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Navigating the ups and downs of relationships can feel like learning a new language without a guidebook. When emotions run high, or misunderstandings arise, it’s easy to get stuck in frustration or repeat patterns that don’t serve us—or our partners—well. How do you ask for what you need, stay true to yourself, and keep the connection strong, all at the same time?

In this episode, the discussion explores practical tools rooted in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) that help you strike a balance between self-respect, relationship wellbeing, and getting your needs met. Listeners will discover how to pause and choose more effective responses in moments of conflict, learn key strategies for emotional regulation, and find new ways to approach differences with acceptance and actionable change. Whether you’re struggling to communicate a small annoyance or facing recurring arguments, this conversation offers concrete skills to foster growth and resilience in any relationship.

Shireen Rizvi is a licensed clinical psychologist, board-certified in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Over the past 25 years, Shireen has conducted research and training in DBT. Her new book, Real Skills for Real Life, co-authored with Dr. Jesse Finkelstein, is available now.

Episode Highlights

03:35 Introduction to DBT therapy.

07:55 Learning relationship skills gradually.

10:49 Marcia Linehan's therapy development.

16:07 Embracing acceptance and change.

21:30 Balancing objectives and relationships.

25:33 Balancing priorities in relationships.

29:02 Understanding Emotion Regulation in DBT.

31:29 Understanding emotional dysregulation.

35:08 Managing conflict in relationships.

40:28 Using DBT skills for anxiety.

43:36 Book and resources overview.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

• Identify Your Objective. Clarify what specific outcome you are hoping to achieve before entering a conversation or making a request.
• Consider Relationship Impact: Reflect on how you want the other person to feel about you and your relationship after the interaction.
• Prioritize Self-Respect: Decide how you want to feel about yourself based on how you handle a situation, ensuring you act in line with your values.
• Pause Before Reacting: When emotions run high, intentionally pause and consider your options before responding or reaching out to your partner.
• Practice Acceptance and Change: Acknowledge areas where acceptance is needed and where change is possible, aiming for a balanced approach in ongoing issues.
• Prepare Requests Clearly (DEAR MAN Skill): Formulate clear, specific, and assertive requests using tools like the DEAR MAN acronym to increase the likelihood of your needs being met.
• Monitor Emotional State: Regularly check in with yourself to assess your emotional regulation, especially before and during difficult interactions.
• Reflect on Interpersonal Patterns: Periodically review your tendencies in conflict (e.g., always prioritizing the relationship or objective) and adjust to create more balance and effectiveness in your interactions.

Mentioned

Real Skills for Real Life (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

Real Skills for Real Life (*Guilford Press link) (book)

The High-Conflict Couple (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

About Dr. Jesse Finkelstein (TheraHive)

Marsha M. Linehan

Gottman Institute

Shifting Criticism For Connected Communication (Free Guide)

Connect with Dr. Shireen Rizvi

Website: shireenrizvi.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shireen-rizvi-1a5544193

Co-author of the book Real Skills for Real Life: https://www.therahive.com/team/jesse-finkelstein 

Connect with Dr. Jessica Higgins

Facebook: facebook.com/EmpoweredRelationship 

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Podcast: drjessicahiggins.com/podcasts/

Pinterest: pinterest.com/EmpowerRelation 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drjessicahiggins 

Twitter: @DrJessHiggins 

Website: drjessicahiggins.com  

Email: [email protected]

If you have a topic you would like to be discussed, please contact us by clicking on the “Ask Dr. Jessica Higgins” button here. 

Thank you so much for your interest in improving your relationship. 

Also, I would so appreciate your honest rating and review. Please leave a review by clicking here. 

Thank you!  

*With Amazon Affiliate Links, I may earn a few cents from Amazon if you purchase the book from this link.

Episode Transcript

Doctor Shireen Rizvi, it's so lovely to have you. 

Thank you so much for having me on. 

I've actually wanted to have someone on the show who has specialized in DBT as it relates to relationships. And I'm very excited that you're going to be able to share here today. So, for people who are not familiar with DBT, where would you like to start to help people get a sense of the context? I know we can't go super deep, but more high-level. 

