What are dialectics and why is my therapist talking about it?

True story, in 2014 I decided to return to therapy for help in managing my work life balance. As therapists, we're often encouraged to seek out therapy as a source of self-care. I had heard the term DBT being tossed around a lot, but didn't really understand what the big hoopla was all about. At the time I had identified my therapy style largely focused on relational therapy, which focuses on the role relationships play in shaping our daily life experiences. The therapist and the person in therapy work together to forge a strong, collaborative, and secure relationship that can serve as a model for future relationships the person wishes to develop. In addition I also used cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT),

which helps individuals look at unhelpful thinking and behavioral patterns. In therapy the focus becomes supporting the individual to reframe negative beliefs, resulting in the ability to take a more objective and realistic look at the thoughts that contribute to their feelings of anxiety and depression.

In cultivating my therapy practice in addition to attending seminars, reading books, being trained in various therapy modalities, and reading psychology research journals, I had found putting myself in the shoes of the client helped me understand the use and application of therapy approaches best. I had been to therapists who practiced psychodynamic, CBT, family systems, object relations, and mindfulness therapies. I decided if I wanted to truly understand DBT, whether it would be helpful for me and my clients, I would have to try it out.

Here's what I found out:

DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) is a type of CBT which follows the same principle of identifying a persons feelings, thoughts, and behaviors; what makes it unique is its emphasis of mindfulness and dialectics. What struck me as most beneficial from all the therapies I have encountered was the component of validation in dialectical thinking. Now before I continue, there's a lot more to DBT than I'm going to get into today. If you're interested in learning more I'd recommended checking out:

www.dbtselfhelp.com

Back to validation...for many of us, we can get trapped into thinking in black and white and absolutes. We may get messages from our friends, family, significant others, ourselves, and maybe even therapists that we're "wrong, silly to think like that, being too negative, or receive advice on what the right choice is, etc." The D in DBT stands for dialectics, which allows a person to be able to make space to hold two opposite truths. Here are some common examples of dialectical thinking I have seen in my work over the years from my clients and my observations as a therapist:

"When I fight with my partner I want to break up with him but I love him and don't want to be alone."

"I want to watch my weight and keep up with this diet but that chocolate cake looks so yummy, I want to eat half of it!"

"I need to impress my bosses at work but I'm so irritated at staying late at work, I feel like I never see my friends."

Therapist observations in sessions:

"You feel anxious. On the one hand you want safety and on the other, you want to feel freedom. An example is if you have anxiety about going to a party. One part of you wants to protect yourself by staying at home so you don't have to worry about what to say in social groups and you can feel safe and comfortable in familiar surroundings, and the other part of you feels lonely staying at home and wants desperately to meet new people and feels connected with others."

"What if one part of you felt like you needed to keep your house perfectly clean all of the time, but another part of you felt that you were a total slob and didn't feel like doing ANY housework?"

I have personally found dialectics to be an internal compass because it allows you to tell yourself "hey this makes sense!" Feeling conflict within yourself and feeling complicated about situations is normalized when you escape from the box we put ourselves in. It was my experience that the more I validated and normalized the existence of having two opposing thoughts less stuck and trapped I felt.

I also realized, where the problem lies is we think in extremes. In the example above, a person is concerned about dieting and weight and is tempted to have the chocolate cake, often we hear internal voices in our mind that typically sounds like: "don't be stupid and eat the cake, you'll fail at this diet!" or "come on eat the freaking cake, this diet sucks!"

Dialectics helps create a middle path by letting you look at the bigger picture and creating more than two options of "winning" or "failing."

Couldn't it be possible to watch your weight, be compassionate towards yourself, and at times indulge in eating a chocolate cake? Eating the cake does not mean the hard work and time focused on health is erased and thrown out the window. When we're able to expand our black and white thinking by creating more options (also known as seeing the grey) we decrease negative self-talk and are less likely to chastise ourselves about making "the right or wrong decision".