Making Self-Help Resources Accessible to All | Diana Partington of the Book, DBT for Life

I struggled with suicidality from the time I was about 5 until I went into DBT when I was 39. My husband left me very suddenly under very difficult circumstances, and I felt like I was not going to be able to manage my suicidality anymore. I went to a therapist and thank goodness she was like, you need dbt. And I was like, what is that? She sent me to a DBT therapist and I was like, what? I had done a lot of insight therapy across my adulthood, and I felt like I had a really good handle on how I became this way, like, how my behaviors were influenced by all that trauma. But I felt like what I was thirsty for was a toolkit. I was like, give me a box of tools so I have something I can use in this situation. In this situation, like, and suddenly, there it was.

Welcome to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. We are here to inspire creative ideas and connections for entrepreneurs and advocates working to address our mental health crisis. As you listen, I hope you will experience new ideas and motivation to innovate in your business, your community, and in your life.

welcome to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Harrison, and my guest today is Diana Partington, the author of DBT for Life. Welcome, Diana.

Thank you, Rachel. I'm really glad to be here.

I'm glad to have you. For people that don't know, actually, let's start here. How would you explain what DBT is? We use those initials in our field. Like, everybody knows, but sometimes people don't.

Yeah, absolutely. I've actually found that when I've been at conferences exhibiting about the book, we always ask, are you DBT curious? Are you DBT informed, or are you DBT ambivalent?

Oh, okay.

So what I found is a lot of therapists actually are very DBT curious, and I think that's true for a lot of the public when they start hearing about it. So dialectical behavioral therapy is a treatment that is evidence based. And a lot of what it's based on is skills, is like the teaching of this whole toolkit of incredible skills for managing overwhelming emotions, for managing interpersonal relationships, managing crisis without making it worse. And I teach a lot of those skills in the DBT for life. Skills to transform the way you live is the book because it is really about those skills that transform the way you live. So Marsha Linehan, she's the scientist, psychological researcher who had her own struggles with suicidality, and she set out to find the cure. And she went on this whole journey of, like, initially looking into using cognitive behavioral Therapy. Yeah. So trained extensively in that. And what she found is, for suicidal population, CBT can be too invalidating. So then she went the other way and started using a lot of validation strategies from psychodynamic therapies. And for a lot of her client base, that felt too much. Like, you're not giving me any way to change. Like, I know that you understand, but I need tools. So then she started developing this whole toolkit, and the whole therapy is more than the skills. Like, if you're doing. We call it fully adherent dbt, you're working with a consultation team. You're doing individual therapy in a very prescribed, specific way. And then you also have people doing group skills training. However, there's a lot of evidence that learning the skills alone is incredibly helpful for mental health. But the problem is that people tend to limit their thinking about DBT to either it's effective for suicide and. Or borderline personality disorder. I like to say it's effective for anyone who deals with overwhelming emotions. Anyone who's emotionally sensitive can benefit from learning these skills.

How did you first get interested in dbt? How did you find out about it?

I talk about this in the book. I struggled with suicidality from the time I was about 5 until I went into DBT when I was 39. My husband left me very suddenly under very difficult circumstances. And I felt like I was not gonna be able to manage my suicidality anymore, not under those circumstances. So I went to a therapist, and thank goodness, this is, like, 2006. She was like, you need DBT. And I was like, what is that? And she sent me to a DBT therapist, and I was like, what? I had done a lot of insight therapy across my adulthood, and I felt like I had a really good handle on how I became this way, like, how my behaviors were influenced by all that trauma. But I felt like what I was thirsty for was a toolkit. I was like, give me a box of tools so I have something I can use in this situation. In this situation. Like, and suddenly there it was. And so it was life transforming for me. And then also I needed a job. Stay at home, mom. And so I went to graduate school, and I ended up becoming a DBT therapist. And then I actually wrote my master's thesis on effective teaching of DBT skills for different learning styles.

Oh.

My own history. I had severe learning disabilities growing up. Like, I was held back in third grade. I was diagnosed with, like, officially diagnosed with dyslexia. And I also had serious issues with mathematics. And so I'm always very sensitive to different learning styles. So I decided to write this book because I wanted to create a book. I think this is like where the innovation comes in. Because I have such struggles with dyslexia, a lot of self help books are just literal torture for me. Like I look at that book full of like block of text and the trying to figure out like entering into that text. I read much better when there's a story, like an actual short story or liter, like literary. So I've been thinking a lot, Rachel, about what this podcast is about and what I can contribute to the conversation. I think the thing that I want to contribute to the conversation is how we're writing self help books. Ah. Because I think that the way that most self help books are presented, they're for a very specific population with very specific learning style. Categorically, there's over eight learning styles. Depends on what model you're using. But still. And what I tried to do with my book is make it approachable for all kinds of learning styles. So if you look at the book, it's full of color illustrations.

