With this many interpretations going on, I could get a job at the United Nations. After a conversation with my former partner, I talk about my interpretations (i.e. thoughts), realizing that I was relating to those interpretations as if they were REALITY, and the impact that that realization has on me. There's a lot of sadness, regret, remorse, and grief that comes up. Then, I practice radical acceptance around those interpretations (not accepting the interpretations but rather accepting that I HAD those interpretations). There are a lot of bumps along the way AND I end up in a better space than where I started.

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

Emotion Regulation Handout 5 – Model for Describing Emotions (alternate version: E Wheel)

Emotion Regulation Handout 19 – Build Mastery and Cope Ahead

• Cope Ahead of Time with Difficult Situations

Distress Tolerance Handout 5 – Pros and Cons

Distress Tolerance Handout 11 – Radical Acceptance

Distress Tolerance Handout 11a – Radical Acceptance: Factors That Interfere

Distress Tolerance Handout 11b – Practicing Radical Acceptance Step by Step

Distress Tolerance Handout 14 – Half-Smiling and Willing Hands

• Willing Hands

Other handouts/graphics used in this episode

Box breathing video

---------

More resources are available at https://therapize.joygerhard.com/

Please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen.

Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Like what you hear? Support me and this podcast on Patreon.

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. Today is going to be a fraught recording. There's going to be a lot of crying, or at least the aftereffects of crying, i.e. sniffles.

I'm editing them out to not blow out your eardrums, but there's been a lot. So I'm recording this part on January 7th, like very, very early morning. So let's just call it January 6th, because it's still that day, Thursday.

And what I'm about to play for you was originally recorded on a day. Yes. And I can tell you what day. It was recorded on November 29th, 2021. And before I get into all of this, I want to start with something a little unusual. I know that at the very end of my podcast, I have my outro that mentions asking you to rate, review, subscribe, and all that.

That's kind of an automatic thing that happens at the end of each episode. But I wanted to take a minute now to actually say it for real, that that's one of the significant ways that podcasts get noticed and found by folks.

if you leave a review or rate it, a star rating or whatever, especially on Apple Podcasts, that would be super, super helpful getting the word out about this podcast. Also, I could use your recommendations, telling your friends about it.

If you find this useful, if you could recommend it to your friends, that would be also just lovely and helpful. And I would be just, oh, so grateful. But I also love to hear from you.

If you're listening and you have questions or thoughts or concerns or corrections or any of that stuff, I really do love hearing from folks and knowing what is helpful, what is not helpful, what's confusing, all that good stuff.

So do please reach out in any of the communication modes that I have on my website. You can e-mail me at therapize@joygerhard.com, and you can also hit me up on social media. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are all @letstherapize.

So getting to the recording that you're about to hear, I recorded it right after I got off the phone with my former partner. I'd been struggling for months with the fact that we were still in communication.

He would send me memes and YouTube videos of inside jokes that we had or things he knows that I'm interested in. And on the one hand, it was lovely to still have that connection, and to be able to joke around and stuff.

And on the other hand, I was just feeling incredibly, incredibly sad every time I saw a notification that he had messaged me. And then I was judging the hell out of myself for feeling sad because I didn't want to feel sad.

I wanted to be friends with him and to be able to joke around and send each other stuff. And I wasn't there yet. I'm still not there. I was still very much heartbroken in the recording you're about to hear, and I would think it's fair to say I'm still heartbroken.

So I asked him if we could talk on the phone real quick, and I told him I didn't think it was a good idea for me to still be in communication with him. And I told him about the impact that it was having on me, that I was feeling really sad, even though I know that wasn't his intention.

And I told him that I was going to stop talking to him. And he pushed back. He asked me to take a couple days to think about it before deciding, because he still wanted to talk to me. I told him that I would do that, that I would take a couple days.

But in reality, I'd already made-up my mind. And so a couple days came and went, and I just never reached out again. And he has honored that boundary, which I'm grateful for.

So, I hadn't realized that I literally recorded the recording you're about to hear right after getting off the phone with him. The timestamp on this recording lines up with me getting off the phone and hitting record about two minutes later.

So, that's what you're about to hear. And if this is the first episode of mine that you're listening to, whenever I read something from a page that's not my original thoughts, I turn on a reverb sound effect.

So, whenever I'm reading something that's either from the DBT manual or somebody else's work, I will sound like I'm in a glorious cathedral or a high school bathroom. You can picture me in whatever setting you choose. So let's dive right on in, shall we?

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

Well, I just went to blow my nose into a Kleenex that I've used three times already, and it went straight through and right onto my hand. So that's awesome. I want to talk about interpretations for a second. Well, for an episode.

I just got off the phone with my former partner because I needed to talk to him about some boundaries, and what wasn't working for me around how we were still communicating. And in the course of the conversation, I told him that one of the challenges for me when he reaches out to me is that I hope.

I experience hope in those moments. And he said that all other things aside from the specifics of how it ended, it really wasn't going to work long-term because we wanted different things.

And I realized as he said that, that yes, that was true. And I knew that was true. And the thought that I had in that moment was that I can't trust myself, that I can't trust my heart, my gut.

He and I had several conversations about some pretty fundamental, core things that we didn't align about, that we didn't align on. And I want to validate what actually happened. Because what I want to say, what I was about to say was that I charged ahead and ignored all of those things.

Which isn't true. I didn't ignore them. I thought they were things that we could work on, that we could figure out together. And right now, I'm having the thought that I was so off base and that's really concerning to me. And clearly this is very upsetting because here I am crying at you.

