And turns out that properly labeling your feelings (and identifying how they manifest in your body) is key to fighting bad habits. For example, both fear and anger can lead to avoidance, but fear-based avoidance is not necessarily the best strategy, while anger-based avoidance is often a good call.

Honestly, I think everyone would benefit from a bit of DBT. It should be a required Life 101 course. If you want to give it a try, I highly recommend this workbook: The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook by Matthew McKay, Jeffrey C. Wood and Jeffrey Brantley. It took me months of daily work to get through the exercises in this book, and that hard work was a precious gift to my current wellbeing.