Full of it, yes. If you are watching this pod, here's a picture, for example. I noticed immediately how colorful it is.

Yeah. Because I wanted like that picture. Right. A lot of people are intrigued by that character. The way the book is laid out is. I call it choose your own adventure.

Oh, nice.

So you start out and you can decide, I'm going to skip the introduction. The introduction is sort of the history of DBT and all about what that is. And if you want to nerd out about dbt, feel free. But you can skip that drop into that book at any point. So if you like that illustration. And it's an illustration of a young Chicana woman who is in high school and she's got a tray of cupcakes.

Ladybug cupcakes, no less.

Ladybug cupcakes. And she looks very tough, like the tough cookie. And the story about her is called the cupcake committee. And so if that intrigues you, that is the introduction to the chapter about the deer skill. This is skill in dbt. It's a sort of a formula for asking for what you want and increasing the odds of getting it. So we start by describing the facts, expressing how you feel, asserting what you want, and then providing a reinforcer for the other person. I'm not going to get all into that, but it's good.

I can tell.

Yeah. If you're just like, okay, at the beginning of the chapter, it explains what the Deer is. And if you're like, I really don't care about this cupcake story, I just want to learn how to do this, then you can skip to the describe, like the description of how you do it. So what I've done is I've written short stories that actually illustrate the internal process of dealing with intense emotions from a particular problem that you're dealing with, applying skills to that problem and then having a positive outcome. That's how every one of the stories works. Because I wanted to people to be able to understand what it's like to use skills.

Yeah.

And so the stories are all composites. They're skills application to things I've read about in the news, skills application to things that have happened to me or my friends. Skills application to composites. Not a single client, but like different people. Although one of the most powerful stories in the book, there's a central character in that story. She's not the main character, but there's a central character that is a real person who gave me permission to use that story because it's a little bit of a public story actually. And then I invented a fictional character through whose eyes the story happens. And the response to that has been really positive because a lot of people I think are like me. It's easier to read a story.

Oh yeah. And I love this idea of taking all the different learning styles because I think you're so right. And actually I want to rewind you a little bit when you say that self help books are written for a certain kind of person. How would you sort of describe or define that person?

Well, I have friends who are like self help book addicts. Right. They're like, oh, have you read this one? Have you read this one?

So cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's all these great ideas in here, but I think that's for people who like really like reading text. Do you know what I mean? Their learning style is very academic.

Yeah.

This has been one of the huge problems I think with DBT is that it's so academic and it makes sense because Marsha Linehan is an academic and her writing honestly is very dry. I mean, I love her. Literally she saved my life. I've had such incredible good fortune with teaching people skills. It's been amazing and I feel like it's very unaccessible.

I was just going to say this is an accessibility piece of writing in such a way that more people can access this information and the skills.

Because I know what happens to me is like, I remember I had a therapist for A while, who was very big into bibliotherapy. Every time she would mention, you really need to read this book. And so I'd buy it and I'd open it and I would feel dread about it and I'd be like going through the sort of preamble of the introduction and then trying to figure out where's the meat in here, where's the thing that's going to actually help me. And for someone who has dyslexia, that's really difficult. But I think it's also daunting for people who are more visual learners. We have all these different ways that we like to experience learning. So I wanted to create a book where a, you could just drop in at any point and take what is helpful for you. You can also read the book cover to cover. But there's also a lot of visually compelling color graphics. I also bought all of the self help books I could find that used a lot of graphics and a lot of the graphics were kind of confusing. I was trying to strike that note of it being there's like a lot of empty space on the page so that you really can kind of enter into this little section. Do you know about Kaizen from Japanese psychology?

No, tell me.

Kaizen is sort of the psychological principle that Toyota was built on, the success of Toyota. And the idea is that you take incremental steps towards your goal. Tiny, tiny, minuscule steps. And that's what all of their employees are encouraged to do, is take these tiny little steps. Kaizen is a little faddish, I think, in some of the business community because it's so effective though what you're trying to do actually is tiptoe around your amygdala. Oh my gosh. I have to read this whole book. It's scary. It's so scary. We can't do it. We can. Danger, danger.

Right, right, right. And so the amygdala is the brain's alarm system, essentially just for that, in case our listeners are unfamiliar with the amygdala. But that's brilliant. Tiptoeing around the amygdala.

I love that your amygdala is the fight flight response. Right. And literally like that happens to me, like graduate school was torture. And so I get one of those self help books and I'm like, ah. And the advice from Kaizen is not to read the whole book, look at what's interesting to you and then just read a page of that. Don't start at the beginning, start where your interest is with that in Mind. I tried to create a book that's actually built to do that, literally. This book is about tiptoeing around your amygdala to learn skills.

