Making Change While Being Kind to Yourself
How Dialectical Behavioral Therapy approaches change, and how this approach can help us access our ability to grow without going to extremes
I’ll be honest: before I made it into the field of psychiatry, I was an extremely easy target for the self-help and self-improvement industry. While I never went beyond paying the price of a new book for the often guru-led industry, I was devoted. In hindsight, the desire to feel less anxiety, know you’re on the right path, and feel hopeful about the world is so natural to anyone’s early 20s. While there were some helpful insights from some of my time subsumed in the motivational genre, there was also quite a lot of wasted time and possibly painful reinforcements of something I would only later undo through being in the presence of kind, gentle, yet encouraging people.
The combination of now being in the field of mental health and my history with the self-help industry is that the study of habits is incredibly dear to me. If you have been following me for a while, you likely know this. Ideally, any content you’ve gotten from me about habit building or change has not added on to the pile of productivity hacks or transformation inspiration. When I write here or on TikTok—and, frankly, when I speak with my patients—what I hope to speak to is the balanced pair of the beauty of change and validation for where we are now.
On The Dialectic of Acceptance and Change
While I am not an expert in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) in any way, one of the most useful concepts I’ve learned in my reading and training is the core philosophy behind this therapeutic model. A dialectic is defined as holding a conversation between two perspectives, or holding the belief that opposites are not unrelated. In DBT, it is the idea of holding two true, even if conflicting, things at once.
One application is the concept of “wise mind” which is an entity that is the dialectic of combining one’s “rational” mind and one’s “emotional” mind. This might mean combining what our brains or planned out responsibilities need us to do, while allowing some mercy and slowing down for what our heart or emotional self needs in a certain day. This concept shows a view of the self that can hold both of these parts, rather than splitting them away or pitting them against one another.
Another application—and why I bring it up in this article on habits, at all—is the concept in the model of change and therapeutic action (aka how this therapy works) of DBT. Two things are true at once in how a DBT therapist approaches working with a client: