Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills: Intro to Mindfulness and The 3 States of Mind | Episode 3 | Full Transcript | The Skills Podcast

This is the full transcript* from episode 3 of The Skills Podcast: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills : Intro to Mindfulness and the 3 States of Mind. Your hosts, Meredith Meyer - DBT-LBC Certified Clinician and Licensed Therapist and Faith Meyer - Executive Coach and Former CEO/COO, explore the definition of mindfulness and offer practical ways to integrate these skills into your daily living.

*Episode edited to condense length and improve readability.

Enjoy!

Intro to Mindfulness

Meredith: Welcome, welcome. In DBT skills, we have four core modules that we float through. Mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness skills. And that's a lot. And sometimes we get questions around, what skills do you start with or where do you begin?

And the answer for me has always been... we start with mindfulness. And the way I like to think about it is that:

mindfulness is really the foundation that is necessary for all the other skills to work or to come into play. 

For people already familiar with and have practices with mindfulness, that's fantastic. The skills that we have and will talk about, will just nicely apply to what you're already doing. And then for people who are brand new to this space, then hopefully the skills make this concept, become accessible. Because I feel like the word mindfulness can have lots of interpretations or lots of different meanings for people and that can be overwhelming.

So first, let’s try to define what we're talking about with mindfulness and where I like to start actually is to think about the opposite and to define and talk about what it looks like to be on Autopilot:

Acting from that space of just doing things automatically and without much intention or presence.

So, Faith, just thinking about yourself right now, when you think about being on autopilot, what comes to your mind or what do you think about?

Faith: When I'm on autopilot, it feels like my brain's offline. Like, you know how when you've done the same drive home a million times and then you walk in the door and you're like, wait a minute, don't remember how I got here. You just kind of like, you went through the motions without really being like present with it. That's what I think of being on autopilot or just like… my body's just going through the motions or something and just, yeah.

Meredith: Exactly. We can think about autopilot as something that saves us time. We don't have to really think about everything we’re doing. Every time we go to do something, we can just do it. And so auto-pilot, is not inherently wrong or bad.

I think sometimes when we talk about it, people can then start judging themselves for being on autopilot. When we start bringing awareness to it, we might think, "oh my gosh, this is happening all the time! I'm doing this wrong". And... we don't have to judge it. It's just what our minds do.

The downside of being on autopilot a lot or spending a majority of our time there is that it can lead to mistakes that we then have to spend time later fixing or cleaning up. For example, if anyone has ever sent an accidental text to maybe the wrong person or thought that they were responding to one person on the email thread, but responded to everyone. 

I share this in my skills groups, that there's usually evidence that I've been on autopilot. Like I'll find things that aren't in the right place.

Faith: So real.

Meredith: Like, when you leave your coffee cup on top of the car and drive away. Or, you pour not cream into your coffee… 

What is Mindfulness

Then when we kind of flip it and we think about, well, what's the alternative? We start to see what being mindful looks like. And the way that I'm going to be talking about mindfulness is really just this intentional presence of the current moment, or being present to the current moment. And it doesn't have to look one specific way.

So sometimes when I talk about mindfulness, I ask people, well, what comes to your mind when you think about mindfulness? People, a lot of times, will think about meditation or like a formal, seated, meditation practice, which is a form of mindfulness practice, but it's its own thing. So that's one way that it can look like. What it can also look like is just being present to this moment right now. So if you're listening and you're following along right now,

Oh, guess what? You just caught yourself being mindful. 

If you and I are just engaged in this moment, maybe there's other things going on, but we can keep our focus here. That's mindfulness. 

The quality of our attention and our awareness to the present moment is mindfulness. 

And that act of bringing yourself back to the present moment, it's like flexing that muscle. 

And I really do think that this practice of growing your familiarity with mindfulness and building the strength of leading from a mindful place is no different than building muscle strength of any other muscle in your body. You have to start somewhere and then slowly but surely over time, when you do your reps and you increase your frequency or the weight, you get stronger and stronger. So the more we practice, the more accessible it [mindfulness] becomes and from there we see our ability to stay in the present moment grow.

And so that's our intention. That's what we're gonna be practicing.

Faith: Very exciting. What I like about what you're saying right now is that to me it kind of feels like the opposite of mindfulness is like when I'm really in my head and I'm just so caught up in my thoughts that I almost feel like I'm not seeing the world for what's happening in front of me. And so I feel like flipping that is like it's even though we're calling it mindfulness, it's kind of just feels more like a state of awareness and presence.

