#9: Introduction to Distress Tolerance & the STOP Skill
Marielle and Ed delve
“People we love will die, we will get sick, things will not go our way, and we need to learn how to ride out those emotional storms in the most graceful way that we can, without creating additional problems for ourselves.”
– Marielle Berg
Show Highlights:
- Resistance of emotional pain creates an additional level of suffering
- Dialectical approach of accepting what is AND looking for ways to change
- Cultural push to fix things
- When we respond to emotional pain in unskillful ways
- Learning to ride out emotional pain more skillfully
- Feeling shame over the coping habits we have established
- Distress tolerance skills are a natural outgrowth of mindfulness skills
- Concepts of emotion mind, reasonable mind and wise mind
- Subjective units of distress or SUDS
- Learning to ride out the storm
- How we define a crisis in DBT
- When NOT to use these skills
- Skilled distraction
- STOP skill is where we start: Stop, Take a Step Back, Observe, Proceed Mindfully
Links & Resources:
Book:
“DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets” – by Marsha Linehan
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#9: Introduction to Distress Tolerance & the STOP Skill Transcript
Marielle Berg
Hello and welcome to The Skillful Podcast, where we explore DBT and RO-DBT skills to help you reduce emotional suffering, improve your relationships, and become more present in your life. I’m your host, Marielle Berg, a psychotherapist at the Bay Area DBT and Couples Counseling Center.
Marielle Berg
So welcome back, Ed. I’m really excited to begin talking with you today about Distress Tolerance.
Ed Fowler
Yes, I think this is really helpful, helpful stuff when it comes to managing emotions.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And when we get to this module in our skills group, it seems like this is the module, this is the reason why a lot of people sign up for DBT skills group in the first place, right?
Ed Fowler
And for me that Distress Tolerance is like how we get a basic grip on what to do when emotions are overwhelming. So much of what the rest of the skills teach us how we can guide our emotions. But Distress Tolerance is the baseline of like, Oh, what do we do if I’m feeling overwhelmed?
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and not having enough skills or tools in our toolbox creates a lot of problems, which will we’ll go into in a moment, and which is why I think people wind up in skills group because they’re wanting and needing ways or more effective ways to get through those really emotionally rough times.
Ed Fowler
Absolutely.
Marielle Berg
So we teach a whole set of skills in this module, which are all about how to tolerate emotional upset the rough stuff in life, because this is part of life, no one escapes pain in life and hard times.
Ed Fowler
Absolutely. And I think for me, one of the things I’m aware of is that having practiced Distress Tolerance skills, for a while now, I still get in situations where I’m like, Oh, my God, this is overwhelming. So it’s like, even if we’re really practicing stuff, life is life. And we still have crises that come up.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And we can be masters, I think of the Distress Tolerance skills, and it doesn’t mean that overwhelming things aren’t going to happen. People we love will die, we will get sick, things will not go our way. And we need to learn how to ride out those emotional storms in the most graceful way that we can without creating additional problems for ourselves.
Ed Fowler
Absolutely.
Marielle Berg
And I also think about when I reflect on Distress Tolerance, that for many of us, myself included, we can fall into this trap of thinking that we can escape pain or distress or if we’re experiencing emotional pain, and somehow we’re doing it wrong. This idea like this shouldn’t be happening, or this shouldn’t be happening to me.
Ed Fowler
Right. And I think one of the basic skills is being able to just acknowledge, like, I am having a lot of stress right now I am overwhelmed. Because that’s where we can choose what we do, instead of feeling like we need to just make it go away as quickly as possible. And that’s where a lot of times we can get into trouble because we do short term things to make the pain go away, that then cause longer term problems for us.
Marielle Berg
Right, exactly. And that’s the whole crux of what we’re talking about. And that’s how we get to assess whether these skills are working. Have you survived the storm, your emotional storm without creating additional problems for yourself? If you have, then great, then your Distress Tolerance skills are working. If you feel better, wonderful, that’s a bonus. But that isn’t necessarily the point of these skills.
Ed Fowler
Absolutely.
Marielle Berg
And just to backtrack a little bit, so I wanted to expand some on this idea of resistance of emotional pain. This idea of like this shouldn’t be happening, or there’s something wrong with me if something bad is happening in life. I think that that creates an additional level of suffering for people. And so we won’t go into it today, but we will in a few weeks. This leads us into reality acceptance skills, specifically the skill of Radical Acceptance, which is one of the most powerful in DBT. And I think that learning to sit with distress and maybe even make meaning of it is something that can be missed in the therapy world. Often we’re focused on making things better, on change.
Ed Fowler
I think that when we are in distress ourselves, we want it to go away. We do not want to feel intense pain, intense suffering, intense emotion of any kind, that’s uncomfortable. And for therapists, if we have clients who are in extreme desperate stress, we want it to go away we don’t want them to be experiencing intense pain or suffering, right?
Ed Fowler
There’s like such a momentum towards like let’s just stop this, let’s make it go away.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
And what I appreciate about DBT is that dialectical approach of accepting what is, and also looking for ways to change rather than one or the other.
Marielle Berg
Right.
Ed Fowler
And our Distress Tolerance skills in DBT have like such a broad range from simply accepting what’s happening, and that’s all we’re focusing on, to doing things that do change our distress level pretty quickly.
Marielle Berg
Right, that actually bring down our emotional arousal. Absolutely. And I can totally relate to what you just said, in terms of as a therapist, I think this is part of why we do what we do. We don’t want people to be in intense emotional pain. And I also think, as a culture at large, there can be such a push towards let’s fix this.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
And there’s a time and a place for that, if things can be fixed, sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t. And there’s also a time and a place for just being with.
Ed Fowler
Exactly.
Marielle Berg
So let’s talk a little bit about what it looks like when we respond to emotional pain in unskillful ways. So this might involve doing things rashly, and as you said, a moment ago, doing things that provide immediate relief, but then work against us in the long term, that work against us in the long term.
Ed Fowler
Right. So an example might be, if I am feeling really angry at someone, I think if I just yell, I’ll feel better. And so that can get out all the intensity of that anger in the moment. But then I may regret how I handled the situation with another person.
Marielle Berg
Right. And that may create additional problems for you down the road, because now you have something in that relationship, perhaps to repair, it might also create problems and how you are holding yourself or viewing yourself in terms of your self respect being compromised. And so I mean, we can probably come up with a whole bunch of examples of those sort of impulsive behaviors that we do that create more problems for us.
Marielle Berg
And I think of a like a classic one that comes to mind is you know, someone quitting their job in a huff, you know, I quit. Because in the moment, it feels good, because you’re angry, and you’re frustrated. And it’s a moment of power and relief, when your distress is really high. And then the next day or the next week, you might be like, Oh, wow, what did I just do?
Ed Fowler
Right. I think that any sort of addictive or compulsive behaviors would fall into this category as well. You know, like just wanting to numb out that pain. So using alcohol or drugs, or food, or sex, or whatever, to just numb out. Sometimes, for some people, like thinking about suicide or imagining, like kind of checking out into their imagination. Those are other ways of just checking out numbing out, that don’t necessarily solve the problem but that take us out of it quickly, that we may regret later.
Marielle Berg
Yes, and these are the kinds of behaviors that we will hear people talk about when they come to see us, like this is a problem. I’m thinking about wanting to end my life, I’m self harming in some way. I’m rash, I’ve made a mess of my interpersonal relationships, or I have some sort of compulsive behavior. You know, this is the problem, you fix this? And yes, of course, there’s truth to that. And we want to help people change those behavioral patterns. And one of the key ways to do that is to learn to be with distress more skillfully.
Ed Fowler
Right. So to be able to have a range of options for either bringing the distress down, or tolerating it, instead of what we all have us as human beings, we kind of figure out what works, and we keep using it until it’s a habit. And if that isn’t, you know, working short term, but not long term, it can be really hard to change those habits. So in DBT, we have this range of options for what to do when we’re feeling really overwhelmed that so that it’s not just the one option that we’ve been practicing to the point of habituation.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And often when people have been practicing the one option, or very small set of options to help ease emotional suffering, it’s because they don’t know any other ways to do to help themselves. And I think that this is such an important piece, because so often people feel a lot of shame, with the techniques or the behaviors that they find themselves falling into over and over again. And I feel like the Distress Tolerance module helps alleviate some of that shame and says, actually, you just need more tools at your disposal.
