In my last blog, I introduced the idea of secondary targets in DBT, focusing on inhibited grieving, where you avoid or escape emotions, particularly those related to grief, loss, or sadness. Besides removing the opportunity to effectively navigate the grieving process, inhibited grieving can get in the way of therapy. If you have a good therapist, you’re lucky to have someone to help you work through grief and loss, and this work is a lot more effective if you allow yourself to experience and talk about the emotions you’re dealing with. There’s another pattern that can also make you’re life harder.
This pattern is called unrelenting crisis. The secondary targets in DBT are organized according to extremes or polarities, like good/bad, positive/negative, etc. Unrelenting crisis is the flip side of inhibited grieving. Whereas inhibited grieving involves avoiding or escaping your emotions, unrelenting crisis is like living within the chaos of your emotions, doing what your emotions are telling you to do, and ending up in difficult, overwhelming and stressful situations. Some of the clients we see seem to experience an overwhelming number of stressful events. We’ve seen people who, in one week, have had a major relapse back to alcohol or drugs, gotten evicted because of not paying rent, broken up with their partner, gotten into a car accident, gotten arrested for assault, and so on. I used to have a client who experienced an inordinate number of daily hassles, and one that drove her crazy was that her purse strap kept getting stuck in her car door, and she would fall and stain or rip her clothing, have to go home and change, end up late for work and with a reprimand, and so on. Unrelenting crisis is exactly as it sounds. You go through prolonged and repeated crises and are engulfed in intense and overwhelming emotions.
Fortunately, there are a few things you can do about this. If you have a therapist, a good first step is to get help figuring out how you end up in so many stressful and overwhelming situations. Once you figure that out, you can plan to make things go differently. For some people, crises happen because they’re really unlucky or live in an extremely stressful environment (i.e., with difficult or abusive people). There’s not much we as therapists can do about “luck,” but we can help people figure out how to navigate, cope with, change, or leave stressful environments.
Another common reason for unrelenting crisis is difficulties with judgment. We all have poor judgment from time to time. Some people, however, seem to have weaker radar for dangerous situations or people than others do. I remember a book we read to our sons when they were young, describing red flag versus green flag friends, or people who are likely to take advantage of you or touch you inappropriately versus those who are safe to hang out with. Some people don’t naturally have an internal radar for red flag versus green flag friends or partners. They just keep getting into harmful relationships. If you’re one of those people, see if you can get help from your therapist in identifying warning signs that the situations or relationships you’re getting into are likely to be unhealthy or harmful. Try to develop and fine tune your judgement and radar, and you might find that you’re more able to avoid crises.
Of course, sometimes this isn’t just a radar problem. You might have the radar but get into the situation anyway, perhaps because it’s exciting, risky, thrilling, etc. If that’s the case, and you have a DBT therapist, ask her or him about the skills of wise mind or willingness. Finally, if you find yourself in a crisis, you need to know what to do. The most important goal here is to avoid making things worse, and the DBT crisis survival strategies can help with that. I believe I’ve addressed these in a previous blog but might come back to them in the future. ~ Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.