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Running head: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Journal 1

Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Personal Journal

Amber McKenna

Psych Disorders 228

Dr. Robert Stensrud

Due: May 14, 2013


Journal #1

Week of Feb 12, 2013

In tonight’s class we discussed the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and we were to each

come up with a goal that we could journal about through the semester, and to work through the

workbook to try and help ourselves. My goal for this activity was to learn to try and give up

some control in my life. I feel as if I try to control everything in my life, whether or not it is

feasible to really control. I find myself in a constant state of worry and always trying to plan,

plan, and plan. I always want to anticipate what could or what I think should happen. I never

really live for the moment, or enjoy the moment I am living in. I always am trying to determine

what the next step might be. I want to learn to back off, take a step back and really look at myself

and my situation, and just go with the flow. I want to stop worrying so much about things I can’t

control and know that everything will work out the way that it is supposed to. I have stated my

goal out loud, so this is what I will be working on and journaling about.

My plan for this journal is to work through the Dialectical therapy workbook, try out

some exercises and see how they work for me. Whether or not I am a complete failure at this task

will be an interesting find.


Journal #2

Week of February 19, 2013

This week’s journal will focus on basic distress tolerance skills. The point of this

basically is to examine my coping skills. The exercises provide a check list of things to do and to

mark the ones I use or have used to cope with. In looking at this I see that I spend a great deal of

my time worrying about mistakes and problems of the past, I also tend to worry and get anxious

about things in the future. This is no surprise to me, and neither is the fact that I take these

feelings out on others by getting upset and trying to control them, when I’m feeling out of

control of my own life. The radical acceptance part of this is using the radical acceptance

statements to remind myself about living in the present. The ones I marked are the ones that I

can’t change what has already happened, and the present is the only moment I have control over.

In trying to distract myself from these self destructive tactics sometimes it is okay to just let the

emotions out and cry it out to release stress hormones. There is a big list of other pleasurable

activities that I could distract myself. These I do find helpful, and could distract myself with

many of these things while trying to get away from myself destructive thought patterns of

anxiety and control. I think that the distraction plan would work well for me, and help me to

remember the steps I need to take in order to stop the thoughts. Self soothing, is another good

technique that I could use. Using my senses to soothe myself is another good technique for

getting rid of the excess unnecessary stress. A relaxation plan is a good plan to have in place

when I start to get stressed, both at home and away from home. This week has not been a good

week for me to put these plans into action. I have tried and succeeded some, but I have also had

some setbacks. I fully intended to build on these problem solving, and self soothing relaxation

techniques.


Journal #3

Week of February 26, 2013

This week’s Focus will be on the Advanced Distress Tolerance Skills. This is

building on the self soothing and relaxation techniques that I failed at last week. In realizing that

the place I feel the safest at is my home. When I am not in a crisis situation I am able to sit and

use my cue word of soothe to help soothe myself into a somewhat relaxed state, forgetting about

all the stresses I have around me. The committed to action worksheet helped me realize that the

people I hold the most dear to me are my husband, and my family, and helped me to recognize

what the important aspects of my life are. I would be serving my husband and my family by

helping myself to relax, and to work on the self soothing aspect of my life. The coping thoughts

worksheet helped me to recognize the stressful things that I think about on a daily basis. I liked

that this work sheet helped me to look at myself and remind myself of a new coping thought

when I am having a negative reaction to one of my thoughts. I like that I can give myself a new

perspective and a new outlook on helping myself towards moving out of such a negative thought

pattern.


Journal # 4

Week of March 5, 2013

This week I am choosing to work on basic and advanced mindfulness in this

journal. My goal of being more in the moment and living more for the day is slowly starting to

sink in. In the journal book it describes being mindful basically as meditation. To me starting out

meditation is something that I just can’t get my body to do. I feel as though I am unable to just

relax and clear my mind. I am unable to sit still and not think of the hundreds of other things that

are racing through my mind or the other things that I could be doing rather than trying to sit

quietly. This chapter in the book talks about mindless exercise and how we tend to zone out. This

is something that I do frequently. I can be reading a book, but not realize what I just read, or

driving somewhere I can realize that I wasn’t even thinking and don’t remember driving the last

five miles. This is a problem for me and something I am determined to work on. Mindful

breathing is a technique that is talked about a lot in this chapter of basic skills, I feel that it is

actually pretty helpful and has made me sit down and stop the millions of other thoughts coming

across my brain if I focus on just breathing. The advanced techniques of mindful coping help you

to recognize how to use radical acceptance to acknowledge my everyday thoughts without

judging myself too harshly and focusing on how to live a more mindful, aware, and focused life.

I need to recognize when I am zoning out, usually this happens after the fact, but I am going to

work on stopping it in its tracks. I tend to have a pretty negative judging mind when I am at work

at the hospital, but when I am at home I found that I am happy and relaxed and content after


doing the daily worksheets of recognizing my thoughts. This is something that I want to change.

I need to working on using non blaming thoughts while at work.

Journal #5


The next couple of journals I think I will be working on Basic Emotion

Regulation skills. This is an area of my life that gives me the biggest headaches. I am a very

emotional person and sometimes I realize that I have problems regulating my emotions. When I

am sad, mad, angry, hurt, happy, overwhelmed, the list could go on and on, I cry. In general I

feel that I am a crier. In many situations it is difficult for me to stop the crying. If I begin to feel

any sort of emotion my body reacts by crying. My husband gets more than frustrated by this.

Sometimes we can’t have a single conversation without me starting to cry. To me this feels

insane. I recognize when it is starting to happen and I try to stop it. The more I try to stop it, the

more it comes, and harder. I recognize that I have an anxiety problem, and also have struggled

with chronic depression since my early teen years. I think that my body has just learned to use

crying as a defense mechanism for every single emotion that I feel. My fight or flight instinct

that kicks in doesn’t kick in like most other people. My instinct in both situations is to cry. I

need to do a better job of recognizing the symptoms of the emotional tidal wave before it hits

me, rather than afterwards, the water works are already turned on and I can’t seem to turn them

off. Next week I will work on the emotional record of my feelings to see if I can recognize when

it is going to happen and be more aware of the situation before it happens.


Journal #6


This week I kept a record of my emotions. I wrote down the time and place and

what I did when those feelings came about. The first time I felt myself verbalizing out loud how

annoyed I was at the fact that I had to go to work. This was at 5:15 am. I was really angry the

entire time I was getting ready for work, and all I wanted to do was get back in bed and go back

to sleep. The second time I felt myself getting really annoyed at everyone in my work place. I

just wanted to go home, and kept saying how tired I was all day. The next time I recognized my

feelings was just before I had to go to class tonight. I felt myself dragging and dreading going to

class because I was just too tired to deal with going. The following day I also had to go to work

and I felt the exact same cycle all over again. This was the feelings of tiredness, the annoyance,

and the overwhelmed feeling of just wanting to crawl back into bed. I feel like this is not a

healthy growing environment for my baby and for me to be stressed out and tired all the time. Is

this because I hate my job or is it because I have an urge to be a stay at home parent while I try

and finish my masters, but I know financially I am not able to do that since I am the bread

winner in our household. Do these feelings of constant tiredness mean that I really am tired or do

I just need a break from life for right now? My next journal is going to focus on my response to

my overwhelming feelings.


Journal #7


This section of the DBT book talks about the unhealthy things we do in response

to our emotions. I found that in looking through this and doing the worksheets that I am an

emotional eater. When I try and stop myself from crying I find that I tend to eat. I call it my

“eating my feelings days”. This is not healthy. My body in response to stress if I am not crying I

am eating. Some people don’t eat. I tend to overeat, and eat high calorie things in mass

quantities. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is binge eating because I don’t throw up

afterwards. I could redirect those feelings into physical exercise which would be a a healthier

alternative, rather than a snicker bar. I also found that I am a stress sleeper. When I get to feeling

too much stress I just go to bed. All I want to do is sleep and be left alone. This is not healthy,

and I know that. That is one of the things that spiraled me into a deep depression a few years ago.

I feel like I could do a better job of recognizing myself destructive behaviors of eating, and

sleeping and channel them into a more productive outcome like meditating and just slowing

down and realizing that I don’t have to do everything all at once like I feel like sometimes. I also

need to work on my cognitive vulnerability but not having self destructive thoughts when I am

feeling overwhelmed. I need to use the thought diffusion and positive coping thoughts.


