Dialectical Behavior Therapy

  • Just a Taste

    Just a Taste

    I forced myself to engage in the DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) skill: building positive experiences – and got up early to go to a comedy show with Ceila. I’m hammered with triggers at work. Currently my formerly catatonic patient is back in restraints for violence, and I have a patient almost identical to me in

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  • Twisted Logic

    Twisted Logic

    The most bizarre feeling – I’ll never get over it – of watching a suicidal patient. That is my role tonight, on my last night before a couple days off. Every time I peek in on him, I’m taken back immediately to the mental hospital, forced to wear an anti-suicide turtle suit, and an aide

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  • A Bad Day

    A Bad Day

    I had a couple days off, but my weekend was rough. I started getting a headache Friday afternoon which morphed into a migraine later. I took Advil and Ativan, knowing it was probably from lack of sleep – I had worked the night before and had not been to bed yet. I always puke when

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  • The Wall

    The Wall

    IOP was so hard. I am overwhelmed. I question my ability to do this. I question any of it will work. I became slightly overwhelmed with emotion and couldn’t quite articulate how I was feeling. I was starting to open up a little bit more (it’s extremely difficult for me to be vulnerable with a

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  • Intensive Outpatient – Week 5, Attending to Relationships

    Emotion regulation continued – in DBT therapy, attending to relationships fosters improved emotion regulation. This relates to last week’s emotion regulation core concept – building positive experiences. The therapist talked about the two extremes – the dialectical opposites – in DBT. There’s being too open, no boundaries, and then the other end, rigid boundaries, isolationist

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  • Biocentrism and Mental Health

    Biocentrism and Mental Health

    “The universe knows. You’re a good person.” No. The universe doesn’t know of our existence. The universe doesn’t care about our existence even if it could know. Justice is not inherent to anything. According to biocentrism, the universe and all within it might not exist at all till it is observed, similar to the results

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  • Intensive Outpatient, Week 1

    Intensive Outpatient, Week 1

    I finished my first week of intensive outpatient, or IOP, through the mental hospital’s outpatient program. Tomorrow I start my second week. I am still processing it and how I feel about it. I am still just not sure. Everyone is very friendly, very supportive. Almost too much. On the first day the therapist running

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