Ed Fowler
Almost all of us have things that we do to relieve our pain quickly, that we wish we didn’t do, that we want to change. And what I appreciate about the Distress Tolerance skills in DBT is it just gives concrete options in addition to whatever we’re doing. What I appreciate about the skills group is being able to hear other people talking about, yeah, I do this and it’s not really working, and how do I practice this new way. So that that does reduce that shame of like sudden, like, what is wrong with me, when it’s such a human response.
Marielle Berg
It is. We are all motivated to alleviate our emotional pain or emotional suffering when we can. And if we don’t learn effective skills growing up, we’re going to just turn to what what works in the moment. And maybe that’s some of the behaviors we talked about earlier. I also think about Distress Tolerance skills as a natural outgrowth of Mindfulness skills, which we talked about several episodes ago, because in Mindfulness, we’re just learning how to be with what is without insisting that it change. And that’s a huge part of what we’re talking about in Distress Tolerance. And I also think that that is a key component of well being in mental health overall, can you just be with your experience? Can you just be with your emotional state, without attempting to change it?
Ed Fowler
And I think that, you know, sometimes when I work with people early on, they want to, when they’re experiencing extreme distress, like really powerful anger, or sadness, or anxiety, and they’ve learned a little bit about mindfulness, they want to practice mindfulness skills during those moments. And sometimes that’s not possible. Sometimes the stress level is too high to actually concentrate and focus to be in the present moment, which is why some of the Distress Tolerance skills can really help us to figure out what our options are, so that it’s not just sit and be with intense pain, mindfully, which can be excruciating, and too much to actually really do, versus just totally check out, explode, implode, you know, numb out whatever it might be. And we have a lot of possibilities in between.
Marielle Berg
Right? There’s a whole range from Mindfulness of Current Thoughts, which is one of our Distress Tolerance skills, to actually, Distraction is one of the Distress Tolerance skills. That there is a skillful way to use distraction to help you when you’re so emotionally overwhelmed that you can’t be mindful in the moment or you can’t think about anything else to do. S
Marielle Berg
o we’re going to dive into all of those, I think this might be a good place to revisit the concepts of Emotion Mind, versus Reasonable Mind and Wise Mind. Because these skills are great when Emotion Mind is super high. So in our skills group, we talk about Subjective Units of Distress, and we kind of lay out these different levels, with, you know, one at your calmest and sort of 10 at your most distress. And so I think anything a seven or above, it might be really hard to access our Wise Mind when we get that upset.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, I think that you know, this, I really appreciate the idea of like, we have our Emotion Mind, that is guided by the emotions that come up, which are natural, we have our Reasonable Mind, which is capable of sorting through facts and pros and cons and that kind of thing. And our Wise Mind combines them. And when emotions are too high, as human beings, we’re not meant to think, we’re meant to act. So when our emotional distress is really, really high, we’re not able to access that more reasonable part of our mind to get to that balanced state, and the Distress Tolerance skills help us bring that emotion down, so that then we can access our Wise Mind and like, Okay, what would be the best way forward here?
Marielle Berg
Absolutely. And I think of the trauma response with the fight, flight or freeze. So when we are under such high threat, there’s a really adaptive purpose to us not being able to kind of logically lay things out and think about, you know, weigh pros and cons, we just need to act.
Ed Fowler
Right. And this can apply to anxiety or fear, obviously, like that trauma response, it can easily, we can see it with anger. But we can also see that with things like guilt or shame or even sadness, like intense, intense, overwhelming sadness can shut down our ability to think on the more reasonable side of our mind.
Marielle Berg
Yes, absolutely. Let’s just recap where we’ve been so far. The whole purpose of Distress Tolerance skills are to help you learn how to survive a crisis without making things worse. It’s a pause. And as I said earlier, if you feel better, great, but that’s not the purpose of these skills. They’re just to help you get through.
Marielle Berg
The other thing we talked about is the skills help you learn how to accept reality as it is, because this is the only way out of hell, and ultimately to become free, which means that our intense emotions are more like the weather passing and we learn to ride out the storm, rather than get carried away or swept up in the winds. So that’s kind of the whole purpose of these skills.
Ed Fowler
I think for me, what I have found for myself practicing Distress Tolerance skills is, I’m less afraid of being overwhelmed by emotion, because now I know I’ve got plenty of options. When stress gets really high, emotion gets really high, so much more quickly, I’m able to be like, Okay, what are my options here? Where in the past, like feeling emotionally overwhelmed, felt really scary. And there’s often the sense of like, oh, my gosh, will this ever go away? Maybe I just need to make this go away immediately. And so we’re, we have so much more flexibility, when we know there are options for managing intense emotion.
