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WTF is DBT? (Mini-Season Intro)
103 Plays5 days ago
In this very special episode of Friendless, your host James Avramenko finally launches the long-promised DBT mini-season. This introductory episode explores why Dialectical Behavior Therapy isn't just for people with BPD diagnoses—it's practical emotional scaffolding for anyone who's ever sent an unhinged text at 2am or catastrophized themselves out of sleep.
James shares his own journey into DBT during one of the lowest points of his life, why he was skeptical at first, and the moment a simple acronym (STOP) prevented him from making things worse. This isn't about fixing yourself or becoming a better person—it's about working with the brain you have when everything feels like it's falling apart.
What You'll Learn
- Why DBT isn't self-help BS: The difference between theories and tools
- The four DBT modules: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotional Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness
- Who DBT is actually for: Spoiler—you don't need a diagnosis to benefit
- What's coming: A roadmap for the 10-episode mini-season (2 episodes per module + intro/wrap-up)
- The real goal: Fucking up slightly less often (that's it, that's the bar)
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Transcript
Introduction: Overcoming the Fear of Sharing
00:00:00
Speaker
So I want to talk to you about something that for really long time i couldn't figure out how to say loud without feeling like I was going to sound like a complete fraud. I've been trying to find the right way to present this for months, but I just keep shutting down instead.
00:00:16
Speaker
But the thing is, i think it could really help us. But first, I have to get through the part where I sound like a total dick for trying.
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome back to Friendless Sweet Peas. I'm your host, James Avromenko. This week, I'm kicking off a mini season that I've been long threatening to do and honestly long avoiding doing, all centered around dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT.
00:00:51
Speaker
And I have to admit, i have been really, really struggling with how to frame this. And not just this episode either, like the entire season. Because I keep stopping myself. I keep thinking,
00:01:04
Speaker
Who am I to talk about this? Am I going to come across as some sort of like false guru, self-help-y Mel Robbins bullshit, you know? And for a long time, that fear has kept me from just getting it out.
Personal Journey with DBT
00:01:19
Speaker
But I've gotten to a point where I've realized that I just need to say it. I need to put it out in the world and trust that, you know, just I guess from the very nature of me being me, it's not going to come across that way.
00:01:32
Speaker
So here we are. Funny enough, actually, in one of my recent therapy sessions, we decided that a resolution of mine should be framed as other people need me in their lives.
00:01:45
Speaker
and so So this is how I'm trying to manifest that.
00:01:51
Speaker
To set some context for where I was when DBT first came into my life. I was not doing well. And I don't mean in that vague, poetic, I mean, i was probably at one of the lowest points I have ever been in my entire life.
00:02:08
Speaker
I was still very much reeling from the chaos that had come out of my divorce after finding out everything that had been going on without my knowledge and just um how disruptive that had been to my whole sense of self and what I thought my life had been.
00:02:27
Speaker
And only to find out how much of it had been just a complete fabrication. um On top of this, I was finally kind of emerging out of a separate, really destructive relationship.
00:02:41
Speaker
I was drinking, I was using, was very much on the brink of turning some pretty dark allegations into reality.
Understanding and Applying DBT Skills
00:02:49
Speaker
And ironically, it was actually my ex, the one that I was actively destroying myself over, who recommended this free local program called Access Assessment, which I applied to, eventually got through, and then they offered this DBT group therapy six-month program that I went to.
00:03:10
Speaker
And to be totally upfront, um I was oddly skeptical going in. um And looking back, I don't even really feel like I have any real justification for it other than my sort of ingrained oppositional defiance.
00:03:27
Speaker
You know, I've been in therapy for years. I've tried different modalities, but every time a new one comes along, i always have this sneaking suspicion that it's just going to be another person telling me to journal my feelings and think positively, and then I'll end up.
00:03:43
Speaker
feeling worse because I'm somehow not doing it right. But the first session, the facilitator said something that really helped kind of shift my entire understanding of what we were trying to accomplish.
00:03:58
Speaker
They said that these aren't theories. These are tools. And you don't have to be good at them. You just have to be willing to try them when your brain is on fire.
00:04:12
Speaker
And that really struck something in me because, you know, I'm always talking about, you're not broken, you don't need to be fixed. And so to hear somebody else saying it, that it wasn't about fixing myself.
00:04:26
Speaker
It wasn't about becoming a better version of but of myself. It was about what do you do in the moment when everything feels like it's falling apart? And, you know, we didn't get into skills immediately, but I do remember the first skill that I actively practiced. And it was literally called STOP, which is just, it's an acronym for stopping yourself before you do something impulsive.
00:04:52
Speaker
You know, I was about to send a really unhinged message, you know, full meltdown chaos mode. And I remembered S-T-O-P, just STOP.
00:05:05
Speaker
Don't send it. Take a breath. And I didn't. And the next day I woke up and I i was just thinking, oh, thank God I didn't send that message. I would have made things even worse than they already were.
00:05:19
Speaker
um And it was just, you know, it was just this one tiny moment of pause. And that's it. That's all the skill asked me to do. And it worked. And over those six months, those tiny moments, they started to stack. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't this big transformation. It was just, I fucked up slightly less often.