Sure. So DBT stands for Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and it's a form of therapy that was developed by a woman named Marsha Linehan. It's primarily grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy. So if people are familiar with CBT, they will see a lot of overlap with DBT. The reason that it's a little bit different is that the origin story of DBT was actually to apply, or came out of trying to apply cognitive behavioral therapy, standard cognitive behavioral therapy, to individuals with very serious problems with emotions and emotion regulation. And in particular, it's people who met the criteria for borderline personality disorder and who were also suicidal. A lot of research has shown that DBT is effective for that population. But what I have found so interesting is how much DBT has spread beyond that particular population. 

And in particular, I think the reason that it's spread is that it offers really concrete tools that could help anybody in any situation, or most situations, I should say. And so that, I think, has led to DBT becoming much more widely known and widely utilized beyond what it was originally studied for. 

Yes. Thank you. And as we are going to be focusing a little bit more on intimate relationships, this is one of the arenas that most people will feel more activated than they would in other venues or other domains of their life. So it can be really helpful in the intimate space when things might get triggered. 

For sure. Yeah. It's really interesting that you even mentioned that. I just got back this week. I was asked to present at a conference of IT security specialists on this. I'm going to take it back, but on distress tolerance skills, because they work in really stressful situations, they get blamed for everything. And the organizer said to me, ” You know, I'm not sure if people are going to relate to this. You know, we'll see where the conversation goes. And in my head, I thought, Oh, people are going to relate to this because not only do they have stress at work, but they have stress in their lives, because 

And sure enough, I stayed and, you know, had like a meet and greet after. 

And so many people came up to me and said, ” This will be helpful in parenting. This will be helpful with my wife. This will be helpful with my husband. So I do think relationships, of course, are a prime opportunity to focus on improving how we interact, how we are effective, and how to be more skillful. 

Thank you. Yes. I love that, and I so appreciate that you and your co-author, Dr. Jesse Finkelstein, have done such a great job to normalize that everyone, including both of us, like every single human, is confronted with stress in life, and that we have to negotiate emotional regulation and interpersonal skills. And most of us aren't actually taught explicitly. And if we didn't necessarily have the best models, it just can be a difficult thing to implement. I loved the analogy you both referenced. Like, imagine going to a foreign land where you don't know the language. Do you want to say a little more about that? 

Yes. I think that we often feel like when we are confronted with a problem or when we have emotions that feel out of control to us, we often think, ” Oh, we should just be able to solve it, get over it. Right. We have a lot of those thoughts. You should just be able to do it. And that doesn't take into account that actually we need to learn how to be. How to problem solve, how to be more skillful with other people. And so the analogy that I use in the book and in teaching people is that learning to be more effective and skillful is like learning another language. And you don't become fluent overnight, and nobody expects you to become fluent overnight. Instead, you have to start by really intentional practice. 

And it's only after very intentional practice, often for a long period of time, that you get to the point where you can kind of just do things fluidly. 

Right. 

“So in terms of relationships, like, if you're somebody who doesn't really know how to validate your partner, because you were never taught how to validate, in how you grew up, you were never taught that you're not just going to become somebody who can be an expert validator of your partner overnight.” You're going to have to practice it. It's not going to always go well, but over time, you are building up that muscle, and you will get more experience, more practice, and it will start to feel more natural to you. 

Absolutely. Because this isn't, as you're saying, as we become more competent, it's going to be more automatic. I mean, I don't know that some of these really challenging skills are Automatic, but we have much more access to them if we have been practicing and implementing them. Because I do agree that some people have a lot of insight or understanding, but the practice is where we get to integrate it and actually build the experience of being able to live it. 

Yes. And I think it doesn't. It might not be. I mean, sometimes it becomes automatic. But more, it's like you with practice, when faced with a difficult situation, you're much more likely to say, ” Oh, what's something I can do here that will be effective? Right. Based on my prior experience, as opposed to giving in to impulses and urges and old behaviors, you can actually have a pause and say, wait a second, I want to lash out, but what's an alternative? And that, I think, does become more automatic over time. 