Awesome.

Other influences on me were Irving Yalam's Love's Executioner. So Irving Yalam is a very famous existentialist psychologist and his book, Loves Executioner is Short Stories. It's a collection of short stories about what happens in session with him. They're really written like short stories where you are in his internal process, in the character's internal process. I learned so much about doing therapy from reading that book. I also have such good memories of reading the wizard of Oz and Little House on the Prairie as a kid where you have all those, like, yummy illustrations. My dad used to read those to me and I would be like, oh, like, I want to look at the pictures. I want to look at the pictures. And I think that adults want to look at the pictures for sure, 100%.

Sometimes we need pictures more than kids because everything is coming at us. Right. We need something that's easy and comfortable and we like it feels good.

Absolutely. Again, coming back to that, like, what's my contribution to the conversation is I feel like I think we need to be rethinking how we're writing. Self help books give them lots of points of entry. So like with my book, you can go to the table of contents and that has information. Everything is indexed. You know, if someone's been learning DBT skills or you've been reading the book and you're like, I don't remember what that's called. There's also a glossary of terms. So again, you can read through, like, what skill do I need? And then go to that chapter. Or just be like, you know what, I'm going to open the book. You know, like how some people do with the Bible, where they'll open the Bible and drop a finger.

Yeah, that's a fun way. Okay. I just opened to clarifying priorities. That seems like a good section.

Oh, yeah. So drop here and reset.

That's where I dropped it. Right. Even just those words, clarifying priorities, I can get something out of that.

Exactly. You're like, okay, how do I clarify my priorities?

Exactly? And I think the fact that you're doing this with DBT in particular, so I know that self help books are all geared towards things that help people. And that's a beautiful thing.

Absolutely.

And dbt, to me, we have this additional level that it is research based, that it is evidence based, and it's a Practice that psychotherapists use in their offices all the time. And to me, your book gives it maybe even an accessibility that is, you don't necessarily have to do this with a therapist. You could still learn these skills in this book.

Oh, absolutely. You know, cost is such a prohibitor to getting into therapy. Right. And also a lot of people who've done like I was speaking for myself, when you've done all that training to do dialectical behavioral therapy, that's a huge investment. And a lot of times DBT therapists are quite expensive. So accessing that can be difficult. One of your podcasts, the guest was saying, there is no shame in wanting to make money doing this. We want to have a nice life. Just because we're therapists doesn't mean that we have to be paupers. And that balance of the mission. So I run online DBT groups that are available to people all over the country. As long as they have a licensed clinician in their state that's their therapist, I'm just their skills trainer. And that's expensive. It's like $70 per session. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to offer webinars and the webinars are going to be much larger format. It's not as intimate, but it is kind of a skills download. And then there's the book. We're launching a podcast at the end of the month called DDT and the Dharma.

No way. Awesome.

Yeah, I'm really excited about this. So it's different format than yours because we won't be having guests. It's me talking about DBT and my friend Madeline Finn, who's a Dharma facilitator. So when Marsha Linehan created dialectical behavioral therapy, one of the things that she did, so she took cognitive behavioral therapy. And then she started taking all these ideas from Buddhist psychology. And the problem she had is because she's a scientist, how do you make concepts from a faith tradition into measurable evidence based ideas? Jon Kabat Zen, is over at Harvard doing that about pain management. So she starts borrowing ideas and stuff from John Kabat Zen. And what I felt like is she did is she kind of took these ideas and she made them very scientific and kind of took the spirituality out of them a lot. So one of the stories she tells you can find the video online. It's about how she really came to. One of our skills is called radical acceptance.

Oh, yes, that's a good one.