I'm having kind of a similar experience to when I – I think I talked about this in a previous episode about like the check engine light being always on like with PTSD and how, eventually, you just stop listening or paying attention to the check engine light, even when the check engine light is actually trying to tell you something.

And I really, really struggled when I started kind of like digging into my behavior around the situations that I chose to put myself in and the people I chose to engage with. There were things I just outright ignored and discounted and didn't give their due weight.

And there was this really... kind of felt like a come-to-Jesus moment, Idon't know what the secular version of that is. A long, hard look in the mirror, I guess. Kind of the realization that I was really off base, that the situations I thought I was interacting with weren't the situations I was interacting with.

And it's kind of like “The Matrix,” I guess. The people in the matrix think that that's their life. That person they see, that's an actual person that they're seeing. And that woman in the red dress, and all of that.

And it turns out that it's all a program, a matrix, even. Wow, it's in the name. And that was kind of the like the big earth shattering, red pill moment. Not the men's rights activist red pill, but “The Matrix” red pill.

Just this massive ah-ha of, “oh my God! I had been interacting with my interpretations, not with the facts. I was interacting with my thoughts about the facts, not the facts.”

And clearly this causes actually a lot of sadness. It's regret, it's remorse. Looking at a lot of this history, and watching myself choose something that wasn't real, I guess. And to stop talking in vagueness... Vagaries? Is that a noun? I don't know.

To be more specific, I had, this is the persistent pattern. Also, I'm going to apologize right now for the way I sound. I've been crying pretty much for the last hour and a half, and I'm trying to address the amount of snot currently flowing through my body. And I apologize for the sound quality and the occasional sniffle.

So, I was interacting with men as I wanted them to be, not with how they actually were. I was making declarations. “Oh, this person is safe. This person is good.”

And what that did was it had me discount individual instances, individual behaviors of theirs. “Oh, if I feel uncomfortable right now, it's because my barometer's off, because they're a good person and they wouldn't do anything to make me uncomfortable.”

And the problem there in labeling anybody – not just these former sexual partners – with a label... The problem with labeling them with a label is that I stopped paying attention to specifics.

With my former partner, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, and I stopped giving weight to things that weren't working, and thought everything could be figured out. And I stopped listening.

I stopped paying attention because I was interacting with my interpretations and my thoughts, not the facts of what he was actually saying, what he was actually doing, what was actually not working.

So I thought we could spend a little bit of time right now talking about interpretations. So this is a thing... I am so articulate right now. So Marsha Linehan, who developed the DBT handbook, has a model of emotions that is – this is a judgment, I'm going to say, needlessly complicated.

And there is another model of emotions that was given to me by my original DBT instructor that I actually much prefer, and I will put it on the website so that you can take a look at it. And I'll post it on my social media.

It is called the E-wheel and this is not in the DBT handbook. Marsha Linehan's version is Emotion Regulation Handout 5. Basically the wheel itself is comprised of three components:

“An experience, an expression, and echoes.”

And those are the things that spin, like a water wheel. I don't know if anybody's ever encountered a water wheel in real life, but I'm thinking of like old movies from medieval times, I guess, wherein there's a wheel, like a paddle wheel, like the Mississippi River paddle riverboat things.

The flow of the water turns this wheel and creates this kind of self-perpetuating thing. So the spokes on that wheel, again, are:

“Experience, expression, and echoes.”

And your experience is: “our body sensations,” how it feels physically, “and the urges that we have to act.” An expression is how you communicate your experience to others. So, you feel something in your body, and an expression is then: “what you do or say, facial expressions and body languages.”

So for example, I can feel really sad, and I express it by crying. My chin quivers and I kind of hug myself and fold inwards in a way of self-comforting. So again, the experience is what it feels like in your body that other people can't necessarily see. And the expression is how it looks to someone on the outside.

And then echoes. Echoes are how things persist even after the initial emotion. It's: “how your emotion influences your attention, mood, thinking as the day goes on.”

And echoes are protective in nature. They intend to protect. So, an example, I had a car accident a while ago, several years ago now. I was T-boned, turning into a parking lot. And for a couple of weeks, actually, I was really nervous – cautious I guess – about turning across traffic, making left turns.

And that's an echo. The car accident is not still happening. It's over. And there are still ways in which it is shifting, like influencing my behavior and how I feel. So those are the three parts of the wheel: the experience, expression, and echoes.

And what starts the wheel turning is one of two things. It can be an event, just an event by itself. I think of, if I'm walking down the hall and somebody jumps out at me and yells, boo, I don't have an interpretation. I don't have a thought. I just have an immediate reaction.

I immediately go into experience, expression, and echoes. I jump, I scream, I clutch my heart, I can feel my heart racing and a tightness in my chest, and my hands might shake.

And then for the rest of the day, every time I walk down the hall, I might be looking behind the doors and being extra cautious, and wanting to know where everybody is so that I don't get startled again.

So that's an example of an event setting off the emotion wheel. An interpretation can also set off the emotion wheel. So an example taken from the conversation that I just had: my partner – former partner – says it was never going to work because we had these mismatches.

That, in and of itself, can trigger and did trigger sadness and did trigger sadness. And on top of that, there was also this overwhelming sense of hopelessness because the interpretation was that: I can't even trust myself to know what's real, to identify, to look at a situation and be able to determine its viability.

And that interpretation set off this hopelessness emotion wheel, and this sense of I can't trust myself, I can't trust my reality, I can't trust my thoughts, I don't know how to move forward, I don't know how to make decisions, I don't know what's real.

Those are all thoughts, interpretations I had. None of those things actually happened. They're all thoughts. Like anybody looking at the outside would look at me and like, “Joy, you're sitting on your bed. Like you didn't just find out you're in the matrix. Those are thoughts.”

