May is BPD Awareness Month - Blog by Karyn Hall

May 31 – Protecting Joyful Experiences
Creating pleasurable experiences is part of regulating your emotions. It's a DBT skill that can be overlooked. Being mindful of opportunities for joy is part of feeling joy. You may be passing up times that could add joy and meaning to your life. These experiences...

May 30 – Balancing Priorities and Demands
Finding balance between priorities (what's important to you) and demands (what's important to others) is a skill addressed in DBT. Do you have too many priorities or not enough? Too many demands or not enough? There may be many reasons for being too busy. Maybe you...

May 29 – Building Mastery
In DBT, “Build Mastery” means to do things that are a bit difficult in order to build your sense of competence and achievement. When you were younger, you had a natural sense of mastery. You pushed to learn to walk, talk, run, and do things older children could do....

May 28 – Recognizing Emotion Mind
Part of becoming mindful is the ability to know when you are in emotion mind, reasonable mind and wise mind. Emotion mind is particularly difficult. When you're in emotion mind, it's easy to snap at others, "I am not upset," or "I am not wound up or over-reacting."...

May 27 – Stop Judging Yourself
Good morning! I woke up with lots of energy today, so I decided to make bagels. Right now, they are cooling, so I'll let you know later how they turned out. You may remember that I’m working on learning to cook, so this is another step. It's all part of trying to live...

May 26 – Mindfulness How Skill: Nonjudgmentally
One of the main ways that we increase our suffering and create stress is through judging. Our brains tend to naturally judge, judge, judge. You know, "She's a witch," "He's an idiot," "This job is ridiculous," and "This place is horrible." Think of the emotions those...