Acceptance is the name of the game.  I go over what it is and what it isn't, and how to use the acceptance DBT skill in the middle of extreme emotions - in this case, sadness with an added bonus of a recording of me using the skill while in extreme distress.  I also throw in some of the "check the facts" skill.

Helpful resources from this episode:

DBT references

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets – online pdf version

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets – buy the manual from a Black-owned book store!

DBT handouts used in this episode

Distress Tolerance Handout 11 – Radical Acceptance

Emotion Regulation Handout 8 – Check the Facts

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Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

You've got shit. I've got shit. We've all got shit. So let's therapize that shit with your host, me, Joy Gerhard.

Please note: I am not a therapist. I cannot and do not diagnose anyone, or prescribe anything. This is just me – someone who struggles with my emotions and with intrusive thoughts – sharing what skills I've used and how I've used them. Also, a trigger warning: in this podcast, I talk about sensitive topics including: mental illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, rape, childhood sexual assault, trauma, and more. I also swear here and there, so listener discretion is advised.

Welcome, welcome. This is my first episode that I'm recording since I got my website up, so you can go check that out. It's http://therapize.joygerhard.com/. You can go check that out. I've got resources up there, so if I mention particular books or Instagram accounts or various and sundry other resources, I will post those there, along with just kind of high level notes about each episode

So I’m going to be like fully official.

So today we're going to do something a little bit different. Today, we're going to be talking about acceptance. That's not the different part, because that's going to be an ongoing thing. But what I had done is, a while ago, recorded myself in the middle of a very, very strong emotion. I was experiencing a lot of sadness.

And I thought what a great opportunity to actually practice the skill of acceptance in the middle of a very strong emotion, and to record myself doing it so that you can hear what it sounds like. And before I play that recording for you, I wanted to go over what acceptance is because, at least for me, when I first encountered the concept of acceptance, it felt very detached.

I think of people like spiritual gurus like the Dalai Lama, people who are kind of in an another plane of existence. They can do that, and it's not for people like us, us lay people, us plebs. It certainly didn't feel accessible to me at all. And it also kind of felt almost divorced from reality, like it wasn't acknowledging reality.

And acceptance is in fact the exact opposite of that, as it turns out. So that was my own misunderstanding of it. I guess it felt like acceptance was kind of like rolling over and taking it, you know, just like, “Fine, you can treat me however you want to. Fine, you can say to me whatever you want to. I have no agency. This is just how life is going to go.

So clearly, I mean, even as I'm saying these, I had conflicting beliefs about acceptance. So what acceptance is, and I'm using now the DBT manual. DBT stands for Dialectic Behavioral Therapy. And that's a therapy type that I keep coming back to in a lot of these episodes. You can find a link to the PDF on my website, and you can find a link to my website in the description. And you can also find a link to where you can buy the manual.

So DBT has four sections to it, one of which is Distress Tolerance. I don't know that I've explained this before what distress is. I think this is a pretty frequent therapy term. SUDs (S-U-D and then the plural of it is S-U-D-s).

But SUD is a subjective unit of distress. So it's basically asking the question: how amped up are you on whatever emotion you're experiencing? 0 is you are cool as a cucumber, totally chill, nothing's wrong, your system is relaxed, you are not on high alert, you're just like, vibing out. And then 100 is the most distressed you've ever been in your life.

If you are like me and you have a lot of self-harm or suicidal ideation, distress level 100 is life threatening, right? If you don't have those experiences, distress level 100 is like the most out of your mind you've ever been. Wailing in grief or throwing things in anger, just as distressed as you can be, like your body is as aroused as it can be.

Distress happens... I mean, it's all subjective units of distress. Distress tolerance kicks in at around 70; 70 to 100 is where we need to use distress tolerance skills. Because when you're over 70, the thinking part of your brain – that can do problem solving and kind of do higher level long-term thinking, considering other people's experiences, like compassion, all of that sort of stuff – all of that goes offline.

