Demystifying DBT: 4 Core Skills You Can Start Practicing Today
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) can sound clinical and overwhelming—especially if you’re already dealing with intense emotions, harmful behaviors, or mental health challenges such as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). But at its core, DBT offers concrete skills you can begin practicing right now to help you manage difficult emotions, regulate your mood, tolerate distress, and build healthier relationships. Lilac Center describes its approach as teaching mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness.
Below are four core DBT skills to try today—practical, accessible, and effective.
1. Mindfulness: Staying in the Present Moment
What this means: Mindfulness is about paying attention—on purpose, in the present moment, and without judgment. It’s foundational in DBT because you can’t regulate or change what you’re not aware of.
How to practice today:
Pause and notice what you are seeing, hearing, feeling in your body. What scents, colors, sounds are around you?
Try splashing cold water on your face when upset. It grounds you in the present and signals your body that you are alive and that emotions, however intense, are passing.
Use short “check-ins” with yourself: What am I feeling? What thoughts are running through my mind? Are they facts or interpretations? (More on checking facts in Skill #2.)
Why it helps: When you’re not fully present, difficult emotions can spiral and lead to impulsive or harmful behaviors. Mindfulness helps you observe intense emotions without being carried away by them.
2. Distress Tolerance: Getting Through Without Making Things Worse
What this means: Distress tolerance skills help you survive crises without turning to behaviors that feel good now but are harmful long term. It’s about accepting the moment (even if it’s painful), rather than fighting against reality until you break.
Ways to try it today:
Radical acceptance: Acknowledge the reality of a situation that you can’t change right now. Say to yourself, “This is what’s happening.”
Distract yourself or self-soothe using your five senses until the wave of emotion lessens.
Use “short-term comfort” strategies like warm baths, calm music, or breathing exercises to ride out intense emotions without letting them push you into harmful behaviors.
Why it helps: Distress is part of being human. These skills reduce suffering by helping you face what feels unbearable—without acting in ways you’ll regret.
3. Emotional Regulation Skills: Managing the Storm Within
Emotional regulation skills help you understand and name your emotions, reduce their intensity when needed, and change how you respond. This is essential if you find intense emotions overwhelming or unpredictable.
Some skills to start today:
Check the facts: Sometimes our emotions are fueled by interpretations, not reality. Ask: What evidence do I have that this thought is true? Is there another way to see this?
Name the emotion: Labeling what you feel—“anger,” “shame,” “sadness”—can reduce its power.
Change bodily sensations: Go for a walk, splash cold water, do grounding exercises. Movement or changes in breathing can shift emotional intensity.
Why it helps: Emotions drive much of our behavior. Learning how to regulate them means fewer emotional hijacks and fewer destructive cycles (like harming yourself, substance use, or spirals of shame). Lilac Center emphasizes emotional regulation as a core DBT component.
4. Interpersonal Effectiveness: Effective Relationships, Healthier Connections
What this means: These are the skills that help you get what you need out of your relationships while keeping them healthy. They’re especially important if you struggle with fears of abandonment, volatile relationships, or social isolation—common in BPD. Lilac Center’s programs include support for interpersonal effectiveness and family or group work.
Ways to practice today:
Be clear about your goals in a conversation. What do you want: respect, information, connection?
Use “DEAR MAN” (a DBT acronym): Describe, Express, Assert, Reinforce, stay Mindful, Appear confident, Negotiate. This framework can help communicate effectively without escalating conflict.
Practice listening fully, not just planning your response, so others feel heard—which often helps you feel heard too.
Why it helps: Relationships are a big part of mental health. Better interpersonal effectiveness means less conflict, more supportive connections, and better boundaries—which reduce overall stress and help everything else work better.
How These Skills Fit into Individual Therapy & a Bigger Picture
While practicing these four skills on your own can make a meaningful difference, DBT typically works best within a full program that includes individual therapy, skills training groups, and coaching. Lilac Center offers both adolescent and adult DBT, family support, BPD education groups, addictions, and mood disorder work.
In individual therapy, you can work with a therapist to apply these skills to your life’s most painful or recurring issues—tearing down patterns of harmful behaviors, feeling less overwhelmed by difficult emotions, and building a life worth living.
You Can Start Now
Here’s a simple plan to try:
Pick one skill from each of the four categories above.
Practice daily, even small bits—mindfulness for 5 minutes, radial acceptance when you notice resistance, checking facts when upset, speaking up once using DEAR MAN.
Reflect at the end of each day: What worked? What was hard? What could I do a little better tomorrow?
You don’t have to “master” DBT all at once; progress comes from doing—over and over. If you ever feel stuck, considering reaching out to a mental health professional or a DBT therapist (such as those at Lilac Center) who can guide you with empathy and structure.
When distress tolerance, emotional regulation, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness come together, DBT becomes not just a therapy model, but a toolkit for living—one that lets you face intense emotions without being controlled by them, reduce harmful behaviors, and build satisfying relationships.
You’re not alone. You can start taking steps today.