Be in the Moment: How to Use Radical Acceptance and DBT "What/How" Skills to Sink Deeper into Hypnotic Trance

There are many skills in Marsha M. Linehan's DBT* Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets that are My "favorites", but one skill in particular is drawing My mind today. *Dialectic Behavior Therapy, a modality of therapy based on behavioral changes and holding two realities at once.

The day after I first learned about Radical Acceptance, I happened to be traveling to another state to spend some time with family. I was in an excited rush, and unfortunately, I hit traffic before I got out of the neighborhood.

By the time I reached the highway merge, I was tense.

As I was driving towards the exit/entry point for the freeway, someone slipped into the lane ahead of Me without warning, and without a signal.

My instinct was to react to the jump in my chest, the adrenaline rush of almost having hit their car.

But then.

Then I took a moment.

In that split second when I could have felt angry or bad about having been cut off, somehow, My mind jumped to remembering the skill I had learned about the night before.

I didn't remember the whole skill, and I didn't hold Myself to trying to remember the whole skill.

In fact, as it was the first time I was getting an in-real-life test of My skills and actually remembered to reference My skills toolbox at all, I didn't judge myself in the moment.

So immediately, in that moment, I acknowledged the "win" of just having noticed that My emotional state was affected.

As that split second stretched out longer, I took stock of what had happened.

Just the facts.

I acknowledged to Myself...

I acknowledged that I didn't know the other driver's motivation.

I didn't know their situation.

I didn't know if they were cutting in before Me on purpose because they were careless and ignorant of safety.

I didn't know if they had an emergency to get to and were simply oblivious to the traffic around them.

I didn't know anything about them.

All I knew was that they cut Me off.

And I knew that I could take that fact for what it was, something I couldn't change, something that wasn't going to change no matter what I felt...

And I knew that I could breathe through it.

I could accept it.

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That moment was a turning point for Me, for My growth as a person and My eventual understanding of The Universe.

In the almost-decade since that almost-accident, I've had hundreds if not thousands of opportunities to try and observe things nonjudgmentally.

In her handbook, Marsha M. Linehan describes two pivotal skill sets that are integral to any moment of mindfulness, and thus at the root of all moments of radical acceptance: 1- The What Skills (what to do that makes up the entire skill)

2- The How Skills (how to do the things that makes it into a valuable and helpful tool)

So... 1-WHAT is mindfulness?

Well, mindfulness is a moment that is created by interweaving three skills:

A- Observe

B- Describe

C- Participate

When a moment happens, when ANY moment happens...

When a car almost hits yours, but also when you're sitting down and reading an esoteric and psychologically-sound blog.

When any moment happens, you can do three things:

You can A- Observe.

You can observe the space around you, take in the facts, see - for example - a car weaving into your lane, or the color of the text on your screen. This step is an interesting one, because it asks you to stop the internal monologue of description.

The observe skill asks you to just see the thing. Just experience it. See the color, hear the vocal tone of the person... But don't assume anything about it. Just observe. Just experience.

Be in the moment with the occurrence.

Then, once your body is okay with having just observed what happened, you can B- DESCRIBE.

You can describe the experience to yourself, expressing - again - just the facts.

"The car moved quickly, and that jump started my adrenaline."

Describe to yourself what happened/is happening.

"I am sitting in a chair in my bedroom, reading a blog with a blue font color." (The How skills are very important at this point, because they are meant to run concurrently or intersect with the What skills.

If you're confused at this point, I'd suggest sticking through just a bit longer as I finish describing skill C-Participate and read through the How skills before rereading for clarity.)

With skill C- Participate, both of those two earlier skills, Observe and Describe, become the moment you participate in.

When I was learning about these skills at first, I was confused.

Because how is one supposed to participate in the moment if they're so busy trying to observe and describe?

Well, there's the rub, to use a phrase.

Your participation in the moment is the observation and description.

When I was in that moment after nearly being hit on the freeway, you might think I was less involved in the moment because I was thinking about describing the occurrence... But in a surprising and strange way, the description of the thing with that "detached" calm... That grounded Me even deeper in the moment of experience.

The moment of feeling it. Of observing it, of thinking the thing with a crystal clear awareness of why I was thinking the thing.

That is participation.

Participation is the reading and experiencing the soothing element of the color and font.

Acknowledging it to yourself, and also experiencing it.

Being in the moment.

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As for the How skills?

There are three parts to the How skills, and the first one is arguably the most important one for this example

A- Nonjudgmentally

B- One-Mindfully

C- Effectively

Each of the three are important, but I think that everything hinges on A- Nonjudgement

Nonjudgement is one of those things that can't be taught, it has to be found within yourself.

When you're learning how to drive, your instructor can lean over and guide your hand to the turn signal.

When you're learning DBT, no instructor can reach inside of your mind and help you find the space inside of you that can hold things without assigning "good" or "bad".

It's something that you have to come to on your own.

That your psyche needs to discover is possible.

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We don't realize it naturally, but we assign value to everything, even if just in language. "The weather yesterday was good." "The milk went bad."