We actually – when we are that distressed – we don't have access to those parts of our brain. Your whole body is in like survival mode. So, this is where distress tolerance skills come in. Radical acceptance is a form of distress tolerance. So if you're following along in the DBT handbook, this is Distress (I have such a hard time saying that) Distress Tolerance Handout 11.

“Radical acceptance is for use when you can't stop or change a painful event or painful emotions.”

So, some very intense examples are: somebody died and you're grieving. You failed an exam. You're having an outdoor wedding and it's raining. There's a global pandemic. Your flight got cancelled, or, you know, somebody broke up with you.

There's a lot of things that are outside our ability to control, and emotions that go with it can often be outside our ability to control. Grief is... I’m thinking a lot about grief these days. But that's an example of, if somebody died, those emotions often feel like they're outside of our control.

So given that I can't change that somebody important to me died, or that my partner broke up with me, this is where acceptance comes in. And radical acceptance basically means accepting it all the way, so it's total acceptance. Not part-way, dip-your-toe-in levels of acceptance. What needs to be accepted? Just the facts. Just the facts, Jack. Reality as it is.

So, what is currently happening and what has already happened. There's all sorts of things we accept without question. I mean, if I told you that I was born on a Tuesday, you would probably go, “OK, Joy was born on a Tuesday.” You accept that, and you’d behave accordingly, whatever that entails.

On a normal day, if we look out the window and it's raining, I think most of us, if there's no emotional charge, would accept it and say, “OK, it's raining. So if it's raining, I need to, bring my raincoat or bring my umbrella or take public transportation instead of walking. Or I need to turn off my sprinklers, or I need to move inside – if have patio furniture that's not waterproof – I need to move that inside. I need to roll up my car windows.”

Those are things we do when we look at the reality and say, “OK, that's what's actually happening. Now what do I do, given that that is the fact?”

Where we get into trouble is when we have interpretations and strong emotions about the facts that have us reject or resist the facts. So, it's NOT a normal day and it's raining. It's your WEDDING day, and you had an outdoor wedding planned, and it's raining.

Yeah, might have the thought, “Well, my weddings ruined. Like, what's the point? I have all these beautiful plans.”

So we're not talking about accepting the thought, “my wedding’s ruined.” You don't have to accept that your wedding is ruined. We actually don't know if your wedding is ruined. If we accept that it's raining, there's some beautiful opportunities for silliness and fun in the rain during a wedding.

And if that's not consistent with your vision for your wedding, it's like, great, let’s erect a tent? Let's move the chairs inside. There are problem solving things that can turn a shitty situation into – not the perfect, ideal situation, but significantly better. And we don't have access to that stuff, we don't have access to the problem solving, and to alternative ways of being if we are not accepting.

So, the past has to be accepted because it's already happened. There's no way to change the past. The present has to be accepted because it's happening right now. If I go to change something, I'm actually changing the future, not right this second.

So we need to accept the past – the facts about the past, not our interpretations. And we need to accept the facts about the present. And facts can oftentimes be really challenging to disentangle from our interpretations. Like that scenario I just mentioned. You look out the window on your wedding day, and you see that it's raining, and you had an outdoor wedding planned.

You might not even have the thought, “it's raining, my wedding is ruined.” You might just look out the window and go, “my wedding is ruined.” Like it can happen, the interpretations and our beliefs about the facts, can be so close, so closely tied to the facts themselves that it's can oftentimes be really hard to tease them apart.

The purpose of acceptance is, again like I mentioned, it's a distress tolerance skill. It is to help us tolerate a distressing situation that we cannot change. I used to think that acceptance would make everything better. I mean it does, it does make things better. It does not perfect them. It does not make things undo. It won't bring a dear friend back to life.

It won't make the rain stop. It won't change that you failed that test. Or that your partner broke up with you (or with me in this case). What it does is it moves you from suffering into pain. Suffering is pain without acceptance. It's like... I hate to say wallowing because it really does sound judgmental.

It's like moving, moving in and setting up shop, taking up residence and being like, “well, I guess this is just how my life goes now.” That's an assumption or prediction or judgment. None of these things are facts; assumptions, predictions and judgments are not facts.

