Pain is a type of distress. It’s a natural part of life. Pain is designed to be temporary. The purpose of pain is to PUSH US TO DO SOMETHING to end the pain…so we can return to a pain-free state. Pain is a call to action.

Alike most things in life, we have two choices when it comes to pain. We can either LEAN INTO the painful situation and change things or we can work hard to avoid dealing with it.  DBT Therapy gives us the tools to do this

If all we do is work to avoid pain…if we don’t Lean Into it…if we don’t deal with it…if we refuse to accept it…if we refuse to do what’s needed to get through it …OUR PAIN WON’T GO AWAY. It’ll be with us for a long time.

Running from our problems just prolongs our agony and brings us to a chronic state of suffering… a long-term condition of being overwhelmed with despair and stuck in the same place and time… and we don’t move forward.

We want things to get better in our life, but we’re NOT WILLING to do the things that will make our life better. We want life to change, but we’re not in the mood to change, we are unwilling until we have the tools that we recieve in Dialectical Behavioral  therapy

We generally DON’T CHOOSE to make major life changes “out of the blue” or on our own. Change usually happens when we’re FORCED to make changes. And most often, we make changes when we have NO OTHER CHOICE but to change. We generally let things get SO BAD that the pain of living like we’re living is MUCH GREATER than the pain of change…and that’s when we begin to change.

If we really want our life to change, we have to make changes…despite the distress of change. Our life isn’t going to get better unless we do things that make life better. When people make major life changes, a strong commitment is made, like, “Come hail or high water, this is going to happen. I’m going to do what I have to do, no matter what. I’m so tired of living this way. I refuse to allow myself to live like this any longer.”

Excerpt from Chapter 11 “Distress Tolerance” of the DBT-CBT Therapy Workbook entitled: “Out-of-Control: A Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) – Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Workbook for Getting Control of Our Emotions and Emotion-Driven Behavior” (Melanie Gordon Sheets, Ph.D. – 2009 – Recovery Works Publications)