"Good", "bad", "good", "bad"...

These words are so overused, colloquially,

We boil down all of our experiences into two categories, and it steals all of our expressive ability.

We have so many words to choose from, and because we assign judgement to - for example - a sunny day or a sour-tasting cup of milk, we lose all of that inherent beauty in just describing the thing.

When you take the moment to be nonjudgemental, to take away that "good" and "bad", "wrong" and "right", all of a sudden it's like a huge thesaurus is opened for you.

Try it when you can.

Take a drink of ice water and try and express what it was like.

Was it a "good cup of ice water"?

Or were you able to dive into the experience of the cold, crisp, sharp feeling of icy water hitting your tongue?

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The second part of the How skills of mindfulness is B- One-Mindfully.

What one-mindful means is basically... It's the idea of guiding your mind to be focused on just one thing.

Like I said earlier - the three What skills are woven together into one thing... Because you're not just observing, you're not just describing, you're being mindful and participating with observation and description...

And how? You're doing it with no judgment and with all of your focus.

Your entire mind is doing the one thing, participating in the moment with a stance that attempts to bypass the internalized habit of chunking things into two opposing groups.

And as for the third How of mindfulness: C- Effectively.

I know that it's marked as a "How" skill by Marsha Linehan, but I argue that it can also be a WHY.

Why do we practice observing and describing without judgment?

Well, we do it to be effective.

We do it to get to what works. We do it to get to a point where our needs - and wants - can be met by others and even by ourselves.

Because yes, most of the time, the biggest enemy to mindfulness and radical acceptance that we encounter can be ourselves.

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Before we go further and dive into the hypnotic elements one can extract from these DBT concepts, I want to take a bit of a detour.

When, in the developing infant-toddler consciousness, do you think they first learned "I need to fit a certain expectation to get my needs met"?

Obviously, I am not speaking about the conscious development of a psyche, that level of self-awareness can come years, decades, and for some it may even take scores to achieve that point.

But at some point, the deep-down unconscious drives of survival learned that if the infant does x, they get y.

Is it when they throw their first "conscious" tantrum?

Or is it the first time their caregiver shushes and bounces them when they enter the delivery room?

When was it in the survival reflexes of your body and psyche that you learned that you could change the outcome of something by enacting a behavior of your own?

When did you first learn that you could do something that could change what happens?

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The thing about childhood psychological development is that... well... the earlier you learn something, the more it is reinforced each time it is brought up.

In terms of neuroplasticity, the current understanding of how the human brain works and develops, the brain reinforces old pathways each time it repeats the pattern.

This is why it's more difficult to break an older habit, and why creating a new habit becomes easier over time and practice. (Unfortunately, this process is somewhat hindered in people with dopamine-response inhibition - ie ADHD - but it still happens and is still true. Habits can be formed, but it takes longer and more intense practice.)

And the fact of the matter is... judging a moment is a very old habit.

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Judging a moment is a habit that we all picked up at a point where we were confronted by so many overwhelming feelings.

When we were small and needed protection, the bigger the reaction we gave, the better the outcome was.

The more we gave a reflexive jump assumption of "Bad!!! must cry!" or "Good want!!!! smile now! Cry if not get!", the more we slipped into a total polar opposite understanding of things, the easier it was to get our needs met and keep ourselves safe.

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So, in evolutionary terms...

It just makes sense that we're so deeply wired to apply simple judgmental terms to things.

It is completely understandable that our minds make snap judgements, whether it's a complex judgement of a person's choice of clothes or a judgement of "Outside cold, that's bad."

The challenge, as a person who wants to grow and experience the best and most effective life they can, is to remember: You can change your habits.

Even the habits that you learned at three or four months old.

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So...

You may be asking... why did She take this detour?

Why did She talk about early childhood development like it had anything to do with hypnotic trance?

The answer is simple: Because to Me, the two are inexorably entwined.

Or - well - they're more like a hop away from each other, since it's more like A --> B --> C

A - Judgement is an early-development habit that brings a lack of presence in the moment

B- If one can, on a meta-level, process their self-judgement about having judgments, it becomes easier to step away from that judgment. Early childhood habits are difficult to break.

C- Without having judgements about your experiences within trance, without having that veil of "I'm listening well." or "I moved, that's bad"... All of a sudden, your trances can go so much deeper.

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There's a line I sometimes repeat in My trances...

"There's no right way to do this, and there's no wrong way to do this." It's true.

"Right", "wrong"... These are such basic judgments that we claim when we were young and needing to know how to behave for the adults to take care of us.

We assign these judgments so immediately that we don't even realize we do it at first.

"The milk is bad." "I coughed, and that made my trance 'wrong'." There is no "supposed to" in trance.

There is no one way to experience the moment. To experience the now.

To participate, one-mindfully, in trance.

So... if you could take a step back next time you're listening to an induction...

If you could remove the judgement from how you're "supposed" to listen, and just listen and experience it...

Do you think it'll feel like you're sinking deeper?