An event can start the emotion wheel. An event and then our interpretation, our thoughts about that event can start the emotion wheel. And “how likely that emotion wheel is to start spinning” – how easy it is to start spinning and to perpetuate its spin – is based off our emotional vulnerability, which can be affected by health, stress, self-esteem, preparation for life's difficulties” – like skills – “doing things each day that give us joy and satisfaction.”

So, if you have not been able to do the things you love, go out in the sunshine, do a hobby, get a hold of a friend, those can all impact our emotional vulnerability and have that emotion wheel start spinning faster and easier.

The point being that the motion wheel will never spin on its own. There's always an event or an interpretation that will kick it off because all emotions are caused. They never come from nowhere, which is a validating thing and not a belief that I grew up with.

But I want to talk about interpretations because that is what I am struggling with right now. Interpretations are not facts. In the same way... I can sit here and have the thought, “I'm a giraffe.” It doesn't turn me into a giraffe. It's a thought that I had. It is not the fact.

It is a fact that I had that thought. That thought itself is not fact. So, I want to talk a little bit about the distinction between an interpretation and a prompting event for an emotion.

In the Emotion Regulation Handout 6. Some examples here for anger, a prompting event of feeling anger: “having an important goal blocked.” An interpretation that can prompt anger is, “believing that important goals are being blocked.”

The belief may not actually be in line with the reality. So a way of addressing interpretations, and stopping the emotion wheel from spinning at the point of interpretation, is to check the facts.

And Check the Facts is a way of checking out whether the emotional reaction that I'm having fits the facts of the situation, and can help me change my emotional reaction to a situation. I don't know what else to say about this right now, so I'm going to come back to it.

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

Okay, we are now back in the future. And I was struggling really, really hard during that recording. Before I get into kind of my debriefing on it, I want to acknowledge: when I was talking about the E-wheel, I likened it to a water wheel, which actually is called a water mill in medieval times, or to a Mississippi River paddle boat.

And I would like to take this opportunity to formally acknowledge that these are very different mechanisms, that with medieval water mills, the wheel actually is held in place. It's not moving up or downstream, though it is spinning, and the flow of water is what turns the water wheel.

Whereas the Mississippi River paddle boat, there's a steam or fire that powers an engine that turns the wheel which moves the boat. This is, again, not the same process at all.

The E-wheel is much more like the medieval times water mill situation, where the thing that spins the wheel instead of water is either an event or are interpretations about an event. So, there you go. Right.

So, I kind of just stopped in the recording you just heard before getting into the meat of checking the facts. And I want to get into that here. Before I do that, I want to acknowledge something else.

I mentioned that the likelihood that the emotion wheel or the E-wheel start spinning is influenced by our emotion vulnerabilities. One of my big ones is that I have PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Specifically, I have complex, chronic, delayed onset, dissociative post-traumatic stress disorder. Which is a lovely word salad. And the reason my PTSD is chronic instead of more acute or short-term PTSD (when I had my car accident and I was skittish for a couple weeks), is because there are two main factors that have PTSD persist: avoidance and problematic beliefs.

And I'm reading this from a handout I got in exposure therapy at the University of Washington. It's handout 1.1, which is “A Rationale for Treatment” by Melanie S. Harned, PhD.

I don't know what the original source book was that this handout came from. I Googled the shit out of it and couldn't find anything published. So, this may be internal to the University of Washington's DBT program. But anywho, I wanted to read a couple paragraphs about avoidance and problematic beliefs, which are the two factors that have PTSD persist.

Because problematic beliefs are basically our interpretations. It's putting a bunch of stuff into the PTSD meat grinder and getting these problematic belief sausages out of it. What metaphor is that? I don't know. Okay. So, I'm going to be reading a couple paragraphs, starting with:

“The role of avoidance. People with PTSD typically avoid in two main ways: cognitive avoidance (avoiding thoughts and memories about traumatic events), and behavioral avoidance (avoiding situations in the world that are reminders of trauma, that are believed to be dangerous, and or that cause intense shame.)

“It makes sense that people with PTSD avoid in these ways because avoidance works to decrease fear and other emotions in the short-term. For example, a person who is afraid of crowds will become anxious if they are in a crowded store. If the person leaves the store, their fear will calm down and they will feel better.

“However, avoidance makes fear and other emotions worse in the long-term. For example, how do you think the person who leaves the crowded store will feel the next time they're in a crowded place? They're very likely to still feel afraid, and in fact, their fear may be even more intense than it was before.”

And now: “The role of problematic beliefs. The reason people avoid things that make them feel fear and other painful emotions is because they believe something terrible will happen if they don't avoid.

“These types of beliefs usually fall into two main categories: beliefs about danger (the world is extremely dangerous, I will be attacked or hurt), or negative beliefs about the self (I'm weak and incompetent, I'll go crazy or lose control if I have intense emotions.)

“The problem is that avoidance makes it impossible to find out if problematic beliefs are accurate. For example, if a person avoids crowds because they believe they will be attacked, then they will never have had a chance to learn that the likelihood of being attacked in a crowd is very low.

“Similarly, if a person avoids crowds because they think they will get so anxious that they will scream and pass out, that avoiding crowds will prevent them from finding out if this actually happens.”

So, my brain is predisposed to have these problematic beliefs, especially the ones I mentioned in the recording: that I can't trust myself, my heart, or my gut; or that I can't trust my reality.

It's very strange that, in the throes of PTSD, in the thickest part when trauma is running my life, I relate to my interpretations, my beliefs, as fact. And processing PTSD, I learned that a lot of these problematic beliefs that I was having weren't, in fact, fact. They weren't fact, in fact.

