The A.C.C.E.P.T.S. Skill

[music] The accept skill is a set of skills that's based off of dialectic/behavioral therapy and is designed to be used when you're having a moment of crisis or struggle that you can't solve the problem on. The goal of the accept skill is to have added distraction to allow you some time to let your emotions come down. So it's an acronym. The first letter is A which is activities and when you're in a crisis or a struggle or you're in a place of your emotions being too high, you can seek to engage in activities that will distract you and grab your attention to allow whatever emotions you've been feeling to flow through and slow down. So the first letter is A. The next letter is C and this first C is for contributions. This is one of my favorite parts of the accept skill. it's designed to allow you to get outside of yourself and put your energy into contributing to the life of somebody else. I can't think of a better way to allow my emotions to come through and to move down than to gain the perspective of seeing somebody else who might be in need and put my energy into making their life better. The second C is comparisons and this is a careful one because it should only be used in crisis and only in one of two different ways, otherwise it won't be helpful. The first way is to find someplace in my life where I've been in a worse spot and still made it through and remind myself that I'm capable of getting through a hard time. The second part of this C is once in a while it's okay to compare yourself to somebody else who has a really hard time going on in their life and is making it through, which means that you can also make it through. They've become an example to you and you're able to see a broader perspective. The E is for an emotional ship. Our emotions are like waves in the emotions. They come and they go and they can move and if I can get myself to engage in some type of an activity or some type of a thought that can allow me to shift my emotions, I might be able to bring down the part that's feeling like it's uncontrollable. So if I'm feeling really anxious, or really sad, I might be able to go and engage in watching something like a comedy to allow me to laugh and feel a sense of humor and push a new emotion through me which will allow the crisis to come down a little bit just for a moment. The P is called push away. It means taking a time out. It means changing scenery. It means giving yourself a chance to break the routine of whatever you're stuck in so you don't have to stay stuck there and wallow in whatever that emotion is. Imagine putting up a brick wall either mentally or physically between you and your problem for the time. You know you're going to come back to your problem. You know that it's still there, it's not going to go away, but you can take a time out from it for just a moment and allow yourself some space to regroup. The T stands for thoughts and just like the emotional shift, we're looking for a way to shift our thoughts and one way to do that is something called the three-second rule which is to notice the thoughts that you're having. If you're having a big bout of anxiety, notice what they are, list them off, acknowledge that you're having them and then count to three. One, two, three, and on the number three imagine having a hard shift onto something new to think about. And when you do this you want to put your brain into someplace where you'll be able to stay stuck on it for just a minute. So the way that I've used this in the past for myself is I've learned to memorize poetry. So when I'm struggling with a certain amount of thinking that's causing me problems, I notice it, one, two, three, and I start quoting the poem that I'm trying to learn-- as far into the poem as I can get so it allows my brain the chance to move and shift onto something else which then allows my body to start to slow down and come down. You can use this with poetry, quotes, some people use it with music. other people use it with thinking about hobbies or interests or something new. Whatever it is that will grab your attention and is about shifting the thoughts away from the thing that's causing the pain. The last one is S which is sensations and we're going to use our sensations-- any of the five senses for the purpose of distracting and grounding. So I can use my physical touch. Sometimes you see people who have those wristbands on their wrist and they flick them to help move their thoughts to different places or to keep themselves grounded. i have my clients who have a really hard time at night waking up in the middle of the night with bad dreams or trauma or recurring thoughts. They'll get out of bed and they'll go to the freezer and hold an ice cube until it melts which will then allow them to be grounded back into the place that they're at, the moment that they're at, so they're not spinning and having their thoughts go everywhere. You can use your sense of touch, sense of smell, sense of hearing, sense of sight. Any of those things that will allow you to grab your attention. So that's the accepts skill. You guys use it in a time of crisis especially when you can't solve the problem immediately. [music]