Don't Be Afraid to Fail

The amount of therapy you need varies based upon your own individual needs, however most people do well with one individual session per week. DBT also includes one additional skill-building group session per week. Your commitment to the therapy process really is the best determining factor as to how the therapy will work. They do the same with us, and together we end up basically playing a very bad version of the Muppet Show among us. We do this not out of stupidity or malice, and certainly not because we choose to do so, but simply because we cannot possibly grasp the complete complexity of this person. To completely comprehend it by the way, we'd have to fathom the rest of the entire universe, of Reality itself, because everything is interdependent with everything else. We simply don't have the hardware for this, nor the time, since we have a lot of gaming, goofing around and binge-watching Netflix series to do too. So we are `condemned', mutually, by nature, to interact with reductions, with projections on cardboard cut-outs, with puppets and avatars. The fact that we do this isn't the problem, it's simply a given, an unalterable basic aspect of the human condition. The problem is how we do it, and more importantly even, that we're unaware that we're doing it while we're doing it. There's good news however. How exactly we project, and how aware or unaware of this we are, are variables we can tweak to a large extent - which is exactly the aim of this article. Next up: why we, neurodivergents, are especially in a mess with this. Some people do more than one individual session per week, while others are comfortable with the one session. That is something that you should discuss with your therapist to determine a specific treatment regimen. How long does it take to see progress? Progress varies depending on the person, but most people start seeing results very early, typically within 3-4 sessions. Of course, this depends largely on how much effort you put into the program. Doing the homework consistently and attending the group skill-building sessions every week is critical to your success in DBT. This article provides many of the techniques that you will learn during treatment.

What if I'm skeptical? Give it a try. You won't know whether it works or not until you try it. And what we can do about it. Me, myself and I (or how we create other people in our own image) Whenever we meet someone, there are inevitably gaps, unknowns, blank spots in our knowledge about them. Most often, there will be more blank spots than data, especially if you consider how complex human beings are, and how mysterious they can be, even to themselves. Even close friends and partners have significant blanks, both to themselves and to us, so this applies even to them, although to a somewhat lesser degree of course. To make interaction possible we preemptively fill in these gaps, on the spot, with whatever we have at hand. We don't just stand there, completely dumbfounded and empty-minded, waiting for data to slowly and steadily materialize, our jaws hanging and our eyes empty - even though technically speaking we actually should, since we have next to no information about this particular new appearance in our life. Instead, we make a ton of assumptions, on the spot, in the blink of an eye[1]. As raw material for these assumptions we (unconsciously) use two main sources: ourselves as a kind of basic template of `a human being', and other people we somehow consider `similar' to the person in question. I think we can all agree that these are lousy starting points. Just like almost anything else in life, you won't know how effective it really is until you try it. Commit to doing your first behavioral experiment and see how it goes. If it works, great, keep going. If it doesn't, you can always stop. Can I discontinue medication? Although both CBT and DBT have both been found to be quite effective treatment approaches, even without medication, the decision to discontinue your medication should be taken very seriously and supervised by a medical professional. You should discuss that decision with your psychiatrist or another physician.

How does DBT prioritize treatment goals? Target 1: Life-threatening behavior and behavior that interferes with treatment Target 2: Decrease emotional suffering But it's either that or nothing, so that's where we start anyway - and where things immediately start going awry, especially for neurodivergents, as we'll see in a minute. Let's briefly go over the second source of fillers first, namely `similar' other people. For starters, we automatically assume that if something mimics a human being close enough, then it's not a hi-tech android or a perfect hologram, but someone of flesh and blood. Yes, that is an assumption, or do you actually always check that by pinching them or by performing a small biopsy? I admit that it's a wacky thought, but it does go to show how little we really, actually know, and how much we assume. But also on a more down-to-Earth level, we go with a ton of quite detailed assumptions based on broad categories like gender, skin color, body type, pitch of voice, posture, clothing style, whether they look like our grumpy grandfather or remind us of the friendly neighbour's dog, how they smell and move, whether they have an accent, or mayonnaise in the corner of their mouth, and so on. You can call these ideas prejudgments, common sense, prejudices, crap, intuition, whatever you like. You can be in favor or against them. But however you call them or feel about them, we unconsciously indulge in them all the time. Or when was the last time you took about a week of in-depth mutual getting to know each other in very profound ways before interacting with a stranger, a colleague at work, or maybe even your partner? Target 3: Daily living management Target 4: Sense of wholeness and connectedness This is the priority of the goals for DBT treatment. Of course, life-threatening goals take priority and moving through suicidal ideation or self-harm behavior is addressed first. Also, behavior that interferes with treatment is high-priority as well because no progress can be made unless there is commitment to the therapy process. The ultimate goal is to get you to a place of complete wholeness. You are one out of a whole universe, and you are universally connected with every other person in the universe.

Whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs are, the ultimate goal of DBT is to help you embrace yourself, your life, and other people so that you can fully experience and enjoy life. Is Eastern philosophy an underpinning of DBT? DBT's core mindfulness component emphasizes staying in the present, and it does have its foundation in Eastern traditions. And repeated this process at a regular basis to keep up with their ever-changing deep mental and physical states and evolutions in their busy lives? So we definitely use our previous experiences with other, `similar' people, and that's undeniably a very common and often unwise thing to do, but it's how we're wired. But that's not the part I'd like to develop here. What is of much more importance to us, neurodivergents, is the other source of fillers and how we use those: our own person. Because when we project our highly uncommon, fabulously neurodivergent self on a neurotypical, or even worse on a society of neurotypicals, we're typically so far off that it's almost like a psychosis. We use our own person as a model for how others function, and we do this automatically, unconsciously, and very, very often. It underlies an astonishingly gigantic part of our ideas about the world, and other people in it. I call this `self-projection:' projecting our own self-image, or the ideas we have about ourselves, on other people, believing they have the same characteristics we presume we have. At times this process becomes more or less conscious. We may for instance think that since we wouldn't be capable of doing something, someone else wouldn't be either. The goal is to help you stay in the present with your thoughts and emotions because most disturbances result from things that have happened in the past or thoughts about the future. The tradition of concentrating on the here and now has been practiced in the Eastern world for centuries and the Western world has more recently adopted the mindfulness theory. It has been very helpful for people who truly want to get unstuck so that they are no longer overwhelmed by their emotions. Dialectical Behavior Therapy has offered much in the realm of therapies. Dr Linehan has saved thousands of lives with her innovative work. Borderline Personality Disorder is not being crazy or unhinged. It's simply mental illness.

It includes many other mental illnesses as facets of it. Because of that, it only makes sense that an effective therapy for this condition would include many types of therapy and self-reflection. Mindfulness is probably the most important aspect of DBT because we have been trained not to be mindful. Psychopaths and serial killers thrive on this: they look like us, they seem to behave like us, yet they genuinely revel in things that are utterly horrendous and disgusting to us. But since, caught in self-projection, we simply cannot fathom this to be true, they get away with it right under our very noses. We assume that when someone is crying, they're sad, just like we're when we cry. Fakers and actors aside, this is true in most cases. But the reasons why they're sad may be extremely different from ours. For instance, narcissistic people may genuinely, heartrendingly cry because their overly inflated public image has been somewhat reduced to a more realistic version. A vengeful person may be genuinely sad because their vengeance failed. An extremely materialistic person may be genuinely in tears because they missed out on acquiring the latest must-have fad. As long as we're self-projecting, we assume however they're sad for a reason similar to what we'd be sad for, and we may even become accomplices to wrongdoings in the process. The above are just a few of the more obvious examples of self-projection. We're like ants, scurrying around - hurry, hurry, hurry, but going nowhere. Mindfulness forces you to focus on the present. Ask yourself, Am I treading water? Am I at the bottom of a ladder I want to be on or the middle of one I don't? When you choose mindfulness, you look at your life for a moment. Your questions aren't all going to be answered in one moment of mindfulness. It's something that must be practiced every day.