Change is a certainty in life, even if it’s uncomfortable
Life is full of changes. Many are positive! New beginnings, next steps, promotions, and new family members are all good things we hope for. There are also tough life changes, including job loss, illness, death, divorce, and more. We learn from our families, teachers, friends, and society about coping with life changes and transitions.
That said, in our early years, we don’t always get the most positive messages and learn the healthiest emotional regulation skills, and so we don’t always grow up knowing how to cope with the strong emotions that can come with the changes life throws your way.
Major life changes can be tough, especially for the emotionally sensitive
It’s common to have unexpected and strong responses to major life changes, even the positive ones. You may find yourself feeling totally numb when experiencing a shocking loss, or surprisingly sad when you’re reaching a life milestone you’ve hoped and dreamed of, like marriage or leaving home for college. You might even find yourself trying to avoid dealing with the change, hoping it’ll just go away. If you aren’t equipped with effective, supportive skills for coping with change, you can fall into depression or end up with anxiety symptoms, making change all the harder to experience and deal with.
These strong responses can be especially common for sensitive people; those who feel emotions deeply and whose emotions stick around longer can find coping with change to be a challenge.
It’s important to know that whatever your emotional response is to a major life change, it’s normal! You aren’t a problem for having strong feelings; it would be strange if you didn’t. But we do understand that the distress that often comes with change is difficult. Thankfully, there are skills that you can develop to help with coping with life changes and transitions that make the experience of weathering life’s changes easier for you.
DBT can help people handle big feelings that come with life changes
Dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, was designed to support emotionally sensitive people (although it works very well for all people struggling with change), helping them cope with life by offering a huge assortment of life skills that fall into four main categories: mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. When you think about the challenges that come with change, like distraction from the present moment, feeling out of control, tough emotions, experiences you neither enjoy nor want, an inability to ask for what you need, and relationship struggles, it becomes clear that DBT skills can be a huge help when life does what life is going to do and brings change into your life.
Major life changes include:
- Grief, loss, and health changes
- Job loss, a promotion, changing careers, returning to the workforce, or retiring
- Marriage, divorce, blending families, non-paternity events, or having a child
- Going to school, graduating
- Moving house, moving out of the family home, and financial changes
- Changes in the life of your loved ones
- Starting therapy
DBT skills for coping with life changes and transitions
We’ve gathered a few DBT skills here that we think will help you cope with change, especially when incorporated into a comprehensive DBT program.
Mindfulness helps overcome worry when life feels out of control
In DBT, mindfulness can help you better understand yourself, especially when you’re reacting to intense emotions. By stopping for a moment, stepping back from the push and pull of worries and fears about the past and future, and observing yourself in the moment, you can see what you’re feeling and how it’s impacting you.
Mindfulness in DBT also encourages you to not ask “why can’t I just respond the way I’m supposed to?”, which is a common self-judgment when we are struggling with change. When you practice non-judgment of the thoughts you observe, you can more easily let feelings pass you by. “Why am I sad? I should be happy.” can become “I am noticing I’m sad. I’m surprised I feel this way, but there’s no right or wrong way to feel here.”
This detachment from demanding you fit a script can have the surprising result of allowing your strong feelings to pass faster. Add to that the self-awareness that comes with mindfulness, and you can better attune to yourself, helping you choose how to cope because you better understand what you need in the moment.
Interpersonal effectiveness helps you maintain balance during job changes.
When it comes to job loss, changing careers, re-entering the workforce, promotions, and retirement, you’re facing a landscape of different social interactions than you’ve had in a while. You’re also probably going to be dealing with some heavy feelings, so preparing for these interpersonal changes through DBT skills can help you thrive even when the change you’re facing isn’t one you’d choose.
DBT interpersonal effectiveness skills help you better understand how your interactions impact you and others. They fall into one of three categories, all of which combine to create effective interpersonal interaction:
- Objective effectiveness: Help you get what you want out of the interaction.
- Relationship effectiveness: Helps maintain or improve the relationship you have with someone.
- Self-respect effectiveness: Helps you maintain self-respect while relating to others.
By breaking down how you want to show up in your interactions with others, job changes can become easier to tolerate, and can even be a chance to build relationships that can support your future career choices, even if the change you’re facing isn’t one you want to be dealing with.
Distress tolerance can help you make it through grief and loss
Grief is a heavy experience with a lot of emotions connected to it. It can be a long process, and it isn’t linear; sometimes it can lift for a while, and then the same sadness or anger can crash down again. Grief is inherently distressing, and it comes from the life change of loss.
Distress tolerance skills from DBT can help with the harsh negative emotions that can come with change, particularly when it comes to loss in your life. Two particularly helpful DBT skills for distress tolerance include ACCEPTS and TIPP.
ACCEPTS encourages you to use your senses and participate in life while you’re still in distress, to help you stay constructive and involved while your distress works itself out:
- Activities to keep you busy
- Contributing to give you purpose
- Comparisons to offer perspective
- Emotions to broaden how you’re feeling
- Pushing away to give yourself a break
- Thoughts to encourage you to focus
- Sensations to ground you in your body
TIPP encourages you to use your body chemistry to reduce your distress, helping you quickly make changes that make distress easier to tolerate in the moment:
- Temperature: cold to activate your vagus nerve
- Intense exercise to move your emotions along
- Paced breathing to help you feel safe
- Paired muscle relaxation to support calm
Emotional regulation skills offer steadiness when nothing feels certain
Emotional regulation skills pull together all your other DBT skills, helping you experience and work through your emotions without allowing them to dictate your responses.
What shows you what to do when you’re stuck in a strong emotion:
- Observe: Notice what’s happening within you and around you
- Describe: What’s happening in the situation? Stick to the facts.
- Participate: Focus on what you’re doing right now, and put all your effort into participating.
How encourages you to practice mindfulness when in the grip of strong feelings
- Non-judgmental: There is no “right” or “wrong” feeling, just what is
- One mindful: Focus your mind on what is right in front of you
- Effective: Choose what works, not what is “right”
How and What guide you when your emotions are strong; by choosing your actions and focusing your mind, you moderate your behavior and allow your emotions to come and go.
DBT offers structure that makes coping with life changes and transitions easier
While the skills of DBT are highly useful, the routine that a comprehensive DBT program brings into your life can offer you structure, community, and routine. The daily stability of a DBT program helps you cope with the instability that comes with change, giving you a reliable routine that offers a chance for self-regulation, on top of the support DBT skills offer.
Suffolk DBT provides support when things change in life
Suffolk DBT knows that emotionally sensitive people can self-regulate in the face of change, even when their responses to those changes are deep, strong, and difficult. Developing resilience and emotional regulation skills through a comprehensive DBT program can be a gateway to a life where change is something you can face head-on. No life is free from change, and no life is free from tough emotions, but your life can still be one worth living, especially with the support of the empathetic therapists at Suffolk DBT.