And then, I developed another problematic belief, as a result. The problematic belief being that, “oh, I can't trust my thoughts. I can't trust my reality.”

And in looking back over my relationship, which I mentioned in the recording, I saw and was really confronted by how I had been interacting with my interpretations, my beliefs about my relationship and about my former partner, rather than the reality.

Here's something I just noticed. I'm conflating two things: the belief that “I can't trust my reality” and the belief that “I can't trust my thoughts.” Something's clicking. Hang on just a second here.

What is true is: I cannot relate to every thought I have as being factually accurate. As I've said before, if we have upwards of – what is it? Six thousand thoughts a day – they're not all going to be winners.

And not relating to every thought as reality and not relating to every thought as fact is different than not being able to trust my thoughts. And that's different than not being able to trust my reality.

I'm making a huge leap from I can't trust my thoughts to I can't trust my reality. Because I think there are thoughts that I have that are trustworthy – that are in line with reality – and there are thoughts that are not.

So really, the accurate statement is: I cannot relate to every thought I have as fact. And that's okay. Like, that doesn't feel threatening. The thought, “I can't trust my reality” does feel very threatening. The thought, “I can't trust my thoughts,” also feels threatening.

But rephrasing it as “I can't relate to every single thought I have as fact” is just true. Like, I can sit here and have the thought that I'm a giraffe. I clearly have this thought a lot, and it does not make me a giraffe.

I get into trouble if I then have the thought and go, “oh, well, it must be true. And given that I'm a giraffe, I guess, I don't know. What would my behavior be if I believed I was a giraffe? Well, I would stop recording a podcast because giraffes can't talk, for starters.”

Yeah, I think part of the reason that I was having the thought “I can't trust my reality” is because I was conflating my reality with my interpretations. If I think my interpretations are the reality, and then relate to them as though they're the reality, that's how I stop interacting with what is real.

And now I'm just interacting with thoughts, which I guess is where checking the facts comes in. Had I actually checked the facts with my former partner, I would have seen that I was the one repeating that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my former partner and that he didn't echo that sentiment.

I was the one pushing for that. And right away, I start wanting to judge myself. So, I'm reminded of what my therapist said the other day when I was talking to them about this. They said that it makes total sense that the first non-abusive relationship I'd had in a decade, that I would want it to last and that I would be in Emotion Mind.

They said that they could see where shame gets prompted, because I start judging myself for having those interpretations and not relating to reality. Shame gets prompted, but they said it wasn't really justified.

They said that when they hear me describing the circumstances of my former partnership, and how it wasn't abusive, and then considering my relationship history, it makes total sense that I was hopeful because it was going so differently from previous relationships I'd been in.

And the challenges, the things that we weren't aligned in, were challenges, certainly, but so different from violence and abuse. Like they pointed out something (the “they” here in question is my therapist) – they pointed out something actually quite lovely: that I have recalibrated. Where my boundaries are and stuff have recalibrated.

Like I no longer will accept or will stay in an abusive situation. And it made sense that my situation with my former partner – because abuse wasn't present – everything else kind of looked like gravy.

All of the things that weren't working were like, “oh yeah, we can figure that out.” That was my thought. Like, “we got this, it's not a problem,” because it wasn't like an abusive deal-breaker.

Turned out to be deal-breakers nonetheless, but they weren't abuse. So I thought we could work through them.

And the last thing my therapist said about it was that that's part of the recovery from trauma: is navigating what relationships bring up for me and how I want to use skills differently.

And what I'm hearing here is that there's room for some radical acceptance about how things have gone in the past and acknowledging that I don't know how the future will go. I have all these thoughts about, “I'll never find another partner, mental illness precludes me from being in a healthy relationship, blah, blah, blah.”

And I don't have to accept any of the things about the future. I only have to accept what has already happened. So, I want to talk a little bit about radical acceptance. I have an episode devoted to acceptance already, but it's one of those skills that's kind of necessary over and over and over again. It's not like a one-and-done sort of situation.

So, I figure I would do radical acceptance to my interpretations and how I was relating to interpretations about my relationship rather than the facts of my relationship.

So, I'm going to go over Distress Tolerance Handout 11 in the DBT manual, which is the Radical Acceptance handout. So the reason to use radical acceptance is: “when you cannot keep painful events and emotions from coming your way.”

Some notes that I had jotted down that I got from my initial DBT instructor: acceptance is better than denial or righteous anger. It's more effective, rather, than denial or righteous anger. It is not liking or loving something. What it is, it's necessary for problem solving.

We can't change the past, we can't change the present. In order to change the future, to use that problem solving, we have to accept where we currently are and where we have been.

What must be accepted are facts. Facts are not assumptions (which are beliefs not based in fact), they are not predictions (which are future-based), and they are not judgments (which are evaluations).

Facts include how I feel, that I have a thought (like my brain is doing something), that I have an urge, that I have a body sensation. Those are all facts. And then behavior, things that happened.

So: “what is radical acceptance? Radical means all the way, complete and total. It is accepting in your mind, your heart, and your body. It's when you stop fighting reality, stop throwing tantrums because reality is not the way you want it to be, and let go of bitterness.

“What has to be accepted? Reality is as it is. The facts about the past and the present are the facts, even if you don't like them. There are limitations on the future for everyone, but only realistic limitations need to be accepted.

“Everything has a cause, including events and situations that cause you pain and suffering. Life can be worth living, even with painful events in it.”

So those are things that have to be accepted.

So next we ask: “why accept reality? Rejecting reality does not change reality. Changing reality requires first accepting reality. Pain can't be avoided - it's nature's way of signaling that something is wrong. Rejecting reality turns pain into suffering.

