The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Anxiety

124 The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook

most important techniques to learn in dialectical behavior therapy, so you might not be surprised
that you’ve already been practicing some of them in the chapters on distress tolerance and mind-
fulness skills. The four skill groups in dialectical behavior therapy (distress tolerance, mindfulness,
emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness) overlap and reinforce each other because this
helps you learn the skills more easily and to remember them more quickly.
In dialectical behavior therapy, there are nine emotion regulation skills that will help you
gain control of your emotions and the behaviors associated with them (Linehan, 1993b). These
skills are as follows:

1. Recognizing your emotions

2. Overcoming the barriers to healthy emotions

3. Reducing your physical vulnerability

4. Reducing your cognitive vulnerability

5. Increasing your positive emotions

6. Being mindful of your emotions without judgment

7. Emotion exposure

8. Doing the opposite of your emotional urges

9. Problem solving

This chapter will cover the first five emotion regulation skills, and the next chapter will cover
the last four skills. As in the previous chapters, the exercises in these two chapters will build on
each other, so make sure that you do the exercises in order.

RECOGNIzING YOuR EMOTIONS

Learning how to recognize your emotions and their effect on your life is the first step to controlling
your high-intensity emotional reactions. Very often, people spend their lives paying little attention
to how they feel. As a result, there are a lot of important things happening inside them that they
know little about. The same holds true for people struggling with overwhelming emotions, but it
occurs in a different way. Very often, people struggling with this problem recognize the tidal wave
of distressing emotions that overcomes them (such as sadness, anger, guilt, shame, and so on), but
by the time they recognize the tidal wave, it’s too late to do anything about it.
To control your overwhelming emotional reactions, it’s first necessary to slow down the emo-
tional process so that it can be examined. And then, after it’s examined, you can make healthier
decisions. This exercise will help you begin this process by examining an emotional situation that
has already occurred in the past. It will require you to be as honest with yourself as possible. The