Agreed. What do I want to lean into here? And feeling the heat of the moment or the tension of the moment? And I love just to reference the name of your book, Real Skills for Real Life. Like, that's what you're kind of mentioning around how we're all faced with this. 

Beautiful. 

Well, do you want to speak philosophically about just the dialectical? I love how you mentioned even clinicians might not know how to explain that, and how the balance between acceptance and change, or how to hold these disparate pieces together, is such an important role in DBT. Because even as you were saying, as it was developing, people might not be able to leap, reframing, or shifting their thinking. They need to hold their authentic experience along with entertaining new choices. So do you want to speak more about that? 

Sure. Yeah. So just to go back to the origin story a little bit, because I think that will lead to discussion about this, is that, as I mentioned, Marsha Linehan, who developed this treatment, first started to apply standard cognitive behavioral therapy, which, especially back in the 80’s when she was experimenting with this, which was really focused on change, and in particular focused on changing the way you think to change, your behaviors and a lot. And so she took that into her sessions. You know,

We're going to work on changing your behaviors. And what she noticed was that although people agreed that change was important, the reaction was, if change were easy, I would have done it already. 

You're clearly not getting how hard this is, how difficult my life is, how many barriers there are in my life to change. Right. And so over time, she kept consistently getting this message and was like, well, maybe I need to switch. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. And so she switched over to this, what? What was later described as the other side to say, ” Oh, maybe they're right. Maybe change is too hard for them. Maybe instead, what we need to do is focus on accepting your life exactly as it is. 

But when she did that, she actually also got a negative response because the general response was, great, you're understanding now where I'm coming from, but why won't you help me to change? Right? It's not enough to just say, you get it, like, I want you to help me get out of, you know, what I might experience as hell. And so that's where she developed, and over time, this idea of a balance between acceptance and change and a synthesis between acceptance and change, and realized that this was compatible with a philosophy, a dialectical philosophy, which holds that the world exists with opposites, 

And the greater our awareness of the dialectical tension, the greater the likelihood that we could find a synthesis, a meeting point that incorporates both change and acceptance. 

Thank you for explaining that. I have found that to be really helpful both in my life and working with clients therapeutically, that both can be true, and just there's a relaxation into, yes, it's hard, and it's hard to hold both. “And that is the truth. Like, that is part of my experience that this is true, and they're oppositional, or they don't seem compatible. And sometimes that can offer relief just by holding it differently in this way.” 

“Do you want to speak to that? Well, I think for me, it's almost like an acceptance piece to say, oh, there will always be tension. Right? There is no one thing that everybody universally agrees on. And right now, everybody is saying, like, this is unprecedented, how polarized our society is. But a more reasonable response is actually, we've always been polarized, right? Is just that we're polarized about different things, and that changes over time.” But in the context of relationships, I think this is so important too, because in any relationship, whether it's a romantic partnership, a friendship, a parenting relationship, there will always be points of tension and disagreement or different opinions or different wants. And if we can just accept that as a fact, that in itself might help us reduce our own suffering. 

Instead of thinking whenever there's a disagreement, Oh, my God, this is horrible, this must be all wrong. Right? 

Absolutely. And I know some of the research that comes out of The Gottman Institute has talked about there are seven irreconcilable differences, at least in every relationship. And I know that sounds like a legal term of  irreconcilable, but just these vast differences. Extrovert, introvert. And that these things likely won't change all that much, and that it's okay. And how do we work together is more maybe what's more important. 

Yeah. From the Gottmans. You know, what I always take as well is that 

And I think that is relevant in this because if you go into the situation saying, I'm going to avoid all arguments or all disagreements or I'm going to do whatever I can to never fight with anybody, you're actually setting yourself up for a lot of pain. Because that's impossible.

And it's like pushing back or fighting against something really natural. And so it's almost like we stop before we can even start. 

Right. 

The opportunity to collaborate. Do you have anything you want to share with people listening, how to know? You offer so much in the book, even your co-author, but do you want to offer anything here in this conversation around how to make holding the acceptance and the change more actionable in a conversation? Either how to frame it or language, what that could look like to just be able to speak to. These things are different, and how we hold that in this dialectical way. 

