What We Know About Skills Now That We Wish We Knew Then

All right, so the first one that I thought of, I chose please as a skill that I've recognized I've had a real change with how I look at it.

I used to not teach please very well when Kay and I were leading groups together.

Of course, it's an acronym skill.

So I explained what each letters of the acronym meant.

And I think this was even in the DBT manual, which I do have here in the office that I'm in, but I'm not reaching out to grab it.

I think even in the handout though for please, it will say some of those things that we think about with the different elements, right? It would say things like, make sure you're getting eight hours of sleep or like, you know, exercise this many times.

I

feel like that's in the handouts.

And so when I was teaching it, I used to think to myself that this is here as a skill because, well, these are just the things we should be doing.

All of us, like these are the things that we know are good for us, right? It's good for us to avoid mood altering substances.

It's good for us to eat and have a balanced diet.

It's good for us to get sufficient sleep.

So yes, of course, DBT is going to include something about that because it's like, hey, if something is feeling off with you, it's probably because you're not doing these things like you're supposed to do.

So as long as you're exercising enough and sleeping enough and treating your physical illness and all of that, then you'll be well on your way to feeling better because research has shown us that when we do tend to those things, we tend to feel better in our bodies.

True.

But I thought that was really the end all be all of the skill.

That's truly what I thought it was.

And then even a little bit over time, I started to realize, oh, when I'm talking about pleas, I'm not really tying it into emotion regulation.

I need to be tying this more into why this is in the emotion regulation module.

And so then I started to talk about it as when you are doing these things with pleas, it's hopefully going to more or less prevent you from flying off the handlebars, was kind of how I was thinking about it.

Like you're going to be less likely to fall down the rabbit hole of emotion mind if you are well regulated in your physical body.

So do these things kind of prevent you from getting too emotionally dysregulated? Now, I don't necessarily think that that's incorrect, but also I don't think that really gives the full picture of how valuable please is in the emotion regulation module.

It's such an important skill.

Um, and I've now come to realize that it's valuable for a lot more than the reasons I used to think of it as like, it's not just about taking care of your physical body.

It's not just about like, well, this will help you not get into your emotion mind.