Hey all,
If you’re receiving this, at some point you expressed interest in receiving my work & life updates. At long last, here’s to incrementally decreasing my dependence on Twitter!
Anyway: my longform essay on DBT and treating emotional wellbeing as a matter of skill is up at The Drift as a preview of their summer issue! Here’s the link.
The piece deals with the wild history of behavior therapy and its ideological implications. DBT basically puts clients through a maze of carrots and sticks to try to help them both change themselves and accept themselves at the same time; it’s a form of therapy that really centers building “skills”—it deploys a long list of cute mnemonic acronyms to help you handle your feelings more deftly.
No doubt DBT has helped a ton of people a lot—it can be a really powerful tool for treating suicidal behavior and I actually have pretty deep respect for the sophistication of its design. This is not a takedown! At the same time, DBT works perhaps partly because it mirrors some pretty warped, capitalistic beliefs about emotion and selfhood that have gotten into the groundwater of culture.
I’m using DBT here as a way to get at a deeper question about why skill is such a seductive way to think about mental health—it makes us feel like we’re in control, like with some elbow grease and merit our inner lives will bend themselves back into shape.
As a person who excessively fetishizes rigorous research, I went full deep-sea-diver mode: I talked to former clients, DBT clinicians and non-DBT clinicians on background; I made myself complete the entirety of a DBT skills workbook (painful, but not entirely unhelpful?).
Anyway, it made me think really hard about the contradictory narratives we have about mental health—as I put it in the piece, “DBT and its critics represent opposite sides within an often contradictory mainstream mental wellness culture ensnared in yet another dialectic — one that holds that you are defined by your trauma, yet accountable for your woes.” (I am kinda proud of this sentence tbh, but you probably have read the piece to really get it.)
As ever it takes a veritable brain trust to produce an essay like this, both editors and friends. To single out three of you, without long chats with Natasha Lasky, Michael Stablein, Jr., and Dana Glaser, this piece would have been way worse.
yours,
Lily