“Refusing to accept a reality can keep you stuck in unhappiness, bitterness, anger, sadness, shame, or other painful emotions. Acceptance may lead to sadness, but deep calmness usually follows. The path out of hell is through misery – by refusing to accept the misery that is part of climbing out of hell, you fall back into hell.”

So this last one, “the path out of hell is through misery – by refusing to accept the misery that is part of climbing out of hell, you fall back into hell.” It's like being stuck in a room that's on fire and also having a fear of heights.

Like in order to get away from the fire, you're going to have to crawl out the window and climb down a ladder. None of it's going to be pleasant. Staying in the room is not going to be pleasant, climbing out a window is not going to be pleasant, climbing down a ladder is not going to be pleasant.

in order to get out of the room that's on fire, you've got to climb out the window. And I think of rejecting reality as sitting in the room and being like... it's that dog meme, right? The dog sitting in the room and saying, “this is fine,” even though he's surrounded by flames.

The originator of that meme is on a 2013 webcomic called On Fire, and it was created by artist KC Green. And as is true with everything, in order to be prepared for shit I have to first acknowledge that shit is happening.

In order to put on a raincoat, I have to acknowledge that it's raining, even if I don't want it to be raining, even if the fact that it's raining is screwing up all my plans and I feel really angry about it. Still, in order to put on a raincoat, I have to accept that it is in fact raining.

And typically, the process of acceptance is really, really... At least for me, it can be really, really painful, especially around things that are painful, and I avoid doing that work. So, it's me choosing to stay in the room that's on fire instead of climbing out the window. Yeah.

So something to note here, this is distress tolerance handout 11A:

“Factors that interfere with radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is not approval, compassion, love, passivity, or against change.”

Just as a side note. Because I think a lot of times when we talk about acceptance, it kind of gets couched in this very new age, navel gazing, passivity of just, like, “It's fine, I won't even care about it. It's all good.”

Like ambivalence, willful ignorance, a refusal to acknowledge what is so. It's not burying your head in the sand. It's actually way more powerful than that. So, let's do some practicing radical acceptance step-by-step.

This is Distress Tolerance Handout 11B. The thing I'm working on accepting here is that I had a lot of interpretations, I had a lot of thoughts around my past relationship, and that I was relating to those rather than the reality.

I had decided this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with and I stopped taking in new information from my former partner. So, I want to accept that I had a lot of interpretations, and I want to accept that those interpretations were not in line with reality. And I can't undo any of that. So step number one:

“Observe that you are questioning or fighting reality. ‘It shouldn't be this way.’”

Yeah, I definitely have a thought I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have had all these interpretations. I shouldn't have been relating to the interpretations as reality. I should have been paying attention to what was actually so.

I should have been more mindful, more aware, instead of kind of having my own agenda, I guess. So, I am questioning and fighting reality. I'm having the thought that I shouldn't have done that. It should not have been that way. Step 2:

“Remind yourself that the unpleasant reality is as it is and cannot be changed. ‘This is what happened.’”

Yeah, so in the handout it says, “remind yourself that the unpleasant reality is JUST as it is.” I almost universally get rid of the word “just” or “but” or “only” because those tend to be words that diminish our experiences. So, I took that word out.

So, the unpleasant reality – that I had a lot of interpretations with my former partner, that I was not paying attention to the things that he was saying, that I was relating to my interpretations as reality – all of that is what happened and cannot be changed, because it's already happened and I can't change the past.

As a side note, I am right now sitting super tall in my bed. I'm having an open body posture, so I'm like opening my chest up, doing willing hands. Willing hands is Distress Tolerance Handout 14. It's kind of like the Ohmm position, I guess, in yoga, with your palms up.

Mine are not even resting on my knees. They're resting to either side, even more open than my knees. The reason for this is typically, a lot of the things that I don't want to accept are things that I find really sad, which has me want to like kind of curl up, or things that I have a lot of shame around, which has me want to hide.

So by sitting up really tall and having that open body posture, it's kind of psyching myself into being like, “hey, don't hide. You're okay. This is fine. You're not in danger right now.” So next:

“Remind yourself that there are causes for the reality. Acknowledge that some sort of history led up to this very moment. Consider how people's lives have been shaped by a series of factors. Notice that given these causal factors and how history led up to this moment, this reality had to occur just this way. ‘This is how things happened.’”

So, that third step is kind of like validation, I guess. It's saying, “hey, there's a reason that this happened the way that it did.” And it's largely what my therapist said to me, that given my history of abusive relationships, it makes total sense that in my first non-abusive relationship in like 10 years, that I would be in strong emotion mind – the emotion being love – that I would be very hopeful and really want it to work.

And Emotion Mind – I've mentioned this before – in Emotion Regulation Handout 6, one of the echoes or aftereffects of pretty much every emotion is a narrowing of attention. Strong Emotion Mind is very, very focused on whatever the emotion is.

So, it makes sense that in very strong love Emotion Mind, that I would not be as grounded in reality as I would be if I were in Wise Mind.

Since we're talking about Emotion Mind for love, I actually have never looked at Emotion Regulation Handout 6 for love, because it's not typically an emotion that I need to regulate. Or thought I needed to regulate. So,

“Some echoes and aftereffects of love are: only seeing a person's positive side; feeling forgetful or distracted; daydreaming; feeling openness and trust; feeling alive and capable; remembering other people you've loved; remembering other people who've loved you; remembering other positive events; believing in yourself; believing you're wonderful, capable, or competent.”