Marielle Berg
I love that you just said that, because it makes me think about some of the ripple effects of these skills, and how people can leave DBT therapy with I mean, so many things being changed, but such a stronger sense of their own efficacy in facing hard things.
Ed Fowler
Absolutely, yeah.
Marielle Berg
So, really increases self confidence, like, oh, like life, will throw me what it throws me and I know how to respond.
Ed Fowler
Right? I hear this a lot from clients that I work with, as they’re going through DBT of like, Oh, my God, I knew how to handle, that came up, and I knew how to handle it. And it’s like that great moment of like, Ah, I just needed some concrete things to do. And now I have them, and now I know when to apply them. And that’s the process of this growth.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, I feel so good. I mean, to experience it, and then to witness people go through that. So while we’re going to be discussing all these different Distress Tolerance skills over the next several episodes, we will be referring often to crises. So let’s define what a crisis means in this framework.
Ed Fowler
So basically, you are in a crisis, when you’re in a situation that is highly stressful, that is short term. So this is something that isn’t going to last forever. And it really creates intense pressure to resolve the situation now, so that there’s something really stressful, that isn’t actually going to last forever, but we feel this pressure to make it go away quickly.
Marielle Berg
Right. And that pressure to make it go away quickly relates to some of the things we talked about earlier, some of those behaviors, those storming out those self harming behavior, imploding, or exploding as you so nicely put it. So there’s, it’s a short term situation where there’s a lot of pressure to like, fix it now.
Ed Fowler
So you know, when we’re in that kind of situation, we want to be able to use crisis survival skills, so that when we have pain that cannot be fixed quickly, like the pain may be really intense, but it’s not going to go away immediately, acting on our emotions may make things worse, we are not going to be able to stay in our Wise Mind and stay skillful. Those are examples of where we want to use crisis survival skills.
Marielle Berg
Absolutely. I want to answer that. So we’re talking here about, you know, short term, intensely emotional situations where there’s a really strong desire to fix it now or feel better in the moment. A crisis can also be when you are facing a major demand, that will have serious consequences if you don’t meet that demand.
Marielle Berg
So let me explain that a little bit. This means that you have a deadline, for example, and you are feeling really sad, and like you can’t get out of bed, you can’t make it to your computer to work on that deadline. And so during those moments, you can also use crisis survival skills, because in DBT, we would also define that as a crisis situation where if you don’t actually do the things you need to do, you are going to have a lot of problems down the road.
Marielle Berg
So this, as I said, could be something related to work or school, an important meeting or deadline. So when you have those strong desires, because of emotional overwhelm, or emotional distress, to procrastinate or avoid, those are also times that we would consider a crisis and you need to pull out some of these big guns to help bring down your emotional distress enough so you can do what you need to do.
Marielle Berg
Let’s talk just briefly about when not to use these skills, because they’re fabulous, and there can be the danger sometimes of overusing them. So we don’t use these skills for everyday life problems. We have a whole bunch of other skills we teach in DBT that can help with that. And the reason why we don’t use these skills for solving everyday problems is they’re not designed for that they’re not problem solvers. They’re more ride out the storm kind of skills.
Ed Fowler
I think when we talk about the way we use all of the DBT skills in our skills group, the Emotion Regulation skills, skills for actual changing our emotional responses, and the Interpersonal Effectiveness skills for really interacting with other people in a way that really works for us, those require a certain amount of Wise Mind, being able to access the reasonable side of our mind. So often we’ll talk about using Distress Tolerance skills, to then be in a position to access other skills for Emotion Regulation, or Interpersonal Effectiveness. But if we are so overwhelmed by emotion, we’ve got to bring those down when not using, for instance distraction, which can be so valuable short term, as a strategy for getting through every single day.
Marielle Berg
Right, or for creating the life that you want. And in the Distress Tolerance, skill set, so we teach a skill, Distraction. And we also teach a set of skills called Self Soothing. And so some of the things you can do when you’re practicing self soothing, or, you know, take a bath, or get yourself, you know, your special drink that you love to enjoy, you know, engaging your senses in one way or another. And so if you are using self soothing to work on your long term life goals, it’s not going to go well.
