Tolerating Overwhelming Emotions

An emotion is a natural instinctive state of mind triggered by circumstances, mood or relationships, or something similar. At times, emotions can become overwhelming and make us miserable. Are there skills to help us master and control our unwanted emotions?

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Resilience

“The human capacity to face, overcome, and even be strengthened by experiences of adversity” (Grothberg, 1997). What is Resilience, and how does one become more resilient towards adversity?

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Splitting

Splitting includes all or nothing thinking. Splitting makes it hard for people with BPD to accept that everyone is imperfect and can make missteps. By becoming familiar with our splitting tendencies, we can then move towards walking the middle path and thinking and living dialectically.

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Mariah Saldana
Walking the Middle Path: a Parent's Role

Parenting teens can be hard. Where’s the manual? At St. Louis DBT, we aim to help parents and teens more effectively navigate this challenging period in adolescent development, to foster wise decision making by both parents and teens and to learn to seek the middle path.

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Mariah Saldana
Fact or Fiction? Checking the Facts

Stopping to check the facts in the heat of the moment takes intentional and practiced effort. Facts are observed through the five senses, verifiable through other means or statements of feelings, needs or wants. Many statements we believe to be facts aren't necessarily facts. The challenge arises when we over-interpret or misinterpret the fact with a negative bias. How do we overcome this challenge?

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Mariah Saldana
Mental Hurdles: Cognitive Distortions

Are cognitive distortions creating hurdles in your life? Cognitive Distortions are ways of thinking we may become caught in. The process of identifying and changing patterns of faulty thinking is called cognitive restructuring, a key component of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) builds on CBT and uses cognitive restructuring to help clients reduce their suffering and create a life worth living.

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Those Pesky “...ing "Words"

Venting comes on a continuum from a thoughtful airing of thoughts and emotions with a trusted confidante to a self-vindicating verbal barrage on the unwitting listener. Did you know that Venting is a skill? Frequently venting frustration or anger is a form of practice—the more you do it the more skilled you become at it.

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Mariah Saldana
Challenging your Curiosity using MBCT

Negative thought patterns are a residual symptom of depression. People have anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 thoughts a day. That’s not to say it is easy to change your negative thoughts of “what if?” and “why?”

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Tolerating Overwhelming Emotions

Sometimes emotions are overwhelming because the circumstances, mood or relationship issue is so powerful.  When a loved one dies, your client feels overwhelming grief.  In time, the grief diminishes.  Other times, the intensity of the emotion is greater than the trigger warrants (e.g., a child spills a glass of milk and mom goes into a rage). Most of the time, our client’s emotions are complex.  Story-telling, over-interpretation and ruminative thoughts trigger an overwhelming emotional response (and vice versa).  

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