When emotions get very big, very fast, most people reach for one of two strategies. They try to outthink the feeling, which almost never works, or they try to outrun it, which works briefly and then makes everything worse. Neither approach is wrong. They are both reasonable attempts to manage something that genuinely feels unmanageable. But there is a third option, and it comes from a body of work called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT.
DBT was developed in the 1980s by Dr. Marsha Linehan, a psychologist who had herself survived a tremendous amount and who built this framework, in part, to give people specific, doable, in-the-moment skills for when emotions become too big to hold. I integrate DBT into my work with many clients — not as a primary modality, but as a quietly indispensable companion to the deeper trauma work we do together. The skills I am going to share with you here are not the whole of DBT. They are four of the most useful skills, offered the way a trusted friend might offer them over tea.
The first skill is called STOP. It is an acronym, and it is exactly what it sounds like. When you notice yourself in the early stages of being overwhelmed — that first hot prickle of panic or rage or grief — you Stop. You do not do anything. You Take a breath. You Observe what is actually happening in your body and in the room. And then you Proceed mindfully, which is to say, with intention rather than reaction. The whole sequence can take ten seconds. It will sometimes be the difference between sending the regretful text and not sending it. Between saying the regretful sentence and not saying it. Between the spiral and the pause.
The second skill is called Opposite Action. It comes from the observation that emotions try, by their very nature, to drive specific behavior. Sadness wants to make you withdraw. Anger wants to make you confront. Shame wants to make you hide. Fear wants to make you flee. These behaviors are sometimes appropriate to the actual situation. They are often not. Opposite Action is the practice of, when the emotion-driven behavior would not serve you, doing the opposite. If sadness wants you to stay in bed, you get out of bed and call a friend. If anger wants you to confront, you wait twenty-four hours. If fear wants you to avoid a difficult conversation, you initiate it. The point is not to dismiss the emotion. The point is to act, intentionally, against its momentum when the momentum is not in your favor.
The third skill is called Self-Soothe with the Five Senses. This is a simple, embodied way of helping your nervous system come down from a peak. You choose one of your senses — sight, sound, touch, taste, smell — and you deliberately bring something soothing into it. You light a candle whose scent you love. You wrap yourself in a blanket. You put on a piece of music that calms you. You make a cup of tea and pay full attention to its warmth in your hands. The skill sounds almost too simple to be useful. It is not. Anxiety and overwhelm live in the nervous system, not in the mind. They respond best to the language they were learned in, which is the language of the body.
The fourth skill is the most counterintuitive, and in many ways the most powerful. It is called Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance is the practice of acknowledging, fully, what is actually true in the moment — without arguing with reality. If a relationship has ended, the work is to accept that the relationship has ended. If something painful happened, the work is to accept that it happened. This is not the same as approving of it. It is not the same as being passive about changing what can be changed. It is the simple, often deeply hard practice of stopping the internal protest against reality so that you can begin to respond to what is actually here.
Most suffering, in my experience, is not caused directly by the painful thing that happened. It is caused by the fight against the painful thing having happened. The work of Radical Acceptance is the slow letting go of that fight. Not the giving up. The letting go.
These four skills — STOP, Opposite Action, Self-Soothe, and Radical Acceptance — are not the whole of healing. They are, however, the kind of practical tools that can help you stay on your own feet long enough for the deeper work to happen. I use them, alongside EMDR and Brainspotting and warm relational work, with adults all over Wisconsin and Colorado. Whether you are in Madison, Waunakee, Denver, or somewhere quieter where you have come to depend on virtual therapy in Wisconsin or online therapy in Colorado for your mental health support, these skills are with you wherever you are.
If you take only one thing from this post, take this. Emotions, even the very big ones, are weather. They are not the climate of who you are. They will pass. The skills above are not techniques to make them pass faster. They are ways to stay on your own side while they do.
If any of this resonates, I want you to know that what you are feeling makes complete sense — and that things can genuinely change. I offer virtual EMDR and trauma therapy for adults across Wisconsin and Colorado, including Madison and Waunakee. If you are ready to take the first step, I would love to connect. You can schedule a free consultation directly at https://alchemy-practice.clientsecure.me/ — no pressure, no obligation, just a quiet conversation to see if working together feels like a fit.