So definitely seeing a person's positive side. And I would even go as far as extrapolating that and saying also only seeing the relationship's positive side. Because I think I was aware of areas where my former partner was not skillful.

I think I was aware of things that weren't operating at 100%. I was aware of where there was friction. And I still thought all of those things were things that we could deal with together and work on.

Given that I was in strong Emotion Mind for love, it makes sense that I would want that relationship to work. And I'm also aware of the fact that my former partner, when they were articulating their uncertainty about our relationship, I wasn't putting a lot of weight on that, and I was kind of dismissing it.

So, I can see how that would contribute to their lack of... It would make it harder for them to say it, to say that they were unsure, because I wasn't listening. Okay, and that's how things happened. I'm going to go back to step one:

“Observe that I'm questioning or fighting reality.”

Because I'm, right now, having the thought: it shouldn't have happened that way. I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have discounted their concerns, discounted their uncertainty. I wish it had gone a different way.

I wish I had been able to behave a different way. I wish they had been able to behave a different way. I wish the entire outcome had been different. And step 2:

“Remind myself that the unpleasant reality is as it is and cannot be changed. ‘It's what happened.’”

That is what happened, and we are broken up now. Okay, step 4:

“Practice accepting with the whole self, mind, body, and spirit. Be creative in finding ways to involve your whole self. Use accepting self-talk, but also consider using: relaxation; mindfulness of your breath; half-smiling and willing hands while thinking about what feels unacceptable; prayer; going to a place that helps bring you to acceptance’ or imagery.

So, I'm going to sit up even taller, and do my willing hands here.

“Use accepting self-talk.”

One of the things my original DBT instructor said was that, when you're not able to accept something, you can accept that you're not able to accept it. Acceptance isn't about trying to convince yourself of something that's not true or something that you don't believe.

It's actually the exact opposite of convincing ourselves of something that is true, of the facts. This is actually what happened. Accepting self-talk would be something like, “That is what happened. I don't like that that's what happened. I wish it had been different. And that is what happened. And I want to accept that is what happened.”

I use “I want to accept” rather than “I do accept that that's what happened,” because I don't know that I do accept it yet. I want to. And if I didn't want to accept, I could use the phrase, “I want to want to accept.” You can have a little Russian nesting doll of acceptance.

I'm doing a lot of breathing. I've mentioned before that I really like box breathing. There's a link in the description and also a video on my website of box breathing. Which is whatever count, so let's say 5, you breathe in for five, hold for five, breathe out for five, hold for five. And you just count in your head: one, two, three, four, five.

And the reason I like box breathing as opposed to just deep in and out is, for me, deep in and out actually feels a lot like hyperventilating. The holding of the breath is what, to me at least, it slows my system down and calms me down. So, I'm going to do that for a couple.

I'm going to do five for all of them, then six, then seven. Let's see if I can get up to eight today.

Okay, let's do five.

Okay, that was five.

And another thing I'm going to add while doing this is use some kind of internal imagery, I guess, of just have the thought: I want to accept that I had a lot of interpretations about my relationship that were not in line with reality. I'm going to think that while I do my box breathing for a count of six.

Okay, that was six.

Now I'm going to do seven.

Okay, that was seven.

Let's try eight just for grins and giggles. Okay.

“So that is practice accepting with the whole self.”

Moving on to number five:

“Practice opposite action. List all the behaviors you would do if you did accept the facts. Then act as if you have already accepted the facts. Engage in the behaviors that you would do if you really had accepted.”

So basically, imagine it first and then go do it. So if I did accept that I had a lot of interpretations about my relationship that were not in line with reality, interpretations, thoughts about the longevity of it, the future, whatever, and that they weren't in line with reality, if I accepted that is what happened, I would be validating.

I would see how it made total sense that is the way I would think, the sorts of thoughts that I would have, the sorts of behaviors that I would have.

I would acknowledge that that's not how I want it to go in the future and that in the future I want to be much more mindful about the information I get from any future partners about their thoughts and feelings about the relationship and hear them, take in that information, accept that information, and behave accordingly.

I think of that line from Maya Angelou: “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Yeah, like part of what has had me stay in a lot of abusive relationships, there's a lot of factors. And one of them is that I didn't take abusive behavior, I didn't listen to it as an indicator of that person's behavior.

I don't know if I treated it like a fluke or something. I almost dissociated that person from that behavior. It's like when somebody gets caught being racist or homophobic or something, and they say, “That's not who I am.” I'm like, “yeah, but that's the behavior you exhibited, so...”

I want to believe that people can be more than a single behavior. It's harder when it's a pattern of behaviors. And saying “that's not who I am” over and over again while continuing to exhibit that behavior doesn't really jive.

Like it doesn't really... There's some disconnect there. It's the ocean saying, “Yeah, I know I'm wet, but that's not who I am.” Like, “Actually, ocean, that is who you are. That is the entirety of who you are. You're wet.”

Oh, so if I accepted the facts, I would validate my experience. I would validate my former partner's experience. I would see how everything made sense.

I would acknowledge that it could not have gone any other way given where I was Emotion Mind-wise, my state of mind, given my relationship history, given my skill level, and then of course given my partner's relationship history, my partner's skill level, both of our skill levels around communication and identifying boundaries and a whole host of things.

it makes perfect sense that it went exactly the way it did. And it could not have gone another way. And going back to step one, I am observing that I am questioning or fighting reality. I'm having the thought, well, clearly it was doomed from the beginning, which is, I mean, not the case.

Really what it's saying is that, like with a series of dominoes falling, there were points at which somebody could have plucked out that domino and kept the rest of the dominoes from falling. And that didn't happen, so there's a reason that didn't happen.

