Client Resources

Here are suggestions and links to resources you might find helpful, and which I regularly refer to in therapy:

This part of my site acts as a living document and therefore errors will happen! Please feel free to let me know if there are dead/incorrect links, typos, etc, and I will update it.

Learning DBT skills

DBT Skills Training: Handouts and Worksheets- #1 book I'd recommend getting. There are open PDFs of this online (just Google it!) though I recommend getting a hard copy so you can fill it out yourself
- Note: Please make sure you get the skills book, not the training manual, which is geared toward clinicians (you can get that too, if you like, but it's supplemental/far beyond what most clients want)
The Skillful Podcast- solid podcast covering DBT skills application, great for those who prefer to consume information in this format
DBT Skills List- a useful reference, and worth having easily accessible or saved to your phone photos or notes. Google "DBT Skills List printable" for a variety of additional options

Desert Island skills

If I had to pick the 10 skills I reference the most, they would be:

1. Mindfulness: basic definition and principles (HOW and WHAT skills)
2. Mindfulness of current thoughts and emotions (building meta-awareness of self)
3. Radical acceptance (including dialectics)- beware of common radical acceptance mistakes:
  1. - Radical acceptance does not mean you have to approve or be ok with facts about reality- just that you need to fully acknowledge those facts for what they are
    - You do not have to radically accept something that isn't a fact or a reasonable limitation on the future
    - Having radically accepted something does not mean you feel "at peace" with it (not at all!)
4. TIP - for crisis, panic, and high distress
5. 54321 - for grounding, mindfulness, dissociation, and/or crisis
6. PLEASE - to decrease vulnerability to emotion mind
7. Identifying and labelling emotions - I highly recommend posting an emotion wheel on your bathroom mirror or somewhere easily accessible!
8. Check the facts and cognitive distortions (overlapping skills from DBT and CBT, respectively)
9. Opposite action - beware common pitfalls and misinterpretations of this skill-
  1. - Opposite action isn't for making yourself do things you don't want to do. Instead, the goal of opposite action is to change your current emotional experience
    - For opposite action to work, we need to do it all the way. No half-assing it!
10. Balancing interpersonal priorities (here is the full interpersonal effectiveness module)

A few words of caution:

1. There's no replacement for learning the skills in their entirety, then picking and choosing what elements work best for you
2. There's a reason therapies like DBT have a full complement of skills and don't reduce it down to a top 10- this will almost definitely not be sufficient to make change in your life. Instead, consider this a "taster" or a place to start from
3. Self-teaching skills is typically not sufficient to get the outcomes people are looking for, particularly without consistent feedback from a therapist. Applying skills in real life leads to confusion for even the savviest, smartest people!

All this said, I'm a pragmatist- I get that not everyone is able or willing to dedicate the time to learning all of the skills

Disordered Eating and Body Image

Health at Every Size (HAES)
- Additional HAES-aligned resources
- HAES information for kids (5-12th grade) via National Geographic
Debunking fatphobia and bogus science:
- BMI (Body Mass Index) - why it sucks and isn't an accurate measure of a person's health
  - From FiveThirtyEight
  - From the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
  - From the CDC (targeted at practitioners, but useful for all)
- The health consequences of weight/size discrimination- I highly recommend this article for an in-depth summary of major fatphobia issues in medicine, via the University of Illinois - Chicago School of Public Health
How to find providers who don't suck at talking about size, shape, and the realities of living in a human body:
- Rule-out and rule-in providers by looking for important keywords in their bios and descriptions (e.g. rule-in HAES, all foods fit, body neutrality; rule-out weight loss, dieting, broad recommendations for restriction or exclusion of foods)
Managing weight and size conversations at the doctor's office
Book recommendations:
- Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
- The Body is Not An Apology by Sonia Renee Taylor

Under construction/coming soon

Resources for the following:

Polyamory
Kink
LGBTQIA+
Parenting teens
Adulting, everyday tasks, and executive function