It's one of the most powerful skills. It's that radically accepting reality as it is even when you don't like it. And we always have that caveat is, you don't have to decide you like it. That's not what it is. You may not condone it, you may not like it, you may even hate that it's happening, but you are radically accepting that this is the new situation that you're in. And so you stop fighting reality, which reduces your misery and your suffering. So Marsha Linehan talks about she went to Shasta Abbey in California, and she was there for a month. And this is where she really deepened her understanding of radical acceptance. And she tells this cute story about how when you're working and a bell rings, you have to abandon what you're doing. If you've been sweeping a pile in the kitchen and you haven't picked it up in the dustbin and thrown it away, too bad for you. You have to walk away. Would that drive you? I would drive me crazy, yeah. And so that's adorable, but because I really am a huge Marcia fan girl, I went to Mount Shasta Abbey to do a day retreat. I asked one of the nuns, I was like, do you remember when Marsha Linehan was here? And she said, oh, yes. She really struggled while she was here. And that brought, like, kind of a pathos to that story for me, of like, oh, yeah, radical acceptance is not cute. Radical acceptance can be incredibly hard. And it also, like, being at the abbey, made me really feel how spiritual a lot of these principles are. And so what I want to do with this podcast is we're going to go through the book and take, like, a skill, and we're going to talk about the skill, but then we're also going to talk about what are the Buddhist principles that this relates to? Because another feeling of mine is that accessing Buddhist psychology can be very difficult. Those texts are so dense, and there's so many components to it. And so what we want to do with that podcast is give people a new way of accessing DBT skills. So, for instance, Maddie and I did a one of these talks already with an audience, and we were talking about mindfulness. A lot of people who are in DBT who have significant trauma, they have a really hard time meditating with their breath because they dissociate. It's a huge obstacle to, like, sort of the gym practice of mindfulness. This is not language, this anywhere in dbt. Maddie said, then you just need to pick a different anchor. And it was like the whole audience was like, oh, right. Like, oh, if your cat is the Thing that is the most calming, comforting thing to you. Patting your cat can be your anchor. And anytime your mind wanders to something else, you come back to that adorable little face. There was an exhale and an opening of people being like, oh, there's new ways for me to access mindfulness. So we're going to go through all the chapters and address, like, what are the tools from Buddhist psychology that can help you reduce your suffering that relate to this particular skill?

Oh, I like that.

And again, your format. Right. It's audio. And that's another way for people to learn and access information and especially conversational. Like this. Right. Makes it a lot easier to absorb the information.

Yeah, I think so too. I do. Another thing that I think of too, when I think of dbt, and you haven't necessarily mentioned this, but I think some of your work attest to this. I think. Yeah. When you say DBT is for anyone who experiences overwhelm, I mean, I think that's true of anyone that is human. I think that's true of all of us. And I have often thought we should probably be teaching DBT skills in high school. Like, this should just be part of life skills that people learn how to do because they're just that impactful for coping with whatever life brings, which is very unpredictable. And everyone has moments of overwhelm.

Yeah, I 100% agree with that because I do think these skills are applicable to everyone. And there's a lot of people who are actually working on these ideas of teaching DBT skills in elementary school, junior high and high school.

Great.

I would change so much. One of the stories I love to tell about this though is because it is like that you don't have to be emotionally sensitive to benefit from skills. So my focus used to be suicidal adolescents, which now I've moved into adults. I got cancer one summer and I was like, I'm working way too hard. So I stepped back from working with adolescents. But one of the fun things about working with adolescents was in classic dbt, parents come to group with the adolescent. My experience was this is a powerful, transformative experience for their relationship. But usually what happened is initially mom would come with teen group, and then one time mom couldn't come. Parents required to come. So dad comes, and then all of a sudden it's dad who's coming to group. Because men love these skills. They manualize things that are often challenging for men to understand. Not all men, obviously, but sort of, you know, the general population. And so these men were like sort of high powered CEOs that kind of stuff. And they would start incorporating DBT skills at work, their employees, how to approach them with a deer and how to validate customers. So the applications of these are just phenomenal, I think.

Is there one thing that you would like to just leave with our audience either about entrepreneurship or about dbt? What would just be your one thing to leave listeners with?

What we're trying to do is, is address the mental health crisis. Right. I guess the thing that I want to leave is we need to be thinking about how people learn, how we're presenting information. Because like that therapist that I was seeing, that was like every session she was like, bibliotherapy, here's a book that you should read. Here's a book you should read. And I would tell her, I'm not gonna read the book. And I think because probably her learning style is she learns really well from reading these books.

Yeah.

And the books she was suggesting were very dense, very academic. Marshall Linehan says that therapists tend to prescribe whatever worked for them.

So valuable.

And it's reasonable. That's why I'm like, okay, find a therapist who what works for them works for you.

Yeah.

Because we're always going to have that bias no matter how much we work against it. Especially if we're trying to reach like a broad scope spectrum of people and trying to like have a broader impact. Thinking about learning styles. Who am I reaching with this particular approach? And there's nothing wrong with writing a dense book that is going to be more approachable for certain kinds of people. And if we want to get that information into the hands of other people, trying to find other ways to communicate, that it's more inclusive. I think inclusivity is incredibly important. If you see that book, tried to make sure that I was including all kinds of people, people with handicaps, people of different genders, sexual orientation, ethnic backgrounds, that kind of thing, faith, traditions. But we also have to think about inclusivity in terms of how people learn.

I love that. Well, Diana, it has truly been a pleasure to chat with you today. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you, Rachel. I just really appreciate this opportunity and I really love what you're doing. Feeding the world with some ideas for innovation. Help us all get creative, because we all want to help people.