I was recently at a “hybrid” conference, for which some of us attended in person and others attended virtually. The conference organizers used an online platform for people to connect, whether they were present or joining from somewhere else. Within this platform, you have an avatar, and you can walk your avatar around virtual rooms. When you get close enough to others’ avatars, Zoom-like screens pop up, and you can chat with them. As a member of the board of the organization, it was important to be present during key opportunities to connect, such as the virtual wine and cheese and student poster events.
The thing is, I don’t normally do all that well at ambiguous cocktail parties. At conferences, if I don’t know very many people, I tend to wander around awkwardly, hyper-focused on my drink and food, hoping to see someone I know and can talk to. If that doesn’t happen, I don’t last too long! As a result, I wasn’t really looking forward to the virtual cocktail party at my recent conference. Fortunately, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. This is partly because I knew several people at the party, and also because it’s a lot less awkward wandering around as a lonely avatar than as a real person.
Reflecting on this experience reminded me of some of the supplemental skills we teach in the interpersonal effectiveness module of the DBT skills. Interpersonal effectiveness skills mostly have to do with identifying your priorities in interpersonal situations, effectively asking for what you want and need and saying no to things you don’t want to do, and finding a way to do all of this while maintaining your relationship and self-respect. A lot is packed into the interpersonal effectiveness skills, along with a bunch of what we call supplemental skills. These are skills that we don’t normally have time to teach. When we do have time to squeeze a few in, my normal approach has been to ask clients which ones they want me to cover.
The skills that my cocktail party reminded me of have to do with making friends. These are called skills for finding potential friends, and if you have the DBT Skills Training Manual (2nd Edition; Linehan, 2015), they start on P.270. We usually start by discussing why you’d want to make friends in the first place. If your friendships have been fraught with conflict, you might think you’d be better off without them. Well, despite that, in DBT, we believe friends are a critical ingredient in happiness. It’s hard to be happy if you have no close relationships. You don’t need to have a million friends; just one close connection can be enough for many of us. Indeed, some research has suggested that connection to others might be even more important for our health and longevity than quitting smoking (see some of this research here: https://instituteforsocialconnection.ca/mortality). In DBT, we have a set of skills geared toward making friends. I’ll continue in the next blog discussing some of the specifics of those skills, and how they can even help a cocktail-party-impaired person like me. ~Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.