“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re yo

EPILOGUE

This is the key step. You have to believe you can change—and that you deserve better.

You do not need to wait for your mood to improve to make a behavior change. This is also why cognitive therapies alone sometimes come up short; simply thinking about problems might not help if our thinking itself is disordered.

One simple tactic that I use to cope with mounting emotional distress is inducing an abrupt sensory change—typically, by throwing ice water on my face or, if I’m really struggling, taking a cold shower or stepping into an ice bath.

As Terry Real had pointed out long ago, this anger was rooted in shame, but very often my anger would also create more shame. If I yell at my kids, for example, especially when I do it because I’m upset about something else, I feel shame.

My therapist at PCS told me to imagine instead that my best friend had performed exactly as I had done. How would I speak to him? Would I berate him the way I often berated myself? Of course not.

One obvious way this applies is in how we think about ourselves. What does our inner dialogue sound like? Is it kind and forgiving and wise, or is it harsh and judgmental, like my inner Bobby Knight?

DBT consists of four pillars joined by one overarching theme. The overarching theme is mindfulness, which gives you the ability to work through the other four: emotional regulation (getting control over our emotions), distress tolerance (our ability to handle emotional stressors), interpersonal effectiveness (how well we make our needs and feelings