Building Resilience in the Face of Failure with DBT

Failure is a totally normal part of everyday life. It’s normal to mix things up, need extra time, make mistakes, and not know everything. So when failure is highly emotionally dysregulating, and when failure is a regular part of work, school, relationships, and life in general, what can you do to make failure easier to handle?

You can build resilience to failure using dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). DBT for emotional resilience can equip you with DBT skills to make it through the distress of failure and re-regulate yourself emotionally. It also provides you with space to practice these skills with trusted people who experience the same sensitivity you do, helping you recognize that even when you feel rejected or judged, you’re not alone, perfectionism is not the answer, and you are not your failure! You’re a whole human being, with strengths, weaknesses, and the ability to build resilience to handle all the mistakes you might make in life. 

Learn How to come back after a setback

DBT skills for emotional resilience help you handle strong emotions in the face of failure

The DBT skill of Opposite Action can help you both in the moment and long term, to manage symptoms that make failure feel emotionally overwhelming. When you feel your emotions welling up after a moment of failure, pay attention to how you want to react. Are you ready to spit out a passive-aggressive jab at your partner? Do you feel like smashing something? Do you want to start asking over and over about how your friend feels about you, to reassure yourself of your worth?

Try doing the opposite. Say something kind (or at least neutral) to your partner when you’re ready to insult them. Gently put down the thing you want to smash and hold your hands in your lap, palms up, to show a willingness to be calm in the moment. Write down positive things about yourself, instead of seeking external reassurance from friends. 

Taking the opposite action calms you down in the present moment, and it also teaches you over time that you can take a moment and choose your response. There may be times at work where it is worth asserting yourself or having hard conversations with coworkers. But if you can have those conversations from a calm place, and you use Opposite Action to develop the skill of choosing calm, you bypass BPD-based reactions and start living your professional life the way you want to. 

How DBT skills can help you find emotional regulation at work

DBT for emotional resilience can help prevent perfectionism from holding you back

An emotional reaction that doesn’t get noticed as readily as outbursts is avoidance. Whether in your personal life or at work, avoiding trying new things or putting yourself out there, and instead sticking to what feels safe and manageable, is a common response to deep fear of failure. Failure can feel like rejection or a reflection of your worth, and when that triggers emotional overwhelm, trying can feel impossible.

When you’re avoiding something in your life, like trying a new hobby, applying for a new job, or taking on a new role at work, consider the Cope Ahead DBT skill to help you emotionally prepare yourself, so you can push through avoidance when the time comes to act. Try the following steps, and see if they help you move forward in a situation where you may fail (possibly multiple times!), but where ultimately, if you keep trying, you’ll have enriched your life.

• Describe the situation in detail to yourself, including considering where you might fail.
• Decide what you want to do in the moment to cope with possible failures and the feelings that can come up during those failures. How will you move forward and adapt when failure happens?
• Visualize the situation, with yourself in it, and walk through exactly what you’ll do. During this visualization, imagine that you’re both experiencing the worst-case scenario, and that your attempts to cope are successful. 
• When you’re done visualizing, set aside some time to rest. It’s tough to envision a worst-case scenario, but it’s helpful to remember you’re resilient enough to make it through failure. 

Emotional regulation at work can help you handle intense emotions triggered by failure, criticism, and feedback

BPD and career challenges can go hand in hand, but DBT was specifically designed to address the emotional intensity of BPD, so DBT skills are a particularly helpful tool when failure feels overwhelming at work. DBT for emotional resilience allows you to manage emotions without sabotaging your career. The Check the Facts DBT skill is a great example of emotional management that fits in well with any career scenario.

Say your boss shoots you a brief email telling you to make a change in a recent project you worked on. You were proud of your work, and it was well received, so this event of receiving the email triggers emotions. Shame, fear, and anger well up, and then your emotions start to inform your thoughts and actions. You’re ready to fire off an angry email to argue about the change, just to prove a point about the quality of your work, or you want to apologize profusely, offer to take on more work to make it right, or do anything to show you’re really valuable.

 With Check the Facts, you take a look at your thoughts and examine if they’re true. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What emotion do I want to change?
2. What event prompted my emotion?
3. What are my interpretations, thoughts, and assumptions? What are some other possible interpretations?
4. Am I assuming a threat?
5. What is the catastrophe?
6. Does my emotion/its intensity fit the facts?

When you review the facts, you might see the email was brief because it was sent from your boss’s phone during a meeting. You may realize the change is a small one, and worth making to improve the project. You may realize your boss didn’t actually criticize you directly, and was just participating in the work project. You can then recognize that the thoughts of “My boss hates my work” or “I have to prove I am valuable because of this failure” aren’t based on facts. 

By checking the facts, you can build resilience to feelings of failure by giving yourself room to learn, change, and grow, helping you preserve working relationships and improve your performance while also reducing your emotional stress.