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Learn how the first essential “How” skill in DBT can support teen mental health and help build emotional resilience.

Last month our Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) column discussed the three essential “What” skills for understanding DBT. The column listed a few ways to practice What Skills which are comprised of Observing, Describing and Participating. You can find it here.

The Six Core Mindfulness Skills, which are central to DBT and rooted in Marsha Linehan’s original program, include three mindfulness “How” skills. As with all mindfulness skills, the goal is to increase joy and reduce suffering.

What Are the DBT “How” Skills?

“How” skills tell you how to practice mindfulness or “how” to approach each one. Once you know how to practice, then mindfulness can be most effective. To use the “what” skills of observing, describing and participating we practice three how skills: Acting Nonjudgmentally, One-Mindfully and Effectively.
Coming from a place of acting nonjudgmentally is more complex than it sounds so today we start with it.

Acting Nonjudgmentally: Discrimination vs. Evaluation

We can delineate judgment into two types: judgments that discriminate and judgments that evaluate. It is necessary to discriminate e.g. this pool has no water in it, I will not dive in. However, it is not necessary to evaluate e.g. my school is bad, I am bad, this group sucks.

Our goal is to use judgment to discriminate but not to evaluate. Evaluating is when we have an opinion about something as if it is good or bad, valuable or not valuable. Try to remember that this evaluation is your opinion. A judgment of “bad” or “good” is not an actual quality of what you are observing. Mindfulness skills do not judge things in this way.
Acting nonjudgmentally is stating what IS and not your evaluations of it.

For example, instead of saying “My son was good today” you would say “I like the way my son treated me today.”

Can You Still Say ‘Great Job’? Reframing Positive Feedback

Can you still say great job to someone you evaluate has done a great job? Absolutely. Positive evaluations have fewer relational consequences than negative evaluations. After you have reduced your internal judgment to a level that is successful in interpersonal interactions you will be using “great job” effectively and without the judgment you once did. Because saying great job to a colleague also means “You handled that very effectively.” Saying “great job” to a teenager also means “I am proud of you.”

Letting Go of ‘Should’: A Key Step in Reducing Suffering

I want to emphasize letting go of the word ‘should.’ When you use the word ‘should’ you are defining yourself as a person who states how things should be, demanding reality to be a certain way, demanding people to be a certain way… do you see the issue? If we can let go of the world needing to be a certain way perhaps, we can work to let go of needing ourselves to be a certain way.

How to start? You can count all your judgmental thoughts. You can say in your mind ‘that was a judgmental thought.” You can observe your nonverbal judgments i.e. voice tones, facial expressions. When you feel judgmental practice a half smile, or you can practice rephrasing judgments on paper if you process well on paper. All these ideas bring your judgment into your awareness, make it more conscious rather than unconscious.

For a little more advanced work, imagine a person you are angry with and then imagine understanding that person or taking a judgmental thought or statement and replace it with a nonjudgmental thought or statement. This kind of exercise challenges you to let go of judgment.

In our next column, we will discuss the next “how” skill entitled One-Mindfully. Please continue practicing your mindfulness as it is foundational to approaching the three other domains of DBT: Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Distress Tolerance.

The above are concepts adapted from Marsha Linehan’s DBT Skills Training Manual Second Edition.

Shannon Calder, PhD, LMFT is the Clinical Program Manager for Casa Pacifica’s Camino a Casa RTC/PHP/IOP programs.

Shannon Calder, LMFT, PhD
Clinical Program Manager

Shannon Calder, Ph.D., LMFT, serves as Clinical Program Manager for Camino a Casa. An expert in mental health assessment, crisis intervention and clinical supervision, Shannon began her career in psychiatric hospitals and addiction treatment centers and joined Casa Pacifica in 2012 as a doctoral practicum student. Over the years, Shannon has held key roles at the agency including serving on the Crisis Intervention Response team and its commuity-based Wraparound program. Prior to Camino a Casa she served as Clinical Program Manager for Cliffside Malibu, overseeing the Sherman Oaks Outpatient adult program.

Shannon earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology and her MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute.