DBT Practitioner – Distress Tolerance Skills for Counseling

DBT Practitioner – Distress Tolerance Skills for Counseling

About Instructor:

Aman Varma has undergone accredited course training in CBT practitioner, Diploma in Hypnotherapy, Mental Health Practitioner, NLP Specialist Practitioner, Diploma in Psychological Counseling and Diploma in Modern Applied Psychology.

Learn Distress Tolerance & Self Soothing Skills of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) to help your clients

What is distress tolerance?

Distress tolerance is the ability to experience painful feelings, at least for short periods, and to cope in ways that do not involve the infliction of further suffering.

No matter how skilled we are at managing our lives there will be times when painful events occur. People vary substantially in how they respond to painful events. Some people seem to tolerate or cope with negative experiences and emotional pain better than others. They can feel high levels of pain or distress but somehow they seem to cope, manage to contain it, and carry on with their usual day-to-day activities. At the other end of the spectrum, some people have great difficulty coping with the painful feelings that accompany negative experiences, and they develop maladaptive strategies to cope with these feelings such as self-harm, substance abuse, and suicide attempts.

Distress tolerance is connected to emotional regulation but has a different focus. Good emotion regulation skills may reduce the intensity of painful feelings that are experienced in response to painful events, while poor emotion regulation skills may contribute to higher intensity of distress. But independent of how intense the painful feelings are, it is possible to tolerate that distress well or poorly. Distress tolerance skills are focused on the process of coping with the distress, as it is, not with the process of reducing its intensity.

Most individuals learn to tolerate distress in childhood and this ability improves through adolescence and into adulthood. We learn that experiencing painful events, memories, feelings and thoughts are inevitable and we learn ways of going through these experiences without reacting adversely. From interactions with parents and significant others, we learn that painful experience is universal and role models demonstrate ways of coping effectively. Clear, predictable and respectful feedback from others helps us learn.

A person may not develop the skills to tolerate distress if childhood environments do not provide adequate learning opportunities. Young people with poor distress tolerance often experience chaotic family situations in which adults demonstrate poor distress tolerance themselves and do not provide clear, predictable and respectful feedback.

Interventions to enhance distress tolerance provide alternative learning opportunities in which individuals can acquire the skills involved. In addition to providing clear, predictable and respectful feedback in response to maladaptive coping responses, explicit instruction and guided practice are offered in order to enhance conscious awareness and proactively build new skills.

Where does this module come from?

Many of the practice elements in this module are drawn from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT). DBT contains four skill-based modules, one of which is Distress Tolerance.

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is designed specifically for clients who experience overwhelmingly painful emotions and have developed maladaptive coping strategies such as self-harm and suicide attempts. A central proposition is that if clients can come to accept that emotional pain is inevitably a frequent visitor in life, and if they learn alternative skills for coping with it, then unhealthy responses will be reduced. DBT teaches three (3) main types of skills for tolerating distress: (i) radical acceptance; (ii) distraction, and (iii) self-soothing and relaxation.