Well, I think before I talk about actually doing it in conversation, it's more like doing it in your own head, recognizing that there are different approaches to something. So I don't know. This is a totally minor example, but as with all relationships, sometimes minor examples really cause a lot of pain. I think about my husband, who never pushes in his chair. Okay. And I walk by his chair that's halfway across the room, it seems like. And when I do that, I experience just extreme annoyance. And this happens, like, on a daily basis. Right. It's like. And I have all these thoughts, what's wrong with him? Why can't he push in his chair? And I even go back in my head. This is when I'm being, of course, unskillful. 

It's like, why did no one ever teach him how to push in his chair after, you know, all of those things go in my mind. Right. And so, where does acceptance and change come in? Well, I think that this is actually an example of a moment for that, which is, do I want to talk to him and develop a strategy or a plan or a conversation, a reinforcement plan for helping him remember to push his chair in after he uses it, or do I want to focus on accepting that the chair is not going to be pushed in? Or do I want to figure out if there is actually a synthesis there? 

Meaning maybe I can ask him and prompt him, and I can also recognize it's not going to happen a hundred percent of the time, and I can accept those moments when it's there, or I just push the chair in myself. Right. Like all of these things, without stewing about it. These are all options. And so if I'm clearer about those options that are available to me, that might or it should influence whether I talk to him about it, or do I let it go? Right. Do I do it myself, or do I have a conversation with him about it? And when I do have a conversation with him about it, how can I do it in a balanced way? Instead of just going in with, you should always do this. 

You're a bad person for, you know, leaving your chair out or whatever the equivalent of that would be. 

Thank you for that practical example. I was meeting with someone on Wednesday, and they were like, it was about a fork. 

It's always something very silly. 

Right. I appreciate this. And so with that question of, like, is this something I want to make a plan or a strategy to talk to my partner about, in some ways, it feels implied that there's discerning how important it is or how much this means to me. Is that right? 

Yeah. So this is something that we might call, it's labeled in the book as interpersonal priorities, which is when there is a situation in which you want to ask somebody for something or say no to something. “There are actually three different priorities or components to keep in mind.” One is getting your objective, meaning getting what it is that you're asking for. Him pushing in his chair every time he gets up. Right. Would be an objective. The second component or priority is the relationship. How do I want this person to feel about me as a result of this interaction? And usually the baseline response to that is, I want this other person to feel good about me and about our relationship, and that our relationship is. Is good, solid, and strong. And the third component or priority is self-respect. 

How do I want to feel about myself as a result of this interaction? And again, normally, what we would answer that question is I want to feel good about myself. I want to feel like I handled this well. The importance of recognizing those three components is one piece of being effective, and then the second piece is to think about how I would rank order those three priorities going into the conversation. Because actually knowing what I prioritize as number one is going to influence how I behave and respond, right? So, in that, again, just referring to that silly example, because now I have it on my mind. 

If my objective, getting him to push in the chair, was the most important and I didn't care as much about the relationship or as much about my self-respect, one could imagine that I could throw a tantrum, or I could threaten him, right? I could do all sorts of things to get this objective. If you don't start pushing in your chair, I'm going to leave you, right? That would be to get my objective. But of course, I think most of us would realize that wouldn't be helpful in terms of the long-term relationship and actually going into that situation. And I think why I haven't yet talked to him about this is because I realized that my priority in this particular case is that the relationship is more important to me than the chair being pushed in, right? 

Knowing that priority in many circumstances actually leads me more towards that acceptance route, right? To say, ” Oh, the chair's out, okay, let me push it in, right? Versus, again, if my objective were the most important, I would really be going after it. 

Thank you so much for giving an example and giving an indication of this skill that's in your book. And as I'm listening to you, it sounds like this being able to prioritize in these three ways helps me understand if it's a preference or if it's something that has much more significance and meaning to me as it relates to the relationship or something I'm needing? Because sometimes it's not just about the chair, right? Sometimes it actually has a deeper meaning. But sometimes, like I can think of the towels, right? I have a preference for the towels being folded in a certain way. But it's just about the towels. Do I notice it? Yes. And is that something I really, to your point, want to broach? But if it doesn't really mean that much, then it might not be worth bringing up, right? 