Journal #8

Week of April 2, 2013

This week I will look at the idea of Advanced Emotion Regulation skills. The four

advanced emotion regulation skills of this section would be being mindful of my emotions

without judgment, emotion exposure, doing the opposite of my emotional urges, and problem

solving. I think this week I will just take the first two into consideration and look at being

mindful of my emotions without judgment and emotion exposure. Next week I will try the other

two. I have already been working with the being mindful of my emotions but this time it gets a

little harder when I have to try to watch my emotions and recognize them going up and down and

change. I also will have to work on the fact that I can endure my emotions without crying. I

suppose the goal of this is that maybe the emotions won’t be so intense or overwhelm me to the

point of a breakdown. The breathing technique in this book is helping me to slow down. Take in

the emotions; don’t judge myself upon how I am feeling. It is okay to have emotions and strong

emotions at that but not to let them control me. I am in control. What I learned from those

techniques is to focus, focus on myself, my breathing, and my emotions and put a name to it, and

not to judge myself upon it.

The second techniques are to expose myself to my emotions. The goal is to face them

head on and not to hide from them. I need to expose myself, feel the emotion in order to

recognize it. In doing an emotion log I wrote down certain events that made me have an emotion,

how it made me feel and how I either coped with it, or blocked the response I was going to have.

I struggled with this and even though I recognized the emotion I still let myself react the way I

wanted to. This is something that is so hard for me and I will continue to struggle.


Journal #9


The purpose of this week’s journal is to continue working on the advanced emotion

regulation. I am going to work on the last two goals of the emotion regulation which are doing

the opposite of my emotions, and problem solving skills.

The first exercise on doing the opposite of my emotional urges was really hard for me. I

feel like I can recognize my emotions pretty well by this point, but doing the opposite of how I

feel is a whole other challenge. I realize that when people look at me sometimes they think that I

am pretty angry. Sometimes they are right, sometimes I am and I am an open book, other times I

just look like I am when I’m not at all. Sometimes my anger sits on my sleeve and I have a hard

time controlling my body language, and facial expressions. The first thing I had to work on was

to focus on the emotion itself. Working on that is something I will always continue to do. After I

recognized the emotion, I needed to recognize how it was affecting my body language, voice,

and look on my face. After I was able to identify these things, I was able to make a conscious

decision to just breathe and change everything about how I was currently feeling. This didn’t go

unnoticed my people by any means at all. People would notice my squirming within me and the

intense change. I guess this is something I will have to work on to do a little bit more subtlety

than I currently am. I feel a little robotic when I notice myself doing those things and changing

my body language purposefully. I didn’t make it to working on the second part of the goal this

week so that is something I will work on for next week. I didn’t anticipate needing so much time

to work on the changing of my body language, and doing the opposite of my emotions.


Journal # 10


This week I will be working on the last part of the advanced emotion regulation. The last

part of the goal is something I didn’t get to last week because I was so busy consuming myself

with working on doing the opposite of what my emotions wanted me to do. This is something I

will have to always work on. That is not an easy feat.

This week the problem solving skills could prove to come in handing while continuing to

work on this goal. The goal of this is to basically analyze your behaviors and recognize a

sequence of events that lead up to your poor choices, or decision making. The first exercise to

look at is the behavior analysis sheet. This is something that after I recognized an emotion, I

looked at what happened just before I felt that emotion. I had to ask myself if I had control over

this event, or if I didn’t, then I recognized the thoughts that went with my emotion, and what

might have triggered me to feel that way, I looked at what had happened during the day before

that particular even and if that was related or not, and then I looked at if there was a behavior I

did that triggered myself to feel that way. Basically I just needed to move on because I was

confusing myself. Then I looked at the second part of the task which was to just recognize the

ABC’s of problem solving. Alternative responses, Best Ideas (where I just made a list of the best

ways to handle the situation), and finally Commitment to implementation (I figured out new

times, and places to test out this technique). I made a list this week to help myself where I

recognized my behavior and thoughts, exposed myself to the emotions to work on coping with

them, I did the opposite of what I really wanted to do, and I committed to my new behavior.


Journal #11


The goal for this week is to work on basic interpersonal effectiveness skills. This

basically is to remind myself to be mindful of others, not trying to figure out what my next step

is going to be, what I am going to say next and trying not to be too passive aggressive. I basically

will just work on myself and paying attention to others more. I sometimes find that I get inside

my own head, I can be staring at someone, having a conversation, but not feel like I really heard

what they said because I was too busy thinking about what I wanted to say next, or other things

that I had going on that I was going to do after that conversation. That is not a healthy behavior. I

feel like you miss a lot of context clues about their needs, and reactions, and then I projected my

feelings onto them. I should have seen the blow up reaction coming. Some of the key

interpersonal skills that I feel like I should work on the most is asking for what I want, and

getting more information.