At the same time and just to say what you were just saying in slightly different words...

The act of becoming aware and then losing your awareness and then becoming aware again and again… That's the rep that helps you build that muscle, that mindfulness muscle. 

Meredith: Yes, awesome. 

Okay... So we have, the practice of returning our attention and the practice of being in the present moment.

Where I typically tell people to start with this one, is to practice this with things that you enjoy doing. So what are the things that are fun or that excite you or that feel good in some way? And can you focus on bringing your full attention to that? 

Can you see what it's like to really bring your full attention to that? And then part of this practice is then noticing what gets in the way and what makes it difficult to stay present. 

So I think this is a really important piece to talk about. One, just to normalize it because so much can happen/get in the way of being mindful. But then also to kind of equip ourselves for what we are going to do when those things show up.

A very common one that probably we can all relate to is just being distracted. There's so much going on at any given moment that our attention can get pulled in a million different directions. And especially these days with our phones that are constantly with us and pinging us and having information show up at any given moment… our attention gets pulled all the time. 

Planning for that, when those distractions show up, how am I gonna keep myself from either engaging with them or when I find myself distracted again, how can I bring myself back? And that bringing yourself back part, I know I've already spoken to that a few times now, but there's a second piece to that which is:

being really kind and gentle with yourself while you do it.

So, if you go to start practicing this and every time you caught yourself being distracted or pulled away, and you beat yourself up or berate yourself or are really unkind to yourself, you may loose the net benefit. Okay, you caught yourself, but you shamed yourself in the process, like that might deflate the whole practice. So, we really want to try to pay attention to that. 

We say that part of mindfulness practice is being non-judgmental and that includes with yourself. And then the other piece, which I feel like is the most challenging piece is... this idea of not being attached to the moment or having non-attachment.

So why is that the hardest piece? 

Going back to that example of thinking about something really positive. For example, I love spending time with friends. I'm thinking about a couple of friends I just saw over this last week. And when I'm there, I am like so happy to be with them. I'm fully engaged. And then... something happens, maybe they're getting distracted or maybe they're talking about something that has been really difficult or challenging or, maybe we had conflict that we need to resolve. So if I'm attached to things looking and being a certain way, and that's the only time that I'm truly happy or content, that can create a lot of tension, and take me out of the moment.

Meredith: So wanting things to look a certain way is something we have to practice relinquishing control over again and again. Seemingly simple, but really effing challenging, that can be really hard.

Every time I talk about this, I laugh because before I got into therapy, I was in hospitality, and my whole world was about controlling the environment or wanting things to go a certain way or having all the systems in place for things to align a certain way. And so this can be really counter intuitive for people. In so many of our fields, we train ourselves up to be in control and control things.

The dialectic here is that, we can both want things to be a certain way and step back, acknowledge and let things be as they are.

And then, we can ask ourselves, what is it like just to have full awareness and attention to that? 

Faith: I'm sitting here grinning like a Cheshire cat because it's like, I'm thinking about running a company of almost like 200 people and just being like, okay. It's like herding cats sometimes, right? Or you have that objective when you're going into the meeting of like, this is the single most important thing for us to talk about today, right? And then you find out that there's like some other thing that like really needs attention and is equally important. is like, how can you hold all these things that are true all at the same time?

Meredith: Yes.

Faith: And just kind of do that dance of non-judgment, right? and also, yeah, just finding a way to kind of, like you said, embrace what is happening in the moment and still guide, especially as leaders when necessary. but I was also smiling just because of the control thing as someone who's grappled with anxiety quite a bit in my life.

That desire for control is so real because it's like the illusion of safety and predictability.

Meredith: Yep. And again, for inroads, just having awareness and catching these processes, whatever shows up. It's just information… You’re getting data. And then once you have that data, then we can start working with it.

Right now we're all in the present moment.

Sitting here, life is happening, in this moment. And if we were just to sit and be here for some time, and noticed our thoughts and saw what happened…

We would notice our thoughts going in two directions. One direction, is the anxious, or the often anxious generating direction, which is future-oriented thinking. So our brains can pull us into the future at anytime. And there's function there. Again, this is nothing to judge… The pros of this are, we can plan ahead, think about what might happen, anticipate what's to come and equip ourselves best that we can for that.

If anyone's ever had to give a speech before, you plan ahead. Or if anyone's a performer or an athlete, right, you do all the practice. So again, there are a lot of pros of being able to think into the future. AND if we spend too much time in the future, that's where that anxiety can live. Catastrophes live there. Like what if, this? Or, what if that? Is this gonna happen? Is that gonna happen? 

And if we, again, spend too much time there, anxiety can be the outcome… And we get robbed of the present moment. 

So, even in this present moment, if I'm around people that I love, or I'm doing the thing that I love, but my brain's over here thinking about all of the what if’s. I'm gonna be feeling the emotions in line with what I'm thinking. Versus what's actually happening in front of me. 

Then, we can go another direction where we can think back into the past. And recalling memories, revisiting things, it's a very lovely ability of our brains and it can have its own little traps.

The, coulda/should/woulda traps… and this can be a place where our depression can live. Or again, if we're in too much past-oriented thinking, we can get stuck there and that's the feeling state that's often associated with too much time in the past, and it can also rob us of this present moment. 

So we've all been there, right? We're here, I'm here with my people and doing the thing. Oh, but I'm thinking about what happened yesterday. Or I'm thinking about what happened a month ago or the last time I got in a fight with a person. I'm replaying that. And that's just going to take me out of this, this present moment.

Meredith: So noticing it, if we fall into those two places, again, can we tag it? And then what do we do to bring ourselves back? And this is where I love the stacking of the skills over time. 

Because if we come back to the present moment, right now, the way I'm talking about it, we're kind of assuming that the present moment is neutral or positive, right? And sometimes coming back to the present moment, there’s discomfort in the present moment. I'm tuning back in and it’s like, I don't want to be here anymore. 

So, in response, maybe i going to go back into the past or I'm going to think about the future… or daydream… or go somewhere else. Right? To avoid this moment. And this is where a lot of the distress tolerance skills that we'll talk soon, because they can be really helpful.

The practice of just tolerating what is and seeing that I can be with it and I don't necessarily have to get away from it... That’s a skillset.

It’s the opposite of being in a place of just always, reactively just trying to get away from whatever it is that I'm experiencing. That state of being creates its own set of difficulties and it creates like these ripple effects that can be really, really challenging and hard to get out of. Lots of webs of behaviors that can become problematic. 

So, learning to tolerate what is, and again, not having to get away from it, is a skill set. And then what I've been naming before, like just being with what is and not judging it or not having attachment to it, that's also its own practice too.

Intro the 3 states of Mind: 

Okay, so that all being said... the first core skill is around this concept of what we call "Wise Mind". So again, there's two kind of inroads here. We can just talk about the concept of Wise Mind. And then what we can also talk about... what wise mind is not... what isn't wise mind.

The framing for this is what we call three states of mind. We have our logic mind on one side or, our reasonable mind, and our emotion mind is another state of mind. And then in between those two, so you can imagine the Venn diagram, the space in the middle is our wise mind.

Wise mind is like the synthesis or the integration of both those other states of mind. And by cultivating our mindfulness practices and understanding what the other states of mind feel like, we can also start to understand what a wise mind feels like. And the idea here is, we start, once we can identify that, can we tune into that more and then make our like informed, like embodied choices from a wise mind place? 

Okay, imagining that Venn diagram, let’s zoom in and look at one side... our reasonable mind or logic mind, two different names for the same thing. This is where our analytical brain lives or our analytical world lives. So if anyone's ever been task oriented, you're probably in logic mind… Taxes, math, looking at spreadsheets, engineering, building… they’re all typical tasks coming from a place of reason and logic and doing things a certain way. 

Pros and cons of having a logic mind. 

Pros: Lots of lots of organization, the roads that we drive on, the buildings that we live in is all brought to you by very good sound reason, logic, and structural engineering. Shout out to all those people out there doing that work.

If anyone's ever put together a piece of furniture from IKEA, I say you probably had the experience of being pulled into the different states of mind, but hopefully you found that really reasonable mind to put it together...

In both states of mind, there's a spectrum here, a range of intensity. So at any given moment, we can all access reason and logic for most of the time, right? And then there'e its extreme form, when reasonable mind kind of crowds out the other two states of mind… there's not room for any of our emotions… and we can't access wise mind.

Characters that kind of embody a more logic mind state of being, like kind of the classic ones that I offer are to think about the Spocks' of the world or like the Sheldons' out there, they kind of embody a more reasonable mind/logic mind presence. Pros and cons of that? There's lots of pros, lots of beauties in those characters.

And the cons, like where we see them maybe kind of struggle is more on that relationship level or that like the interpersonal side, which is often more of an emotion mind, emotion based way of being. So if that's helpful, think about people... or characters out there in the world to make sense of what pros/cons of this state of mind look like.

Okay, so let's flip it and talk about emotion… on the other side of the Venn diagram, we have emotion mind. Well, let me ask you, when you think about emotion, what comes to mind? What kind of lives there for you?

Faith:  For some reason, my brain keeps going to Inside Out right now, that movie, where I'm like picturing the emotions doing their thing just like fully. I also think about kids a lot here, you know? And it's just like pure fluidity between all of the emotional states, you know, just it's unpredictable. And just like, it feels so far removed from any.

A plus B equals C. It is just like, I feel quantum.

Meredith: Absolutely, yes. Yeah, Inside Out did a great job of modeling the different emotions and what happens there and what can happen. Kids for sure often are coming from this very emotional base front.

Faith: Yeah. I'm also going to like something like road rage, which is just like pure emotion and not any sort of logic.

Meredith: Yep, yep, yep. So emotions, we're so lucky to have them all. We are all wired to experience emotions. We'll talk a lot more about emotions in emotion regulation section. But for now, when we think about emotion mind, this is more of the place that goes, this is “what I feel to be true”. Reasonable mind is, this is “what I think to be true”. 

Pros and cons of emotion mind

Pros of emotion mind… think all the arts, music, connection, empathy. There's so many things that come from emotion that are just lovely, like passion, right? And again, this exists on the spectrum. So we have a lower intensity, like where emotions are here, but maybe they're not running the show.

And then on the extreme end is when our emotions are so loud or so fully encompassing that it crowds out all the logic or the reason in the moment and we're not able to move forward in the place that has… access yo both. So emotion mind in it’s extreme, we say emotion mind runs hot because it's typically hot. Think, lots of energy, emotions can be really loud… think, the last time you got in a fight with someone or last time we were really passionate about something. 

Cons of emotion mind is the crowding out of logic, being reactive, impulsive and loosing sight of things in the long term. 

What is Wise Mind

I think of wise mind as you're taking the strengths, or the pros, of both states of mind. And we're bringing it together, we're integrating them together.

Wise Mind... holds both. So what is it that my emotion mind, or self, needs and wants and what is it that my logic and reasonable mind needs? Wise mind brings that together so that both can co-exist and people can make important decisions from there. 

There's different words that people will put on like their wise mind. I like to use the phrasing of this is, “what you know to be true”.

If you slow down… and really listen to what i know to be true, underneath all the noise… that's our wise mind.

Sometimes people will name it their intuition. 

And something that I just want to name here is that you already have a wise mind. Everyone already has it. We're just putting words onto this. And now that you have those words, can you start to see it for yourself? Where do you feel the most balance or again, what do you know to be true? And when you're making decisions that are in line with that, like, what does that feel like? What does that look like? So that's kind of the framing of it….

So using the three states of mind as a tool, I like to think that if you can see those other states of mind, if we can just see it and notice it, that's wonderful. And then, if we can make modifications based on what we’re noticing… that’s even more skillful.

So for example, like woah, I'm in pretty high emotion mind right now, is there anything that I can do that can help me bring down the intensity of that so that I can then try to access my wise mind? What can I do that might help pull me in a more centered place? 

Or similarly, if we find ourselves in a strong, reasonable mind state, we can ask ourselves, is there anything I can do to try and access more of my emotional needs. 

What information am I not thinking about? Or who could I talk to that might give me the other information that will help us make a more informed choice that takes into account all the other dimensions of this situation.

Faith: 

I really, I think the thing that really resonated with me just now as you were talking through this is kind of, tend, I like to think in continuums a lot of the times. And so you're like, okay, I'm thinking there's the logic mind, there's wise mind, and then there's the emotion mind, right?

This kind of emotion mind tends to feel hot, logic mind tends to feel cold. Like that alone feels like a helpful guide for me to like tap into at any given moment. 

A lot of the times that I'm working with my CEOs, I'll ask them, okay, in this moment, usually because I can see that they're way more in emotion mind, like they're super hijacked by something that's got them activated. I'll ask them, if you put yourself on a scale right now of fact to feeling, where would you land in this moment?

Meredith: Nice.

Faith: And a lot of the times that's helpful. The next question though usually has to be what assumptions are you making? Like what story are you telling yourself? Because I think the tricky thing about knowing is unless you check in with that or have a really strong awareness of what true knowing with like a capital K feels like in your body versus like, well, I just know that that's what they're thinking. It's like, well, do you know? That's a question I have to ask myself often. Yeah.

Meredith: Yeah.

I’m laughing because when you said, you know, where are you on the scale right now of fact or feeling? Another cue can be the sense of urgency behind something. Emotion mind runs hot and if i have this feeling, I HAVE to go tell this person what I'm feeling, right now. I HAVE got to send that email, right now. Right? That’s usually a sign of emotion mind. 

Faith: Yes.

Meredith: And that emotion mind… can masquerade as wise mind. Like, "yes, I have all of the facts, I know what I'm feeling is true, damnit" when really it's just strong emotions clouding our judgment. So I love that question because it just gives you an opportunity to tune in with yourself.

And then again, becoming familiar with your own patterns and what kind of pulls us in different directions. If I have awareness, like, yeah, I often think that these are facts, but really this is like more feeling based or this thing happens and I tend to be back in this place again. Okay. Now that I know that, like, how do I, how do I work with that? Or at least just give myself some time to not make things worse or to not keep acting from that place. If it's not working out.

Faith: Yes. And it sounds like you're also offering up maybe a place that people can kind of use as like a launch point for this. If anybody here wanted a homework assignment to write or an exercise to take away from this, to me, this sounds like this is a great, could be a great launch point is accepting, I think the goal is not to always be in wise mind. Right? 

Meredith: Yes. 

Faith: It sounds like what you're suggesting is that there is an opportunity for anybody who wants to start practicing this to just check in with themselves and grow their awareness around where might you be? Is that it? 

Meredith: Yes, and, we'll talk about this more. But now that people are familiar with it, you'll hear us kind of use this language of like, finding your wise mind or, you know, working from your wise mind.

And to your point… it’s not humanly possible to always be in wise mind. So we're just constantly fluctuating between emotion mind, reasonable mind, wise mind all throughout the day. So at any given point, just checking in with yourself, and asking, where am I right now? And again, using those other states of mind as kind of like reflection points can help us build awareness around this concept. 

Faith: Yeah, and just reflecting on what you said earlier, the idea of just trying to suspend judgment, like be gentle with yourself and try not to attach to this too much. I make up that something that could be useful for that is maybe just labeling what's happening in the moment. Like, noticing. Emotion's running hot right now, right? Or, yeah, coming in, coming in hard with logic in this moment. Cool, cool, just noticing. Logic mind, emotion mind.

Meredith: Yes. And next time we meet or next week, we'll go into the what and how skills of mindfulness, which are more kind of like tangible things to do, which we can absolutely, that will absolutely help pull into this practice. And it all kind of comes together to have different things to pull on for mindfulness practice. Yeah.

Faith: Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, and I think the thing that's coming up for me right now as you're talking about this is like I used to work with doctors and one of the docs I used to work with was saying how really there are no flat lines in life. You look at all of your bio rhythm readouts and stuff, your heartbeat, your brain waves, everything. It's all ups and downs, right? It's all this flow state. The only flat line is death.

And so I feel like that personally has been a really helpful anchor for me when whenever… internally i feel like, God, why can't I just get out of this emotion mind, find the sweet spot and not feel reactive or not feel super in my logic mind or what have you. Just honoring that the flow is part of the dance and knowing that it ebbs and flows is helpful. 

Meredith: Absolutely. Yeah.

Faith: Yeah, because I would imagine that, judgments, is probably a very common place that people might struggle with this particular concept. 

Meredith: Totally. Yeah, lots of assumptions. I think a lot of the times… we can have lots of thoughts around what this should look like or how we should be acting or be  showing up, like you're saying, showing up in the world or just feeling internally.

So yeah, I love that framing. I definitely think of it like a multi-dimensional framework with lots of lines that are ebbing and flowing and moving around. And how do we just acknowledge and see that as part of our lived experience without putting judgments or demands on it to be different, but really just understanding that and then deciding how do I want to be with that? How do I want to move with that? 

Faith: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you. And I also love to just say too, I heard you say should and I feel like that's a really common word that I can hear when I'm coaching people and I struggle catching myself sometimes. Should implies you have a choice, that's all. So you hear yourself saying, man, I should, this, this, that and the other. It's like, interesting, should. It just means I have a choice.

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