Here I am doing my DBT homework so I thought I might share it with people who as yet have not done DBT or are awaiting to get on a programme.

This section is about Mindfulness and is drawn from the skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder by Marsha Linehan.

I am learning a method at the moment called Mindfulness, it has proven very successful and is a core part of Dialectical Behavioural Therapy.
It is very exciting and I am already trying to apply it in my life.

I will try to explain it in so far as I can but I am still learning it so please bear with me

It is based on the theory that there are three states of mind

The reasonable mind - thinking rationally and logically, fact based thinking,and focused.

The Emotion mind- thinking and behaviour are controlled by your current mental state, reasonable logical thinking is difficult reality seems huge or distorted and the persons behaviour is the same as the persons emotional state.

The Wise mindis a mixture of both reasonable and emotion mind added to intuitive experience and analysis.

Mindfulness skills are the tools to balance emotion mind and reasonable mind to become wise mind.

There are three what skill and three how skills.

The first what skill is observing oneself, insofar as to experience in the moment with awareness what is happening as opposed to leaving a particular situation or trying to end an emotion. Observing is different to the event itself just like observing singing and singing or observing a mood swing and a mood swing.
The second what skill is to describe the events and personal responses in words. In learning to describe you learn not to take emotions and thoughts literally for instance in your mood swing you may feel threatened or agitated but that does not mean the world is ending or someone is trying to harm you.
The third Mindful skill is to participate without self consicousness but with attention.

The three how skills are

Taking a nonjudgemental stance, the problem with judging someone or thing deemed good can always become bad. In this instance your mood swing may have painful consequences or the outcome of the mood swing may be destructive. A nonjudgemental approach observes the consequences and may suggest ways to alter the behaviour or event.
The second how is to learn to focus the mind and awareness in the current moment's activity rather than thinking about something else.
The third how skill is being effective that is to focus on doing what works rather than what is 'right' versus 'wrong' or 'fair' versus 'unfair' This sometime requires sacrifising principles to achieve a goal. For instance

So with an agressive mood we want to achieve a placid mood. In the agressive mood state we are in the emotion mind mood and want to get to the wise mind.

So first we observe we are in an agressive mood for example, then we describe in words the aggressive mood be it threatening or angry but not any outside influences and thirdly we are attentive of this mood. Now we take a nonjudgemental stance in that we accept the mood and realise the consequences of the mood and suggest to ourselves ways to avert the consequences. We then focus right in the moment, this is vital to the process, forgetting all outside influences. Then finally we focus on doing what is effective way to end the aggressive mood.


I hope I made that understandable. No doubt someone else will come along and put it a lot more eloquently than I have.

Paddy