I feel that I really need to work on asking for what I want is a big thing, I know what I

want many times, but I forget to ask for it, and then I get upset when something doesn’t go

according to the way I projected it in my mind going because the other person didn’t realize that

I wanted something particular. I also need to work on getting more information. Sometimes, I

find myself jumping to a conclusion that I saw coming because of the information that I had in

my mind when I didn’t ask the other person for more information on the situation or how they

were feeling. They had a different outcome in mind, and then that put us on two completely

different playing fields. This is a big task for me to work on.


Journal# 12


This week’s goal is to work on the advanced interpersonal communication skills.

The skills that I am going to continue working on are ways to ask for what I want, and gathering

more information.

The first park of asking for what you want is trying to figure out how to ask for

what you want in a nonthreatening and non demeaning way. These exercises taught me that if

you start with a disarming statement, people are more receptive to give you what you need.

Starting with a direct and specific question will leave little to no room for misinterpretation of

what you are asking for. The key to this is to leave any type of charge or emotion out of your

voice when asking for this. This is tough for me to do as an emotional person. Secondly if you

start with an appreciation statement, you make the person feel more valuable and therefore more

receptive to your request. Also I think that using this along with assertive listening will help me

to gather more information on a situation to be able to better control my emotions, and my

thought processes during a conversation. I feel that some of my listening blocks come from mind

reading, rehearsing what I am going to say, and advising rather than trying to listen and

understand I find myself trying to jump straight to the conclusion right away. The mind reading

becomes a problem when I end up hearing what I thought was going to be said and that isn’t

what the person said at all. The key to this for me is going to be to just really try to focus on the

person and what they are saying by just listening rather than trying to interject my own thoughts

and what I think is best to be done, yet another task to work on.


Journal #13

Week of May 6, 2013

This week’s journal I think I am going to work on the coping with resistance and conflict.

This seems to be an issue in my life. The issues dealing with this are mutual validation, broken

record, probing, clouding, and assertive delay. The first one to work on is the mutual validation.

It is important in an argument that you validate the other person so they feel that they are being

heard. The key to this the book says is not agreeing with the other person just letting the other

person yes you have in fact heard what they are saying and heard it correctly. The second part is

the broken record, you just keep repeating what you are saying until the other person begins to

get it or actually hear what you are saying. The third about probing, asking a direct assertive

question like what about the ___ (insert specific example) bothers you and clouding agreeing

with little parts of the situation and then the assertive delay telling the person you won’t deal

with a situation for like an hour. These are all good things to do in an argument and I think

would be specifically helpful when it came to an argument with my husband that we have

constantly and never seem to get any resolve out of. Negotiations are a huge part of a marriage

and I wanted to test these suggestions out when we had an argument. I decided to give it a shot

the other day and try these things out rather than cry about the situation as I had previously been

working on not crying and controlling my emotions. I couldn’t believe the end result, we finally

got a resolution to the problem that we had been arguing about for so long. It seemed really hard


at first to try and take a step back and not cry, but with working on all the things I had previously

been doing, I was better able to control my emotions and get a handle on myself and deal.

Journal #14

Week of May 13, 2013

Overall Reflection

This week I finally made it to the end of the DBT workbook and can begin to “put it all

together” I feel that I have done a pretty good job over the course of the semester working on my

goal.

My goal was to just live in the moment and not try to control everything in my life. I also

wanted to learn how to control my emotions and regulate myself better without stressing out so

much and crying all the time. I will remember to work on my mindfulness, deep relaxation, self

observation, affirmation, and commitment to action. Some days are always going to be harder

than others, and some days it will seem like a walk in the park. The key is to keep at it and not

get down on yourself too much when you do stumble and have a bad day, it’s bound to happen.

I think that I have learned a lot of valuable tools to help me live a happier, mentally

healthier life by working on this work book. By continuing to work on myself and each of those

things just three minutes a day hopefully someday it will come as second nature to me and I will

be able to better cope with all aspects of my life.


I think that I can apply this type of therapy to my counseling life because I think that high

school students could really benefit from this type of activity. Sometimes they get so

overwhelmed with the daunting task of high school, homework, extracurricular activities, and the

drama of their friends that they forget to learn how to slow down and take a look at themselves. I

feel that this workbook was a really good tool for me to learn how to better take control of my

own life, and I will keep it in my office to pull out different sections to help my students with

issues they might be having. Overall, I feel that I really learned a lot from doing this. Not only

about the dialectical behavior therapy, but I learned a lot about myself as well.

ambermckennaschoolcounselor.weebly.com · web viewin tonight’s class we discussed the dialectical...

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