And then it's about, well, okay, it might not be worth bringing up because the relationship is more important, and whatever consequence might come out of having this emotional conversation is not worth it. But then it's well, what do you do? Because if you don't bring it up but you're still stewing about it, that's not helpful. It's not accepting, and it's likely going to bleed out in some other way. So deciding that the relationship is most important does not mean, oh, well, then I just have to suck it up and, you know, deal with it. It's more like, okay, let me respect the fact that the relationship is most important and that, therefore, with intention, I'm deciding I'm not going to raise this issue and I'm going to cope with it in this other way. 

I so appreciate that in your book Together, there are flowcharts that people can have a little bit of a reflecting moment or inquiry around. Okay, so, but it's not just like yes or no, like there are lots of options around, do I want to do something different? Is there a way that we can look together? Like, it gives a lot more range for the possibility of how to cope or even have the conversation. So before we go into the conversation and how we might set that up, I also want to say, you, when you, and is it Dr. Finkelstein? That you both encourage people to look at if there's a trend or a pattern around, if you're actively using this interpersonal priority check, kind of, that if you're always putting the relationship first, that might be something to notice. 

Do you want to say anything about that? 

Yeah, I think it's a good point that, you know, we say we want to rank order the priorities going into any particular situation, and from that we might discover that actually we have a pattern. And for example, 

So there's no formula here that says you have to have this percentage, you know, work out in different areas of your life. But I do think it's something to keep in mind. 

Am I always prioritizing the relationship over my self-respect? And if so, what's the consequence of that? How does that affect how I feel? And does that harm the relationship, too? Because actually, the more your self-respect plummets, the greater the likelihood that the relationship is going to suffer as well. 

Thank you. Well, Shireen, I'm listening to you, and I'm thinking, okay, this was more of an interpersonal skill. And I'm also. I know you have a whole section devoted to emotional regulation, but I'm also seeing that this is helpful with emotional regulation in that it invites a pause. It's not just ignoring our experience and stuffing it, and it's not just reacting and impulsively talking to our partner, perhaps unskillfully, but having some discernment and inquiry and being able to work with it a little bit more typically helps organize and regulate emotions. “Do you see this as even something that helps with emotional regulation?” 

I would say that almost any pause and thinking about how to act next is going to help with emotion regulation. So it's interesting because in the package of DBT skills, there are four categories, right? There's “emotion regulation,” as you mentioned, there's “interpersonal effectiveness,” there's “mindfulness skills,” and then the fourth is “distress tolerance skills,” and they're separated. And each of them, each of these four different categories or modules of skills have their own goals associated with it. And there's obviously a lot of overlap between all of them because interpersonal situations are more likely to go well when you're also being mindful and fully present, and you're regulated. Right. And you're tolerating the distress of whatever the crisis is. So I think it's really, we have these separations, but one of the things that we tried to do with the flowcharts, even, was to show, oh, even though you're talking about an interpersonal situation, here's a point where maybe you might go to an emotion regulation skill first. 

Great. Well, would you like to speak to that? It feels important. I think a lot of people in the collective kind of conversation are talking about emotional regulation. And can you say a little bit more about when one might pivot towards prioritizing emotional regulation? 

Yeah. One of the foundational principles behind DBT treatment is that a lot of the problems we experience are the result of what we refer to as emotion dysregulation. And what we mean by that is that

cause problems for us, and therefore, having a better understanding of our emotional experience. So understanding emotions, understanding what the physiological components of emotions are, and how to discriminate between different emotions, is one part of teaching emotion regulation. Learning to see, oh, maybe that's not anger, maybe that's shame, is actually a really effective strategy. 

So we teach that, right, the model of emotions, how to understand your emotional experience. But then we also teach skills for how to change an emotion that you don't want to have and different ways to do that, as well as skills to reduce your vulnerability to that state of being out of control with emotions. So we have different skills for different scenarios with emotions. Recognizing that emotions are often, I mean, first of all, I don't want to pathologize all emotions. 

That's when we say we want to regulate, we want to learn to do something different with them. 

Yes. And those can be strong indicators to perhaps do more of this work and practice. And I wonder if you would agree, but I would think that our systems are getting activated on any given day, and that these skills can still be really helpful even if we're not feeling the level of intensity of what might be dysregulation. But that. Yeah, you're nodding. 

Yeah, I agree. And so, I think a lot of people might not relate to the word dysregulation because, in general, they feel they're more controlled than dysregulated. Yeah. So you could think, but you could think about a minor example, you know, more minor examples, like what happens when you're feeling irritable. You might not be at that full-throated anger where you're going to, you know, completely lose it. But what is irritability doing for you, and how is that causing problems? Or maybe you're not so depressed that you can't get out of bed, but you're feeling sad, and that's influencing your behavior and relationship. What's something that you can do with that? So yeah, I think

But we all have emotions all the time, and sometimes they don't work very well for us. 

Would you equate these skills that you have in the book to help develop emotional intelligence? I would think so. 

Yes. I think so too. It's funny, we don't use that term emotional intelligence in the treatment, but I would say it's compatible with that for sure. Because I think as you become more attuned to what it is that you. Feeling, as you become more aware of the different components of an emotion, what things we have control over, what things we don't, even as you become more aware of what emotions do for us, like why they're important and useful, I think that does help you become more emotionally intelligent with yourself, but also with other people in your life. 

Totally, because I know some people have a practice of journaling or just pausing to notice what they're feeling. Like, many of us don't even check in. We don't. I mean, there are times when my husband might observe something about me on the outside, and he asks me a question. I'm like, I don't know. Let me take a moment and pause to see if I can identify. But the skills that you're just. What you have in the book feels like a much more directive way to work with having insight and awareness of the emotional. Their emotional internal world. Okay. That's why. That's where that question came from. I'm curious about the theme of emotional regulation. 

If a couple or partners are interacting and it's starting to get a little tense or charged, and one partner starts to notice, ooh, this is starting to feel a little too activated or too escalated for me. What do you help people do in those scenarios? I know some people want to take a break, and then others want to push through and talk about it. And sometimes a pause and then having a time to revisit is helpful. But what do you help people with? Negotiating an intimate relationship or a relationship in general? I guess.

Sure. And here I should say that I'm not an expert in couples, and so I don't treat couples. I usually see one side of that. If somebody comes in and says, ” This is the problem, what can I do about that issue? But I would say this would be actually a good opportunity to talk in advance in some ways about how we fight and when we fight, what we can do to have this work better for both of us? Right. So if there's somebody who said. Who feels like, if one part of the couple feels like, when I get to this point, I want to take a break, and the other person feels like, when they get to that point, they have to keep at it, that's going to obviously be a problem. 

Not just for the situation at the end, but also the dynamic between the two people and how to work through this going forward. In that scenario, you're the relationship expert, so you tell me if I'm close to what you would do. But one of the things that I would say is, can we have a conversation about this when you're not in an argument? My approach when I get activated is to want to take a break. Your approach when you get activated is to keep going and this. And that usually ends up being bad for both of us. 

Yeah. 

What can we do differently? Right. 

Yes. Well, Shireen, I feel like this really harkens back to the acceptance and the change that, if we can notice, we operate differently. We have a different tendency in these interactions. And how do we support or work together where we can both feel that? Does it work for us? I think that's helpful. And to have that conversation in a more grounded way, I think, is really helpful. And then to be able to reference it and stick to it. I think usually for the one who wants to press on is less comfortable with just dropping it, with just no time to revisit. Like, it just feels like, ooh, it's going to get swept under the rug, or like, we're not going to come back to it. So, having something to say, we want to work on this. Let's have a time where we're going to at least check in about it. 