00:05:41
Speaker
And that started to make me feel like maybe I can actually survive with the brain that I've been dealt.
00:05:54
Speaker
So,
00:05:57
Speaker
I have to admit, I'm doing this season right now partially for myself. I need the reminder. you know It's almost been a year since I completed the group because you know time is a fickle and patient asshole. But um I have found myself slipping back into some of my old brain patterns.
00:06:17
Speaker
ah Different circumstances, same brain. you know But I've been in another... difficult emotional rollercoaster over the last few months. And I've caught myself not using my tools, just kind of falling back into old habits, the spiraling, the isolation, fucking up in the exact same ways that I used to. And, you know, it's easy to think, well,
00:06:38
Speaker
If the tools worked before, why aren't they working now? But that isn't, I think, what's actually happening. um The tools don't stop working. You stop using them.
00:06:49
Speaker
And I've realized that I've stopped using them because, i don't know, maybe I got comfortable or I thought I didn't need them anymore or I just forgot. And so part of the season is very much for me.
00:07:01
Speaker
It's me going back through the skills and relearning them out loud with you. Because... um That's another element about not just dbt, but about just sort of personal practice is that you don't learn it once and then you're done.
00:07:21
Speaker
This is one of the things that drives me nuts. You know, you see middle managers say, we care and then never care again. Right? You know, this isn't you do it once and you're done.
00:07:32
Speaker
It's not riding a bike. It's like, yeah, it's going to the gym. You know, if you stop, the muscles atrophy. And right now for me, I think my DBT muscles have atrophied. So that's that's where we are.
00:07:46
Speaker
and And I also... I want to be clear. i am not here to say I have mastered DBT. Very clearly, I have not. I continue to fuck up the same patterns. I have fucked up these same patterns for the better part of my adult life. But these tools have helped me fuck up slightly less often.
00:08:07
Speaker
And honestly, that's my bar. That's it. Fuck up slightly less often because this, at the end of the day, is not about fixing yourself. You are not broken.
00:08:17
Speaker
There is nothing to fix. It's just about working with the brain that you have.
Origins and Concepts of DBT
00:08:22
Speaker
It's about giving yourself options for when it feels like your brain is on fire.
00:08:27
Speaker
You know, it's not a magic bullet. It's treating it like what it actually is, which is scaffolding. It's a ladder or something to help you build your way out of wherever it is you are right now.
00:08:40
Speaker
So little bit of background just for context. ah DBT was developed in the 1980s by a psychologist named Marsha Linehan. She was originally trying to treat chronic self-harm, suicidal behavior, traits associated with BPD.
00:08:57
Speaker
For those of you unfamiliar, borderline personality disorder. And you know,
00:09:03
Speaker
BPD is one of those terms that's kind of become modern shorthand for that crazy person, which I think is incredibly unfair and incredibly inaccurate. In my opinion, it's one of the most misunderstood conditions in the current conversation.
00:09:18
Speaker
And I say that as someone who was diagnosed with it about two years ago. You know, when I first got my diagnosis, I had this moment of, oh, but that explains a lot because One of the core traits of BPD is emotional intensity.
00:09:36
Speaker
it's It's not that you feel the wrong emotions. It's that you feel all of them at like 200% volume. And that creates this really rapid shift between states where you can go from totally fine to completely devastated in the span of like 10 minutes because, you know, someone's tone in their text message felt off.
00:10:02
Speaker
And if that sounds familiar to you, you might not have BPD. um
00:10:10
Speaker
I'm not here to diagnose you. But ah if some of those things sound familiar, then you might benefit from some of these DBT tools. um Because, you know, that emotional whiplash, it's exhausting.
00:10:25
Speaker
And DBT was designed specifically to help with that. And it's really important to know right here, and I'm going to say this many, many times throughout the season, you do not have to have a BPD diagnosis to benefit from DBT.
00:10:42
Speaker
Not even close. It just boils down to emotional regulation. And I think pretty much everybody in today's day and age could probably do with a little bit more of that, right?
00:10:54
Speaker
So...
00:10:58
Speaker
There's four modules within DBT, and we're going to go through each of those over the course of the season. um Two episodes each, plus this intro and a wrap up at the end. So we're looking at 10 episodes total for this little mini season.
00:11:16
Speaker
First up, we've got mindfulness and not the like sit cross-legged and think about nothing situation. that doesn't work for me. ah And I strongly doubt it works for many people. ah Mindfulness in the DBT lens is more about paying attention without your brain dragging you into the past or the future.
00:11:36
Speaker
um It's about avoiding that sort of mental time travel. um But... um Think of it like, have you ever been in a conversation with somebody and realized that you haven't heard a word they've said in the last two minutes because you were mentally replaying an argument from three days ago?
00:11:54
Speaker
Or you were lying in bed trying to sleep, but your brain is already catastrophizing about something that's going to happen next week. That's what we're talking about. And we're going to talk about how to actually stop that, or at least how to notice when it's happened and to sort of give yourself a little bit of an off-ramp.