Ed Fowler
Right? Yeah, these skills are meant to help us get through a short term crisis, they’re not going to move us forward. A whole other set of skills will move us forward in the direction of our goals. This is to bring down the distress enough to actually do those other skills.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, this is the life jacket. These are not necessarily teaching you how to swim. So let’s delve into one of these skills. Should we talk about the STOP skill?
Ed Fowler
Yeah, this is such a good one.
Marielle Berg
I know. It’s simple and short and sweet. But it can be incredibly effective.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, so the STOP skill is where we start when it comes to Distress Tolerance. Am I the first one that ever said that? Probably not. Any DBT people out there kind of like, Yeah, I know, they say that every time but the
Marielle Berg
I have never heard it before. So I like it.
Ed Fowler
I have not either. So I feel, you know,
Marielle Berg
Original.
Ed Fowler
Really original. So the STOP skill is a very basic skill, when we notice that things are starting to become overwhelming. And, as with so many things in DBT, the STOP skill is an acronym, which stands for Stop, Take a step back, Observe and Proceed mindfully. So that’s the S T O P of the STOP skill.
Marielle Berg
And I know it’s hard when we’re talking about acronyms on a podcast. So people are listening, or teaching this in group or writing it on the board. And people have a sheet of paper in front of them. So just to recap, so the acronym is S T O P, the S is for stop, the T is for take a step back, the O is for observe, the P is for proceed mindfully, and we’ll go into each of those in a bit more depth.
Marielle Berg
And we’re also going to link to the skills book in our the show notes so people can follow along if they’d like to. So when we’re practicing the STOP skill, it can sometimes be helpful to actually visualize a stop sign because we’ve all seen millions of them throughout our lives, in our mind.
Ed Fowler
So yeah, I think that and for me, like I will sometimes even like do a stop motion with my hand for myself of like, okay, stop, as if you’re trying to, you know, signal to someone to stop. And really, it’s like, take that moment not to just react, not to just go with whatever’s going on. But just to stop in our tracks. Take a pause.
Marielle Berg
Right. So this is, you know, don’t do anything. And when I first started teaching DBT, I was like this is, I don’t think I respected the skill enough, it sounds really simple. And it’s so powerful. If we can just actually freeze for a moment and not react, there is so much more choice when we can take that pause. So that’s the S in STOP. And it’s really about control, staying in control. And when we are very emotional, so many of us feel pretty out of control.
Ed Fowler
Right. And I know for myself, I’ve experienced this and I hear it from clients all the time of like, the power of noticing and this comes into the our Mindfulness skills, noticing like I am really revved up right now, I am starting to get going. And to just stop and pause and notice. And that’s where the T in the STOP skill is for take a step back. So we stop in our tracks. We pause the line of thinking or the actions or the instincts that were going on. And then we take a step back from that. And sometimes people will talk about literally taking a step back.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, right. If you’re having about to maybe have an argument with someone, literally taking a step back, gives you a little bit more physical distance and can send a message to yourself. I’m retreating. I’m pausing for a moment.
Ed Fowler
Right. So you know taking that step back literally or figuratively, taking a deep breath, something to like, kind of reinforce the pause with the STOP. So the STOP said, stop, the T says, take a step back, pause it, take a deep breath, and then observe. So again, like I kind of have like a visual of, you know, rushing forward, and just stopping, and literally taking a step back to, instead of going with that momentum that the emotion is creating, we’re starting to reverse a little bit, or stepping back from the edge of where that emotion might be taking us.
Marielle Berg
It makes me think, I’m imagining a lot of listeners can relate to this, when you have your phone in front of you, and you’re about to send that angry text, right? And so the T would be like, delete, delete, delete.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Marielle Berg
Let’s erase that. I think we’ve probably all been there.
Ed Fowler
We’ve all already practiced this skill many times. So once we’ve stopped, when we’ve paused, we’ve, you know, kind of taken a breath, then we observe what’s happening. Notice what’s going on within us, to pay attention to what emotions am I feeling? What thoughts am I having? What body sensations am I experiencing? Just notice, what’s happening with me? Notice what’s going on in the situation. Like, what’s happening here? What’s the other person doing or thinking, where am I right now, you know? Like, that we just kind of take inventory of what’s happening that’s causing such a strong emotional response.
