17 Dec 2025 · 5 min
Brian Johnson breaks down Marsha Linehan's four DBT skills: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. Linehan's core idea balances radical acceptance with change. She said: "If you want to get out of hell, you have to get through the fire to the other side."
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic one. In the last several plus ones, we've been spending time with Marsha Linehan and learning more about her breakthrough work with Dialectical Behavior Training, as you may recall, but I'll deliberately repeat for the spaced repetition. Learning 101 win. We defined a hallmark of DBT as the dynamic balance between acceptance of oneself and one's situation in life on the one hand, and embracing change toward a better life on the other. I encouraged you to consider one thing you could accept in your current reality and one thing you could change to create a better future reality. You do that quick thought exercise. Now we're going to continue our exploration of how to apply DBT to our lives today. Let's get straight to work. Marsha tells us, and I quote, DBT skills fall into four categories, each of which is designed to solve a different set of problems. The first two offer the path to acceptance of reality as it is, while the last two, taken together, are the change skills that help clients embrace the changes they need to make in their lives. One, mindfulness skills, which help reduce pain and increase happiness. Number two, distress tolerance skills, which teach you how to tolerate crisis situations so that you can effectively find a solution to whatever's causing the stress. Number three, emotion regulation skills, which, as the name implies, teach you how to control your emotions so that you don't react to what's happening around you without reflection and don't say things or do things that make the situation worse. And number four, Interpersonal effectiveness skills, which help you to be effective in relationships with others, relationships with people close to you, and with people you interact with day to day at work, for instance. End quote. I repeat, DBT skills fall into those four categories. Mindfulness, Distrust tolerance, Emotional regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness. As we briefly discussed, Marsha reminds me quite a bit of my Yoda Phil Stotts. They have a lot in common. They both revolutionize their respective fields, and both of their philosophies are super practical. What Phil calls tools, Marsha calls skills. Check out our notes on Phil's lessons from Living the Tools and Coming Alive. And of course, if you haven't seen the Netflix documentary on him called Stutz, check it out. We've got all that linked in the plus one. And as we discussed, another thing they both have in common is a love for radical acceptance. But the thing they are really aligned on is the fact that the process of building a life worth living won't be easy. In Lessons from Living, check out those notes Phil says we need to embrace the three inevitables of life. What are they? Pain, uncertainty, and hard, constant work. As you know, if you've been following along for a while, I had fun adapting that into these plus ones. Linked in this one I love pu p u H u and I love puke P u c w Both of them are linked. Check them out. Now Marcia discusses this in the context of what she calls distress chann tolerance. She says, quote, the goal of DBT is to help people find the path to getting out of hell. I know it works because I've seen it happen for clients countless times. More important, that's what research studies, mine and other people's, demonstrates. But it is not an easy journey going on that path. This is what I tell my clients. If you want to get out of hell, you have to get through the fire to the other side. It's like you're in a house and it's on fire. There are flames all around, especially at the front of the house, surrounding the door. That is the only way out. Your impulse is to retreat into the house, try to find someplace safe, but of course you will just die there. You've got to find the courage to go through the flames at the front of the house, the flames around the door. Then you can get to the other side. You have to go through your anger, open up to your therapist, keep going through the pain. It isn't overnight that you are going to feel better, but you will. End quote. And that's today's plus one. You want to get through the fire of the current challenges you're facing. Well, have this in mind. If you want to get out of hell, you have to get through the fire to the other side. Let's do that today.