Facts are: things that can be observed, how you feel, that you had a thought, that you had an urge, or that you had a body sensation. To kind of get at that in a little bit more creative way: when I try to figure out what a fact is, I picture an alien from another planet who's not even like a carbon-based life form – like completely different from anything we can imagine – sitting in the corner.

And this alien has instruments that can pick up sounds and sights and stuff. What would those interests instruments see? And the reason I use this as an example – the alien in the corner – is because oftentimes we don't fully understand what are facts and what are interpretations.

A great story about that I my last hospitalization stay in a psych ward. One of the fellows who worked there was from Eastern Africa. I don't remember which country. But culturally, for him, eye contact was a sign of disrespect. So if you made eye contact with somebody, that was disrespectful.

He's relaying this story to us. Ad it was a huge culture shock for him coming to the United States where, if you refrain from making eye contact, so you're constantly looking away, people will assume you're weak, you're lying, you're trying to hide something, you're embarrassed.

The more effective thing, the thing that's more socially acceptable in the US, is to make eye contact. If somebody's not making eye contact with me, and I say, “Oh, they're disrespecting me,” that's an interpretation. That is not the facts. Even if culturally we all agree that is a sign of disrespect, it still isn’t the fact.

The fact is that person didn't make eye contact with me. My interpretation, or the thought I had when I saw that person not make eye contact with me, was, “that person’s disrespecting me.

So, getting back to our alien in the corner with their little instruments. What does that alien see or hear? How loud is my voice? What are the words that I'm saying? What is my body posture? What are my facial expressions?

So those are facts. And then there's a subcategory of facts that the alien can't pick up on, unless we assume this alien has the power of telekinesis? Telepathy! There we go. So one of the instruments that the alien has gives the ability to look inside my body, and read my thoughts, and see what my body sensations are.

Because those are also facts. If I'm having pounding, you know, my heart is pounding in my chest. Or if I am having the thought, “oh, we're doomed.” I'm having the thought, “my day is ruined.” I'm having the thought, “no help is coming. I'm all on my own. No one will ever love me.”

Those are all facts – it is a fact that I'm having those thoughts. Those thoughts aren't necessarily pointing to fact. And we will go over this over and over and over and over and over again because it is so important. That it is a fact that I had the thought... I can have the thought, “I am a pink elephant.” I just had that thought, “I'm a pink elephant.” Having that thought doesn't make me a pink elephant.

I can have that thought 1000 times a day and it does not mean that the truth is that I'm a pink elephant. The fact is, I had the thought that I'm the pink elephant.

So, kind of bearing that in mind, I'm about to now introduce the audio clip that you're going to listen to. And I want to also say something else about radical acceptance. And this is at the bottom of Distress Tolerance Handout 11.

That rejecting reality doesn't change reality. Refusing to acknowledge reality doesn't change it. Refusing to acknowledge that it's raining doesn't change it. Refusing to acknowledge that a dear friend has died, doesn't bring them back.

And acceptance doesn't necessarily mean you feel great afterwards. What it does do is that it tempers the feelings. It moves them out of despair and into something that we can handle.

And you'll see this in the clip I'm about to play. I am crying pretty much through the whole thing. And there's peaks and valleys. But I end the clip crying. And I didn't feel... like, I started the clip feeling really hopeless, and that is not where I ended up.

So and this is on that Distress Tolerance Handout 11, that “acceptance may lead to sadness, but deep calmness usually follows.” And “refusing to accept reality can keep you stuck,” in whatever emotion you're experiencing. It doesn't move. “The path out of hell,” as Marsha Linehan says, “is through misery. By refusing to accept that misery is a part of climbing out of hell, you fall back into hell,” or you get stuck there.

And that can be really hard. I mean, I struggle with accepting that part of it. Like, I don't even want to be here in the first place. Like, I don't want to be sad in the first place. I don't want to be broken up with in the first place. I don't want my friends to have died in the first place. Are you telling me that I have to accept that?

Accepting is not going to bring them back or undo the thing. No it won't. What it does is it changes the way we feel about the thing. And that's not to say it's all rainbows and sunshine and puppy dogs. It just, like I said, it tempers it.

It goes from being despondent, hopeless grief to bittersweet grief. It goes from being I guess despondent – that's the word of the day – about being broken up with and the life that I thought I was going to have ending, to acknowledging, “OK, well, now what do I need to do?”

There's still sadness. Of course, there's still sadness. So I wanted to clarify that. We will keep going over this over and over again because this is one of the... I don't know about you, this is not a skill that I learned as a child.

There are very few examples of it in social media or regular media, books, TV shows, movies, music, the news. There's not a lot of examples of people doing this and doing it effectively. So it makes sense none of us would have this skill, or very few of us would have that.

So, given that I am now going to introduce you to a recording that is from... I'm going to get the exact date for you. Hang on just a second. It was about two weeks after the breakup. Oh, even less time than that, actually. Like a week and half after the breakup. So that is where I'm at emotionally. And now you get to listen to it, so lucky you.

I don't know what to say. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Do our life together. So, what do I accept? I accept the facts. And the facts I I'm having the thought that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

The facts are that it fucking hurts. I feel really sad. I’m fucking heartbroken. The facts are I had to move out of the apartment, the home that we built together. I’m living with my parents again. That is a fact.

I don't have to accept that this will be always and forever, because I can't tell the future. I'm having the thought that, uh, there's no hope. I can accept that I’m having the thought that there is no hope. Because that is actually the thought that I'm having.

I do not have to accept that there is no hope. I just have to accept that I have the thought that there's no hope. I'm having this thought that I have to start all over again. I don't have to accept anything about how that process will go because I don't know how that process will go.

I I'm having the thought that it's gonna be awful and horrible and uncomfortable. I'm having this thought that I will be comparing everything with any new person to my experiences with him. I'm having that thought and I accept that I'm having that thought.

I do not have to accept that that is what will happen, because I don't know what will happen, because I can't tell the future. I’m having the thought that my life will amount to nothing. I’m having the thought that I have no goals, or ambition, or direction, or purpose.

I don't have to accept that I have no goals or ambition or purpose. I accept that I'm having that thought that I have none of those things. I can accept that I can't see those things right now. If they're true, if I do have them, I can accept that I can't see them right now.

I can accept that this hurts. Goddammit. I can accept that I’m feeling really fucking sad and really fucking lonely for my partner who’s not my partner anymore. I can accept that my life is not currently going the way I thought it was going to go. I thought I would be living with him, sharing my life with him, building a future together.

And even... I mean, even if we continue, we stay friends and hang out and stuff, it won't be what I thought it was going to be. I don't even know if that's the fact actually. Because I don't know what the future is going to look like.

I'm having the thought that it won't be what I thought it was going to be. And the fact is that it currently isn't what I thought it was going to be. I have no idea what it's going to look like. I am having a lot of anxiety and sadness about what I think it's going to look like, based off of my last experience dating.

I haven't gotten into this at all with anybody on this podcast yet. In April of 2019, I went on a date with a guy who sexually assaulted me on our date. Which is not unusual. I've had that experience, I think it's 9 times? 8 times. I have to tally them up.

That time in April of ‘19 was the first time it had ever happened on a first date. Yeah, I was not doing great when I met my former partner, which happened three months after that. So, I am having the thought that I have to go back to that place. That is the thought that I'm having.

And it makes sense that I'm having that thought because for a while there I was 8 for 8. Eight of the guys that I had dated... Of the eight guys that I had dated at one point, eight of them had sexually assaulted or raped me at various points in our dating history.

And I was having the thought that, you know, that was just how it was going to go. And that doesn't... Yeah, that was just kind of my expectation of how dates were going to go. And there was really no way of knowing in advance, of seeing it coming.

I'm having the thought that my experience with my former partner was a fluke. Because he did not sexually assault me or abuse me in any way, shape, or form. I don't know how I found him. I don't know how I got so fucking lucky after that nightmare string of... I mean, fuck.

It started in 2012. And went all the way into... let's see, 2018 before finally, I broke the pattern, went on some dates that did not result in sexual assault, which is great. And then had that experience again that April.

I am not in the same place that I was then. I know different things now. I have different experiences now. I have different standards now. I do not have to accept that I have gone backwards. I do not have to accept that I'm in the same place as I was back then. I can accept that I'm having those thoughts.

Those thoughts are not fact. It is fact that I'm having them. And they are not fact. I imagine anybody listening to this would ask or wonder what the fuck is the benefit of any of this, given that I'm still really fucking sad and crying and just really fucking sad.

I can tell you what the benefit is. I'm not spiraling right now. Spiraling looks a lot different than this. This is just deep, deep, deep sadness. What it is not... It is hopelessness lite; you know the non-fat version of hopelessness. Or like the Lacroix version of hopelessness. It has a slight flavor of hopelessness without actually being 100% made out of hopelessness.

There is something very different, neurologically, between saying there's no hope versus I'm having the thought that there is no hope. There is something that's different between, “I am sad” versus, “I feel sad. I'm having the feeling of sadness.”

In the first case with, “there's no hope of versus,” verses “I'm having the thought that there is no hope.” The first one treats it like fact. The second one is the statement of observation about things that are going through my brain.

With the feeling, saying “I am sad” versus I “feel sad or I'm having the feeling of sadness.” The first statement: “I am sad. I AM sad.” Like I'm not a character in “Inside Out,” though ironically the main character’s name is Joy.

I am not sad. I am muscle and sinew and bone and fat and skin and hair and a pancreas and a bile duct. I'm also memories and experiences and personality and a whole bunch of other things. The entirety of my being is not sadness, even though there are times when it definitely fucking feels like that.

And just, goddammit. Just the derailing – is that what happens to a train? It gets derailed? Yes, the derailing – of the life I was working towards and planning on. I’m having the thought that it's really fucking unfair. I’m having the thought that, you know, all the soulda, coulda, wouldas.

And we could talk about those. We’re not gonna talk about them in this episode, but we can definitely talk about those and the skill of non-judgment. So radical acceptance is just the facts of the situation. So the alien in the room.

And let's ascribe to the alien in the room kinetic powers so he could actually feel my body sensations and hear my thoughts, but ascribes no meaning to them. “She’s feeling a tightness –” This is what the alien would say about me: “She's feeling a tightness in her throat. Back of her mouth area. She's crying.

“She's experiencing waves of sadness, just fucking crashing over and over again.” That is the fact of what is happening. I am experiencing sadness. And I'm not spiraling. It's a minor distinction.

It can sound like a minor distinction. “Oh great, I'm still over here bawling my eyes out with snot bubbling out of my nose and super congested. How is that a win?” Well, I don't wanna kill myself right now. So that's a win. I don't want to self-harm right now, so that's a win.

I can feel these feelings. I can feel these feelings and not die. I can feel sad. I can have these thoughts and not die. I mean, I've just been sitting here reading a book. There’s a romantic partnership in it, and just the last like couple hours, just having waves and waves of crying jags.

And like, “pick another book, Joy.” And I don't... there have been times in the last week and a half, almost two weeks now, since my partner broke up with me that I had not wanted to feel the feelings and have chosen distraction instead.

And tonight I was like, “go ahead, feel the feelings. There's no one here to hear you. There's no activity you're trying to accomplish that is vital that this is getting in the way of. It's fine to feel these feelings.”

And I can feel them. That's one of the steps, or the first experiences that I had in DBT, which was just the overwhelm of feeling after having spent virtually my entire life up to that point of avoiding certain feelings, namely sadness, but also fear.

Pretty much everything. I was like a sausage making machine. You could put in different cuts of beef or pork or chicken, but it all comes out looking the same. And so I could have been experiencing a loss or have a worry about something, but it all came out looking like anger. I was an anger sausage machine.

Because I didn't know how to feel those other feelings. I remember the first time I felt sad. I was, I want to say, 27. And I remember, it was shocking. I was sitting in the car with one of my best friends. And I don't remember what had happened, but I remember saying out loud to him, “I feel really sad.”