00:12:13
Speaker
ah Next up is distress tolerance. This is the one for when emotions are so big that kind of nothing else works. It's basically how do you survive an emotional hurricane without like burning your life down in the process?
00:12:28
Speaker
Because yes, sometimes life is genuinely awful and the goal isn't to fix it right away. The goal is just to not make it worse. um This module teaches things like how to not send those really risky texts when you're activated or how to get through a panic attack without making it worse. How to sit with really uncomfortable feelings without immediately trying to numb them or escape them or destroy something in the process. It's it's it's crisis survival and It's probably the most immediately useful module for a lot of people I know for myself, very much included.
00:13:04
Speaker
We then got emotional regulation. This is basically the foundation. This is the real meat potatoes. It's about understanding what your ah emotions are actually doing. um Because the thing is, i think a lot of us are taught that emotions are problems to solve.
00:13:21
Speaker
Or things to ignore or, you know, signs that there's something wrong with us. And they're not. they're They're information. They're signals. And once you learn how to read them, like when you actually understand what fear is trying to tell you versus what anxiety is trying to tell you or how to tell the difference between a justified anger and displaced anger.
00:13:44
Speaker
then you have a lot more options. And then you're not just reacting, you're responding. And that's the shift that we're looking for. Finally, we've got interpersonal effectiveness, which is, you know, kind of a fancy way of saying, how do you ask for what you need without either people pleasing yourself into resentment or accidentally setting fire to every relationship you've ever had?
00:14:06
Speaker
but Because, ah you know, most of us do one or the other. Either we say yes to everything and then we quietly burn out and pull away or we try to set a boundary and it comes out so defensively that the other person feels attacked and now we're suddenly in a fight we didn't even know we were causing.
00:14:23
Speaker
And the objective here is to figure out how to do neither, how to actually say, here's what I need without apologizing for it or kind of making it a whole thing.
00:14:35
Speaker
Will we be perfect at any of these practices at the end of this mini season? No. Will I? Fuck no.
Practical Exploration of DBT
00:14:43
Speaker
But hopefully we'll be slightly more functional.
00:14:46
Speaker
And honestly, that's kind of got to be enough. So here's how this is going to work. As I said, two episodes per module. One is going to be about where we kind of dig into skills. One is going to be about practicing them.
00:15:00
Speaker
um Within each episode, there will be little practice moments, little experiments, things to try. I really want this to not be homework.
00:15:12
Speaker
There's no tracking sheets. There's no productivity guilt here. There's just suggestions, things that work for me that might work for you. And if they don't, that's fine. um So, for instance, like I'll give you a sneak peek in the mindfulness episode. I talk about a really simple grounding exercise. It's maybe like 60 seconds long.
00:15:31
Speaker
You can literally do it while you're listening or you can just skip it. I'm literally never going to know. There's no quiz at the end. So do what feels right. um In distress tolerance, I talk about the stop skills, which is, you know, what I mentioned earlier. And I'll give you a scenario where you might use it, but you don't have to like write it down. You don't have to practice it right away. You can just listen, see if it clicks and maybe file it away for later.
00:15:59
Speaker
The whole intention here is really, really low barrier to entry. You don't need special equipment. You don't need to carve out time in your day. You just listen. And if something lands, you try it.
00:16:11
Speaker
And if it doesn't land, you don't. and that's it. no ah Because reality is, from where I'm coming from, you know I've consumed enough self-help content to recognize that The genre has a very particular brand of bullshit.
00:16:30
Speaker
There's the toxic positivity, the manifestation, the implication that if you're still struggling, it's because you're not trying hard enough. And I don't want this to be that. This is just, here's some tools.
00:16:42
Speaker
They're not going to fix everything, but they might help you not feel so alone in your own brain. And it's okay to be skeptical. I don't expect you to trust me right of the gate. I barely trust myself. have happened I also don't expect you to understand a thing and then immediately apply
Conclusion: Embracing Mindfulness
00:16:58
Speaker
it. You know, I can understand something intellectually and still not do it.
00:17:03
Speaker
I know I need to eat. I know I need to sleep. But fuck, I don't always want to. Right. You know, and that gap between knowing and doing that's OK. That's what we're working on. We're trying to just smooth that roughness out.
00:17:18
Speaker
So that's all I really wanted to talk about today. That's what's coming down the pipeline. Next week, we're looking at mindfulness, which is all again about paying attention without your brain dragging you into the past or the future.
00:17:31
Speaker
um And I just really want to thank you for coming along with this journey. I am trying something new. This is an experiment. We're going to see how it plays out and just hope for the best. So um Yeah, we're going wrap things up here. And I'm just going to say I really hope to catch back here next week um with a brand new episode because it's going to be a ton of fun.
00:17:56
Speaker
ah But hey, I'm not going to worry about that right now. And neither should you. Because why? That is then. And this is now. Mindfulness, baby. So for now, I'll just say I love you and I wish you well.
00:18:09
Speaker
Fun and safety, sweet peace.