THE LAST THREE EXERCISES

These are the last three exercises of the book. I won’t be covering them at length because I’ve got a bit weary, but I will be trying to slowly incorporate them into my life.

The exercises are –

1)   Validate in Your Day-to-Day Interactions.  I already try quite hard to do this. If  I try any harder, people will think I’ve joined a sect.

2)   Practice the GIVE Skills. This is about applying those skills of gentleness, validation, interest and ease to a possibly tricky situation. I may have tried this recently, but I wasn’t brave enough to check if my strategy worked.

3)   Putting It All Together: Incorporating the FAST Skills. This final exercise calls for all the DBT skills to be applied (possibly very slowly) to a knotty problem. I won’t be trying this yet, but I will start thinking carefully about what it involves.

 The next section contains my reflections on DBT. It’s called What Comes Next?