On Thursday, we talked about balancing the various DBT skills to find your best option for a situation.

The author of the website, DBTselfhelp.com , feels that we need to have emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills first, before learning interpersonal effectiveness. She does have a point, but I disagree because I'm seeing a tendency for people to lean towards accepting painful and abusive situations, and trying to tolerate them or change their own emotional reaction, without trying to change the situation and/or environment. If you are borderline, you probably grew up being taught that you can't do anything about it anyway, and how you feel about it doesn't matter, so this response makes sense given that kind of upbringing.

Still, we don't have to put up with environments like that, or let people treat us like that anymore. Interpersonal Effectiveness is hard to learn when you haven't learned it before. But you really can do it. Practice it, a lot, especially when you are not too stressed about something and you can take your time to stop and think through the steps to use the skills. I'm not going to repeat DEAR MAN here because it is in an earlier post, so I'll encourage you to go back and look at it and keep practicing it as much as you can. You can add to it with GIVE and FAST. (a few more things to develop and attend to in your interactions).
http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/ie_handout_9.html
http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/ie_handout_10.html

So, do focus on changing what you can, using these skills. There will still be things that we can't change, crises that we just need to get through, and our emotional reactions to whatever is going on. Sometimes even though we are asking for and working towards change, it just doesn't happen right away. These are the times to use Distress Tolerance and Emotion Regulation.

Just like in the Serenity Prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference....