The DBT Skill I Love and Hate: Half-Smile
If you don’t know this… I am a DBT therapist. I practice DBT in my own life and I am always going between DBT informed and comprehensive with my clients. I have added EMDR to my repertoire as of recently, but DBT is my bread and better and what I have been taught and understand the most.
But for a DBT clinician, you would probably never expect to hear:
I hate this skill so much. There’s legit no point to this skill!
That skill has always been half-smile.
What is Half-Smile?
Half-Smile is a distress tolerance reality acceptance skill where you put on the faintest smile. This smile has cultural and biological significance as when you half-smile, your brain (in the western world) associates this with happy/neutral feelings. There are biological processes that indicate in our brains that we are feeling better than we thought before the half-smile.
I have always had a love-hate relationship with this skill. One, I never could figure out what positive feeling we are supposed to get from this. In order to like a skill in and use it more, we have to find some reason that it feels better than not using it. But I had heard so many people say how much they love the skill and that this is one that they use often. I could never fathom that feeling. Emphasis on the “could”!
I teach DBT skills classes and I always taught this skill with such enthusiasm because I wanted people to believe in the skill, but I would have said earlier that I had no want to practice this skill because “what’s the point? It' hasn’t worked before!”
My Oh My!
I will tell you the story about what happened for me to suddenly start liking this skill. The other night I was working out. I like working out because I feel accomplishment afterwards and it helps me feel stronger in the moment and post-workout.
I was working out and I started to get some of my most dread thoughts:
But why?! Why do we have to do this! This is bullshit. I don’t like the feeling in the moment and I wish we could be sedentary and still get the same feeling! Why do I do this to myself?!
I consider those thoughts to be my temper tantrum thoughts. The ones that really hate doing something and suddenly lose all sense of purpose because it’s more challenging than I would like for it to be. There’s probably something deeper there about not getting enough praise as a child about the hard things but only getting praise when I succeeded at something that was easy, but that’s not the point of the story.
I also had my wise-mind up in my brain validating the emotion behind the thought but also knowing that exercise is more beneficial than I can even imagine. I knew I needed something to help me slightly accept this reality.
I had this sudden thought to try and use half-smile to help me in the moment. My hands were taken up at the time so I couldn’t do willing hands (another reality acceptance skill). So, I was doing the cardio workout and tried doing the half-smile. There was that initial “this isn’t going to work” thought. But after around 7 seconds, I suddenly started to feel my spirits lift up. The sensations as I observe were that my chest felt lighter, and I felt the behavioral urge to keep going instead of finding ways to quit the exercise.
There was a moment of shock running through my head because I had never felt a positive benefit from the half-smile skill before. I was very intrigued by this feeling. So, I finished my workout and started to focus on some introspective thoughts.
Play by Play
In the moment, my thoughts wanted to deny the reality of the benefits of exercise. I had a tough weekend with some tough emotions coming up, especially on Saturday. Before starting the exercise, it was already there. Exercise does something where if it’s intense, I can only feel my body and the thoughts are, for the most part, shoved to the back of my mind. That’s uncomfortable, especially for people who have a lot of dissociative experiences.
In this case, I wanted to deny the reality of benefit. I wanted to not feel. I wanted to sit down and play more Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I wanted to watch videos of people reacting to right leaning politics because people “reading” alt-right people is very enjoyable to watch. I wanted to do anything else but I knew I had to keep the exercise up or I might fall into a behavioral pattern of avoiding what’s helpful.
The half-smile was helpful in allowing me to accept that there are benefits of exercise and it lifted my spirits to keep pushing. It helped me keep working through the tough “stuff” because I know in my wise-mind, I can keep going, I just didn’t want to in the moment. Not exercising leads me down a path of back pain, body discomfort, guilt, shame, and a wacky heart rate.
THIS IS WHY REFLECTING ON BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS IS VERY HELPFUL! DO THE BEHAVIOR CHAINS!
What I learned
Yay, a DBT therapist is still learning!
I learned that half-smile is very helpful for me when I am on the verge of breaking my wise-mind. I learned that half-smile could help lighten my spirit so that I can feel more capable and prouder of myself. I learned that half-smile could have pleasant sensations. I learned that half-smile could give people hope. I learned that half-smile could be a reactionary skill to use instead of one where you plan out when you are going to use it.
Another consideration is that reality sucks. There’s a lot of times where reality is pretty awful and is hard to accept. Half-smile may not be the skill that is always going to feel good. There may be times where half-smile is used to shut down the emotions and be used in the wrong way. We always encourage some level of exposure to emotion because we are always going to have emotions. We also don’t want to encourage overly identifying with emotional mind and never taking time to accept the reality that life is painful and logic and wise-mind are appropriate as well.
Half-smile is one that I will probably innately start to use more and will probably cross my mind more than not now that I have this positive benefit from this. I am super excited about that!