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Leaning into the pain

Posted by llurpsienoodle on July 19, 2008, at 8:39:42

This has been a very powerful thing for me to meditate on when I am in distress. I never made it through Pema Chödron's book in it's entirety "When things fall apart", but it makes sense. Only by truly living with our pain, and experiencing it can we learn from it. I believe that pain is a cry for attention. When we give it the attention it deserves, it stops yelling at us.

Maybe this is what therapy is all about.

I think Marsha Linehan might not have incorporated this useful aspect of mindfullness into her "cognitive behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder". This disorder is characterized by intense levels of chronic distress and instability in relationship to oneself and others.

She advocates things such as self-soothing and distraction as mechanisms to dealing with distress. No doubt this is useful in dealing with emergencies, but Linehan argues that it should be practiced proactively, during minor episodes as well.

I appreciate the notion of incorporating mindfulness into DBT, I'm just not sure how useful it is when one constantly flinches and reacts to pain by shirking it and burying it in layers of distraction and self-soothing. Isn't knowing ourselves the big goal here?

On the other hand, I guess that it's important to react to immediate crises as they unfold, in order to save the client's life.

I guess I'm just talking out of my limited understanding of dharma and DBT.


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poster:llurpsienoodle thread:840728
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