There's the reason neither my former partner nor I could behave in a different way that would have changed the outcome. Now, I can change my future and my former partner can change their future from this point forward, but neither one of us can change what we've already done. So, step 6 here:

“Cope ahead with events that seem unacceptable. Imagine in your mind's eye believing what you don't want to accept. Rehearse in your mind what you would do if you accepted what seems unacceptable.”

Fuck. So, Coping Ahead is thinking about future situations. Imagining a future situation where I meet somebody, and we click really well and we get along and we both really like each other. We have a lot of compatibility.

And I'm thinking this has a lot of long-term viability, which sounds so academic, but that I can see that there's a future there. And my partner, my future theoretical partner here, says things and behaves in a way that indicates they do not... They're not planning for the future.

They don't think there's going to be a future for our relationship, or they don't want one, whatever it's going to look like. Cope ahead for that.

Okay, so Coping Ahead is an Emotion Regulation skill. It's on Emotion Regulation Handout 19. I'm not going to get into it right now because we're going to go down a skills rabbit hole if we keep doing that. But in short, Coping Ahead is:

“Describing the situation that is likely to prompt problem behavior. Decide what coping or problem-solving skills you want to use in that situation, and be specific. Imagine the situation in your mind as vividly as possible. Rehearse in your mind coping effectively, and then practice relaxation after rehearsing.”

So, Coping Ahead with this situation, I think the first thing I would want to do is confirm that what I'm hearing them say is what they mean. Because I know miscommunication can happen. So, I want to make sure that I understand what they're saying.

If they're saying, if I hear something that sounds like they're not entirely sure, I want to reflect back and be like, “Hey, I'm hearing something that sounds like you're not entirely sure about the future of our relationship. Is that actually what you mean to say?”

And ask some questions to get their experience to understand what's going on for them. And if it turns out all the way through that is what they mean – they do have concerns because of like fundamental differences or whatever things that cannot be addressed –

I think then it would be a matter of communicating a boundary, and acknowledging, “Hey, well, given that we're on different pages about what we want long-term, I think the most effective thing for me is to no longer be in this partnership if we want different things out of it.”

Which would suck. I mean, it's going to be sad. And given my past experience, I think it's better to address that sooner rather than later. And practicing here, practicing accepting with my whole body.

And that is what happened in my past relationship. And I can't change that is what happened. And I was doing the best that I could. And there's a reason for all of my choices and thoughts and emotions.

And there's a reason for all my former partners' beliefs and thoughts and emotions and behaviors. There's a reason that it went the way it did. Next here, we’ve got:

“Attend to body sensations as you think about what you need to accept.”

I'm aware that I have kind of like a nervousness. I have a fear of heights, and when I get too close to the edge of a high space, it's anxiety, I guess. But rather than a thought that triggers the anxiety, it's like it's a fear that lives in my body, not in my head.

And my whole body's like, “don't keep going that way. There be dragons. There lies death.” I'm aware that I can feel this resistance in my body. It is anxiety. It's like, “please don't keep going down this road. This is scary. We don't like this.”

I'm noticing myself kind of like fold inward. I'm noticing my shoulders roll forward. So I'm sitting back super tall, doing my willing hands here. The next step is:

“Allow disappointment, sadness, or grief to rise within you.”

So, one of my coping thoughts that I've mentioned in the previous episode about – you guessed it, coping thoughts – that I like is that I can survive feeling this feeling. When I avoid something, I'm training my brain to think, “oh, that feeling is unacceptable. Like we can't feel that.”

And the more I avoid, the more I'm convincing my brain, “oh, if we're avoiding it this much, it must be really scary.” So, I want to allow grief, sadness, regret to come up. Because I really do... I have the thought that I wish it had gone differently. And I feel really sad that it went the way that it did.

I'm having a lot of judgments come up right now. I'm having the thought that I could have used different skills. I could have used skills just period. There were instances where I just wasn't using skills and that had an impact.

And I really wish I'd used skills. And at this point – validation, validation, validation – it makes sense. There's a reason why I didn't. There were some vulnerability factors running. It's a real bummer, man.

I'm having a hard time actually letting the emotion come up right now. And I mean, that's where I'm at today. Clearly, at the beginning of the recording you just heard I had a lot more access to those emotions, if my Kleenex usage is any indication.

Yeah, I just, I really wish it had gone differently. And here's a dialectic – dialectic groupie over here – I wish it had gone differently. And I also have some relief. There's this baby thought that feels like baby Groot from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

It's just like this little tiny twig that's desperately reaching for the sun. This tiny little thought that, “Joy, if you stop giving your time and energy to relationships that aren't working or that aren't in line with what you want long term, that creates space for what you do want.” Which is such a foreign thought.

Like I feel it in my body – a lot of resistance to that thought. I think part of the resistance that I'm experiencing to that thought is that, if I can see the plus side or the silver lining or whatever, that that somehow invalidates all the pain of the breakup.

I think both things can be true: that I can feel really sad about that loss, AND acknowledge that relationship ending makes space for a new relationship that might fit better. I don't know how much I believe that.

I mean, this is not a mighty oak or a redwood we're talking about. This is the little tiny sprout of a thought that is trying to gain some purchase. And I look at it and I think, “I don't know that you have what it takes to actually become a tree, but you do you. You give it the old college try, little sprout.”

And it's also one of those thoughts that if somebody else came up to me and said, “hey, Joy, you should be grateful for your relationship ending because it means that you'll have more space for somebody who fits you better,” I would probably punch them in the face.

That's not true. I don't condone assault. I would give them a dirty look and swear at them. How about that? Because a lot of times when somebody tells me something like that, it's usually a way of negating my sadness.

