I couldn't not respond to this. DBT spends a lot of time explicitly teaching clients skills- crisis survival and distress tolerance skills, emotion regulation skills, interpersonal effectiveness skills. You learn them, you rehearse them, you receive in situ coaching to apply them. The idea is that you need to be taught these skills because if you didn't learn them growing up, they're not obvious. DBT also works on the premise that you are doing the best you can with what you have- i.e. if you had these skills, you would be using them. Self harming, suicide attempts, flying into a rage with others etc. are the result of not having better skills to manage our own distress or our relationships. If everything you've learnt in DBT is obvious, why weren't you doing it before? What about it irritates you? I hope you can hear these for the sincere questions which they are.

Is it that you knew what to do, but couldn't apply it in moments of high emotional arousal? Is it that you knew, and could have applied it, but there were higher secondary gains from the harmful behaviours you were using, which meant you weren't motivated to act skilfully? I'm asking as someone whose life was saved by DBT, but also as a psychologist who spends a lot of time explaining to adults that if the teenagers I see could manage more skillfully, they would.