Marielle Berg
Yes, and I love the O in the skill, the observe, because it helps move us from that tunnel vision or that zoom lens we get when we’re upset, and something feels really challenging, and it gives us a wide angle lens, it really opens up our view, when we can observe, we’re observing what is happening around us and also what’s happening internally. Is my breath shallow? Are my hands clenched? What am I thinking? Am I thinking this person’s an idiot, or I’m an idiot, or I need to tell them off?
Ed Fowler
Right? And again, just noticing our physical response. For instance, noticing, oh my gosh, my hands are clenched. Like, my shoulders are so tight, I’m holding my breath. Like just right there gives us information of what we might do, like start with taking a breath. Valuable. But also, I think, like noticing our thoughts, because so often, when our emotions are really revved up, there’s a series of thoughts that are just going, going, going. And just notice, what am I thinking right now?
Marielle Berg
What is the story I’m telling myself?
Ed Fowler
Exactly, using like, the observe is so similar to our Mindfulness skills, like nonjudgmentally noticing, what am I thinking? Instead of just going with like, yeah, they are an idiot, you know, like, or no, I’m never gonna get over this, right? Like, I am noticing that I am thinking this person is an idiot, right?
Marielle Berg
So different than just believing it.
Ed Fowler
Such a different quality. So that’s where that observing of just notice what’s happening.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. And I think you’re absolutely right, it akin to the Observe that we talk about as one of the foundations of Mindfulness. And if we can observe what’s happening outside of us. And inside of us, it’s so hard to be mindful and to make skillful decisions. So that’s the O in our STOP. And then let’s move on to the final portion of the STOP skill, which is the P, which stands for proceed mindfully, right?
Ed Fowler
I have such a strong visual of this skill, which is like imagining myself just rushing forward, right. And I stop, I take a step back. So I’m moving in the opposite direction that I had been rushing, I observe what’s going on. And then I start to walk again. But slower, more deliberate, putting one foot in front of the other. I’m proceeding mindfully based on the information that I gained by observing.
Marielle Berg
And when we’re proceeding mindfully, it gives us a moment to think about what our ultimate goals are. What do we want in the situation? Is it to tell the other person off? Is it to numb out? Or is it something else? It doesn’t mean you have to work towards that goal in the moment. But you can get clear. Often we can get clear like, Oh, I really don’t want to yell at this old friend of 20 years. That’s not what I ultimately want.
Ed Fowler
So I’m using the example of the you know, firing off an angry text. Notice ourselves typing up our rant, and that’s how I would describe myself, like to just delete it right? And then proceed mindfully might be, don’t respond, take a minute, step away from the phone, right? It might be to say, can we talk about this later? It might be to say, I’m feeling really angry, or whatever it might be, right?
Ed Fowler
The proceed mindfully can take a lot of different forms. But it is not just going with the flow of that emotion that might have gotten us started. But it’s figuring out what’s the wise thing to do here? What’s moving me in the direction that I actually want to go?
Marielle Berg
Yes.
Ed Fowler
And then taking the action that does move us in that direction.
Marielle Berg
Right, absolutely.
Marielle Berg
It’s a really nice description of how to engage the P in the STOP skill, which is proceed mindfully. And we’re pulling on, as we did with O with for observe, and here with the P for proceed mindfully, we’re really pulling on our Mindfulness skills. And this is why we tell people when they want to start learning DBT that you have to learn all the different modules, you can’t sort of just dip in for Distress Tolerance, because they work in conjunction, and you need a strong foundation, particularly of Mindfulness to help you understand and really engage the other skills.
Ed Fowler
Right. And again, the point of mindfulness is able to be in the present moment, not distracted. And so with this STOP skill, we’re noticing that my emotions are really high. And I want to slow it down, be in the present moment. Think about what’s important, and act on what’s important, rather than act on whatever instinct is being driven by these emotions.
Marielle Berg
Okay, great. Thank you so much for joining me again to talk about the scale and we will delve into a whole bunch more Distress Tolerance skills in subsequent episodes.
Ed Fowler
Great.
Marielle Berg
Thanks for listening to today’s episode. To learn more, or if you’re in the Bay Area and want to get started with therapy you can find us online at bayareadbtcc.com. That’s bayareadbtcc.com.