It's like, “Hey, don't be sad – have this other thought instead,” as opposed to, “Both of these things can be true. Of course you're sad. This is a relationship you really wanted to work. This is a person you cared about, that you loved. And you had a vision for your future. So, you're mourning the future that you're not going to have now. AND there’s this other thing.”

And there are days when I have more access to that than others. There have been a couple of days lately where I'm like, “Oh my God, maybe I could find somebody who does therapy too. Somebody who values that and is working on themselves, working on the things that aren't working.”

I mean, because I think a therapist is basically like an emotional coach. In the same way that you have a coach – if you go to the Olympics, you have a coach. You have a coach if you play a professional sport.

And I think if you're going to be in relationships with anybody or processing trauma of any kind or dealing with any mental illness, that it's useful to have a professional around. So, step 9 here is:

“Acknowledge that life can be worth living even when there is pain.”

I've been struggling with this one, partially because of how my life is right now. I'm having a hard time finding the kind of the bigger goal. Marsha Linehan, who wrote the DBT manual and developed DBT itself, she has a book. Her autobiography is called “Building a Life Worth Living.” Go figure.

And that is the ultimate long-term emotion regulation skill: Building a Life Worth Living. Because if your life is worth living, it's not easier to live it, but at least it's motivating to live it.

And I have been struggling with that. I keep having the thought that I don't have a purpose or a goal. And as my therapist told me today, “You do have a goal. You want to get better.”

And I'm like, “Yeah, but for what?” I understand that it is important to want to get better for myself. I understand that it can be really destabilizing and not a great foundation to want to get better for somebody else, AND... Well, I'll just say it.

It was really discouraging to get back in therapy, and spend all this time and energy in therapy, because of stuff that came up in my relationship with my past fartner. That's not what they are. My past partner. Wow.

It was kind of like the inciting incident, I guess, to get back into therapy after taking a couple years off. And I keep having the thought, “I did all this work for nothing. The relationship ended.”

At which point, my friends, my family, and my therapist will all say, “Yeah, and you didn't do it for nothing. There are things you're processing, healing that is being done, that is independent of whether a relationship lasts.”

Which I understand. Like, I know that. And, I really wanted this relationship to last. And I wanted to have the life we were building together.

And in the absence of that, I'm kind of, I'm having the thought that I'm back at square one in terms of identifying what life to have now, what purpose to have. Because at the present time I am functionally unemployed, I am living in a guest bedroom with my parents.

And I don't really have much going on that kind of inspires me to be like, “Oh yeah, we're going to get better for this reason because once I get better, I'll be able to do X, Y, and Z.” So I struggle with that, with:

“Acknowledge that life can be worth living even when there's pain.”

I know that that's true. Logically, I know that that's true. I have a harder time getting my emotions to line up with that. I guess the thing that I can hope for, kind of the things that I can build towards is... Put it this way: I saw a picture on Instagram today of a dig that was happening in England because they found an ichthyosaur.

They were digging, I think, for a reservoir or something, and one of the workers found some weird stone sticking up out of the dirt. And they started to uncover it, and they called in some archaeologists, and sure enough, there's an ichthyosaur there.

And there was a point when the people who were digging that reservoir was digging to make a reservoir. And then they stumbled upon this ichthyosaur, and then the goal became to dig to uncover the entirety of the ichthyosaur.

And I guess that's kind of the closest I can have to a goal right now – the only thing I'm comfortable with. Because almost every other goal feels artificial, like a band-aid. Having the goal of going back to work, I've hated every job I've ever had.

I've gotten burnt out at every single one. Did not enjoy my life while working. Like, that doesn't feel like a great goal. Being a cog in a capitalistic machine doesn't feel like a great goal. Feels kind of soul-killing.

I mean, a lot of kind of our standard here, the hallmarks or the signposts of a successful life... Even with the more kind of holistic, affirming, healing versions of that successful life, it still feels a lot like prescription to me and not in keeping with what I want. Because I don't know what I want.

So, I guess my hope is that as I'm digging down towards this healing that I think is down there, that at some point I will stumble upon a purpose, a goal, something that excites me and has me want to keep on going.

So, we'll call it that. I'm looking for my ichthyosaur. The pursuit of my ichthyosaur can be worth living even when there is pain. The last step on Practicing Radical Acceptance Step-by-Step is to:

“Do the Pros and Cons.”

I'm not going to do that right now because this episode has gotten really long. But I've done Pros and Cons on another episode. Oh, did I do that on this one? I didn't do it on this one. What did I do this on?

Oh, my anniversaries episode, which is going to be episode 14. So, we're on episode 11 right now. So you'll get to hear Pros and Cons in three episodes. But if you're interested in knowing more about it now, it's Distress Tolerance Handout 5. There you have it.

So, I'm going to end here. Thank you for listening. Please do reach out – I mean this like sincerely from the bottom of my feet – please reach out with questions, comments, concerns.

And it's also really, really helpful if you rate or review this podcast on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts. I think Amazon Music lets you do it too. I think Google Play does as well. Stitcher, I think, has turned off that feature.

I have not been able to find it. And I've emailed them and asked, where's your rate and review feature? And they haven't gotten back to me yet.

But anyway, if you, for whatever app you use to listen, if you can rate and review this, that does a huge amount in getting my listenership up. So, there we go. And per usual, I still don't know how to end this. Well, actually I do. I do know how to end this. I'm doing this intentionally now. So, I'm just going to end this super abrupt –

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky

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

Intro and outro music is Swan Lake Opus 20 by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Anatole Fistoulari, released on LP by Richmond High Fidelity / London Records in nineteen fifty-two.