You Had Me at "Science"

"On bad days, it helps me

to remember that even my most overwhelming and distressing feelings are actually electricity and chemicals. That, and to breathe."

I entered a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy six month group therapy program in January 2013 after 40 years of traditional “talk therapy” and pharmaceutical treatment.  I learned within a few minutes of the first class that the word dialectal implies the concepts of “both” and “balanced.” As someone who’d lived her life in the valley of depression, tried to hike out on her own with all the success of Sisyphus, only to be buried in avalanches of panic attacks, the word “balanced” sounded pretty good to me.

However, the very next concept in the workbook evoked skepticism.  It described the heart of DBT as mastering the art of both accepting and changing thoughts, behaviors, and actions. I was okay with the “changing” part. More than 50 years earlier, I’d been traumatized repeatedly as a little girl. So as far back as I could remember, I’ve been trying to change my life. But “accept?”  

Hold on a minute, I thought. Wouldn't this DBT class be a way to make emotional distress stop once and for all? I sure as heck hoped so. I had deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses at stake here. Not to mention, a smidge of hope still voicing, “I’ll do anything to make this pain go away.”

By that point,  I’d exhausted a wide range of self-help measures, as well as “escapist” behaviors such as compulsive controlling, relentless over-achieving, suicide attempts, impulse spending, and other self-injurious behaviors.

None were effective in keeping emotional and psychological distress at bay for long. Worse, I had exhausted myself, too. I could not even continue working in a job I loved as a communications specialist anymore--even with a big stash of anti-anxiety meds in my top desk drawer.

 

However, when the DBT trainer began to explain the science behind DBT, I perked up. According to her, by consistently practicing a set of skills, DBT seemed to help people create new pathways in their brains. In other words, my thought process could create new mental connections and, essentially, abandon the old ones—even though I’m not sure they ever completely go away. That’s part of the “accepting” aspect, I guess.

However, over time, she suggested I could learn to “turn the mind” through the use of dozens of skills such as practiced relaxation, conscious breathing, and living in the present moment to tolerate whatever came my way instead of constantly struggling with it... or trying to escape it.

 

In my first blog post, I referenced Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” The poem suggests that once the traveler (in this case, substitute the word “thought”) establishes a route, continuation on that path is virtually inevitable. Frost wrote that “way leads on to way.”

Likewise, brain cells quickly find the most familiar, well-traveled paths on which to race along at lightning speed. In my case, because of repeated early childhood trauma, these pathways include pain, shame, fear, and guilt. One by one, little by little, similar experiences and similar thoughts formed a super highway of grief and fear through my mind.
 

How did it happen? Science. Not a curse upon me from the universe. Not "getting what I deserve" because I MUST be a bad person. Not a consequence of not getting things perfect. Nope. Science.

In a nutshell, it goes like this. Billions of tiny brain cells in my head are called neurons. They each have a main cell body and a set of what I refer to as “catchers” and “pitchers.” Little hair-like tentacles on each neuron, called dendrites, catch a message in the form of electricity and conduct it like a current through the cell body and out the other side to a “pitcher,” called an axon, which tosses it along to the next “dendrite” and on and on forming thoughts, actions, and responses.

There’s a tiny gap, synapse, between each brain cell that the “current” has to jump across. That’s where the brain chemicals, my psychiatrist is always working to manage, come into play. These chemicals help transport the “message.” On bad days, it helps me to remember that everything that feels so big and overwhelming  to me right now  is electricity and chemicals. Breathe.

For a clinical description of
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, visit the National Alliance of Mental Illness at  www.nami.org