Week of January 24th

DBT is a treatment founded on a series of principles, guidelines, and other structural components that can be reassuring for many clients and clinicians but off-putting to others. Emotion dysregulation and behavioral dyscontrol can be the consequence of ones relationship to rules, structure, and expectations. So many of us are eager to “follow the rules”, but might find ourselves either not understanding what the rules are, or feeling uncertain about our role in their context. For those of us who are unmotivated by rules and structure, we may lean toward the side of the dialectic of challenging convention. Mislabeled the “bad kids”, these folks are potentially more vulnerable to being misunderstood as misfits and therefore easy to abandon. The beauty of DBT is when we observe “rebel” behavior in our clients or in ourselves, our principle of Acceptance prompts us to get curious about its function. In this process we can uncover a range of possibilities: a fight/flight response, an urge for creativity, or perhaps an underlying biological dilemma.

In our experience, even the convention-phobic folks have the human instinct for belonging. Under this assumption, we can believe that one can be both a rule-breaker and function within social and occupational expectations. DBT wants us to embrace adhering to systemic principles (society didn’t grow because everyone followed all the rules all the time) and breaking the rules in meaningful ways that don’t interfere with our life worth living. Using Alternate Rebellion, we can express our contrarian edge without the consequence of self-destruction.

What rules do you have the urge to break? Are there consequences? Do you care? How else could you rebel?

 

 

WORDS OF WISDOM

 

MEME OF THE WEEK