And he went, “really!?” Like it was surprising to him. I don't think it was a judgmental “really” like, “Really? You're feeling sad about whatever this is.” It was more of a, “I didn't know that was a feeling you had.” And that was 27 years old.

And then I know I must have felt sad after that because I moved away. And that was sad. I felt sad doing that. I spent a lot of time numbing and avoiding and putting those things into my sausage maker and spitting out anger. Because anger felt like something that I could tolerate.

Anger gives you kind of the sense of, I don’t know. probably the illusion of control. Of “I'm going to go take charge of a thing. I'm going to go do something!” Because anger as an emotion is a action-driving emotion. It's very motivating.

I mean, all of our emotions beget certain urges. Clearly, sadness has us have the urge to curl up, self-soothe, cry. For some people, there's the desire to isolate when they're sad. For some people, there's the desire to seek out comfort from others when they're sad.

But there’s kind of this craving that goes along with it. And the cravings for anger always felt much more manageable to me than the cravings for really anything else. Or urges, whatever you want to call them.

So when I started going to therapy and certainly started getting into DBT fully, and certainly exposure therapy... Fuck, we should talk about exposure therapy. We're not going to do it right now. But that was one of the things, was literally sitting with an emotion and feeling it fully.

You know what’s amazing about an emotion is... I don't know what research backs this up, but there's this idea floating around the Internet that an emotion will go through your body – If it's not fed. If you have a wave of sadness come up and you don't feed the thoughts – it takes 90 seconds for an emotion to go through your body.

Because an emotion... there's a there's a hormonal component, there's a neurological component. There's thoughts that you have. There's physiological changes that happen. That's why you have those heat maps that can show, like, “here's what a depressed person looks like,” and they're all purple.

And then an angry person, you know, will have more heat in certain parts of their body. And then an anxious person will have more heat in other parts of their body. Because there are physiological changes that your body undergoes, depending on what emotion you're experiencing.

And if you just ride it out, it'll take 90 seconds. Now that I think about it, in the last couple hours while I've been reading this book, until I picked up my phone and started recording, I would have just this wave – and I felt like getting punched in the face – of sadness and I would start bawling.

And a minute or two later, I would go back to reading. Again, it’s if you don't feed it. And we'll get into that too, the feeding of an emotion and what that looks like. The wheel that starts spinning.

But really what acceptance does is it lets things move. I think a lot about rivers or streams. And how the water just keeps moving. And if you throw a log in there, if you throw multiple logs, if you throw concrete in there, the water gets still and deep. And that's kind of my experience of emotions.

Acceptance and validation kind of have similar effects in that way. Invalidation and a lack of acceptance will dam up your emotions, dam up my emotions. And what was just moving through now is staying stuck. It's all blocked up. And instead of being a couple feet deep, well now it's meters and meters deep. And I'm mixing my units of measurement here. Yards and yards deep.

Anybody who's ever been to a reservoir, you know. It just gets all stuck and still and doesn't move. And emotions, I think, are supposed to move. They're intended to move. If you look at your life, if I look at my life, there's not a single emotion that I felt when I was five that I'm still feeling now.

There's not a single emotion that I felt when I was in high school that I'm still feeling now. Which is not to say... I obviously felt anger in high school. I feel anger now, but it's not the same anger over the same thing consistently, like, OK, that emotion has lasted 20 years. Dear God.

No. I don't think that's true of anybody. Even people who are majority angry are not angry 100% of the time. There are there are tiny little moments, tiny little moments like right after you have a really good shit and you're like, “goddammit, that felt good.”

Or, you're driving in your car and you zone out. That's a tiny little moment when you're feeling something different. I mean, emotions are fluid. And lack of acceptance, non-acceptance and invalidation are like a freezer, you know. They take this fluid thing and they turn it solid.

They make it immovable. And it sticks around then for a lot longer. I am using so many mixed metaphors. Yeah, I'm gonna stop now.

And now we're back to future me. So what you just heard me do was identify my thoughts as thoughts, rather than saying that my thoughts are fact. What the fact is, is that I have those thoughts.

And the reason this is effective and useful is that when I'm experiencing strong emotions, the gap between an event and my thoughts about the event gets really small. To the point where my thoughts feel like fact, feel like that's what the event was.

And so going back to my old standard example of rain on your wedding day – courtesy of Alanis Morissette here – is that the gap being really small would look like: I lookout the window. I see it's raining. My wedding is ruined.

And then of course, using my own breakup example, my strong emotions resulted in me having an experience that went like this: my partner says he doesn't want to date me anymore and that I need to move out. Oh my God, my entire future is ruined.

So like I said, strong emotions can shorten that gap between an event, and my thoughts and interpretations about the event. And having a shorter gap between the events and the those thoughts can result in stronger emotions. So stronger emotions shorten the gap, and a short gap results in stronger emotions.

It's this lovely little feedback loop. And what identifying thoughts as thoughts does is that it acts kind of like a crowbar that just wedges in between that tiny little space between an event and the thought, and it creates a little bit more space.

A tiny bit of breathing room. And the more space I can get between the event and my thoughts about it, the more I'm able to regulate my emotions, which brings me out of distress and into something more manageable.

It isn't to say it erases all the emotions. It just gets me out of the maxed-out emotion distress mind, and into something that I can handle. And once my emotions are more regulated and manageable, then I can problem solve. I can check the facts, I can breathe. And all of this helps me regulate even more and eventually I have access to gratitude, and can actually get creative.

Back to my strangely favorite wedding example. So, you remember the original situation was: I look out the window, I see it's raining, my wedding is ruined. If instead, I identify my thoughts as thoughts, it can go like this: I look out the window, I see that it's raining. I have the thought that my wedding is ruined.

The fact is, I don't know if my wedding is ruined. What is fact is that my wedding isn't going to go the way I want it to go. Because I wanted a wedding on a day that wasn't raining.

Going back to my breakup, if you remember the original situation was: my partner says he doesn't want to date me anymore, that I need to move out, oh my God my entire future is ruined. And if I apply this, this skill of identifying thoughts as thoughts, it can go like this instead:

My partner says he doesn't want to date me anymore and that I need to move out. I'm having the thought that my future is ruined. The fact is, I don't know if my future is ruined. What is fact is that the future isn't going to go the way I want it to go. Because I wanted to spend my life with my now former partner.

So you'll notice that acceptance of the facts doesn't actually change the facts. Which is a bit of a bummer, yes. My partner still broke up with me. It's still raining on my hypothetical wedding day. Acceptance wasn't a magic solution that undid either of those things. Well, one real thing and one hypothetical thing.

What acceptance did do, though, was allow me to identify my feelings as feelings, to label my thoughts as thoughts, and doing that ultimately helped me regulate. Towards the end of that flashback that we just listened to where I was crying, you noticed I was crying through the whole thing.

And so I was still feeling emotion even at the end, but it wasn't strong, cataclysmic emotion. Strong emotions (so like 70 and above in the SUDs, the subjective units of distress that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode), when our emotions are 70 and above, 70 out of 100, it turns off our problem-solving part of our brains.

So regulating my emotions so that they get below 70 gives me access to my entire brain. I can feel the motion and still problem-solve, and get creative, and still feel that emotion.

So yeah, so those are my thoughts and experience using some acceptance, and checking of the facts around my breakup. And a reminder, if you want to dig into more of what radical acceptance looks like in the DBT notebook, it's Distress Tolerance Handout 11.

And if you want to know about Checking the Facts – please hold while I find it – it's Emotion Regulation Handout 8. So you can go take a look at those. There's a link to the PDF of the whole DBT manual on my website.

All right, so I'm going to piece out now. Bye! I don't know how to end this.

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

This has been Let's Therapize That Shit!!! with your host, me, Joy Gerhard. If you like what you heard, please rate, review, subscribe, and tell your friends about it. We'll see you next time.