I wonder what you would say about just individually, People might have different capacities for stress tolerance. And do you want to say anything about how that might fit here? Yes. As far as emotional regulation, maybe somebody is feeling stressed, but they're still rather comfortable, but the other person's looking at the signs and they're like, danger. Danger. 

Yeah. This also speaks to individual differences. Right. And probably why 

which includes this, like the capacity to tolerate distress or how quickly you can move on to something else in your mind, versus whether you're the person who stews and can't fall asleep, you know, and ruminates about this. But other people who can be in the same fight and two minutes later are watching TV, not a care in mind. Right. So I think there's a lot of difference there also. And neither is one better than the other. 

So that's the other thing that I think really gets people into trouble: to say, we should all be this way or that way, when in fact, this is the acceptance piece, this is the individual difference piece. We're all the way we are for reasons we might not know. All the reasons. Some of it is biological that we can't fully tap into. Another aspect of it is learning history, how we learned in our childhood and early adulthood, up till now, to respond to things. So the fact that I am somebody who has a hard time distracting and has a hard time falling asleep when something's going on is probably hardwired in me to a certain extent, and somebody then saying to me just get over it or ” Just stop thinking about it is not helpful. Right. It doesn't actually help me. 

Even if it's very well intentioned. 

Yes, thank you for speaking to that. I think this also brings up the skill around non-judgment and how to in how we apply that to ourselves and also to our partner. Okay, wonderful. I feel like I could do a whole week with you, 

I know, let's keep going. 

Well. Okay. So, is there anything you want to say as we kind of wind down around one of the things you have what you and your co-author have a couple of skills around how to dialogue around a request or have? And that's probably not going to go fully deep into it, but do you want to mention? 

Yeah. So I should also say that DBT skills are very heavy on the acronyms, which, for many people, is kind of like an eye roll. Like, what is this acronym? But you have to remember that the acronyms are mnemonics to help you remember. 

That's it. 

So there's a well-known skill in DBT that's the interpersonal effectiveness skill. That's called DEAR MAN. And the DEAR MAN skill, so that's seven letters. D-E-A-R M-A-N are skills that are designed to help you get your objective in terms of that priority that we talked about. And it teaches you how to ask for something or how to say no to something in a way that increases the chances the other person will give you what you want. And it is amazing. Jessica, I will just tell you because I never learned this as a kid, and so I learned it when I went to grad school and was learning DBT. And that was a long time ago now. 

And to this day, if there's a situation interpersonally that I'm feeling anxious about, I still think in my head D-E-A-R. Like, what am I going to say here? In fact, it just came up last week because we had a snowstorm, and an issue with a neighbor arose. You know, like that's another relationship that often causes, you know, issues. And I had to go talk to the neighbor about something, and I was anxious about it. So I actually worked out a little script in my head as to how I'm going to do it ahead of time. That really helped me feel not only less anxious going into it, but also much clearer about what it was I was asking for. Because so much of the time, 

Yes, we have a real hard time directly asserting that's what the A in DEAR MAN is to assert what it is you're asking for. Would you mind not parking your car here? Right. Could you move your chair in after you get up? That is the assertion. Instead, 

And that really gets in the way of us being effective. 

Yes. I couldn't agree with you. And I would say intimate relationship partners typically will get stuck on describing the problem because they're not in agreement. So they spend all of their energy and time trying to get a consensus on the problem. When that is likely going back to the acceptance versus change. People being different is probably not even possible. 

Yes, exactly. And. And something that we teach when we teach the DEAR MAN skill is to keep it short and sweet. Because if you go on for five minutes about describing the problem, that's describing the problem. You will have lost the person at 10 seconds because now they're in defensive mode, or they're in eye roll mode, or they're whatever. But if you say describe the situation, I've noticed when you get up, you often leave the chair out. That's it. Right. That's described. Not oh, and you also do this, and you do this other thing. And here's the laundry list. List of things that I'm reacting to. You really want to keep it focused. 

I love this. And I can already just feel, as we're talking here, how this helps with mindfulness because even the preparation you're getting is really clear and a little bit more present and guiding. What's the objective, what the ask is, or what the conversation goal is? There are so many. This all interweaves so beautifully. Well, I again appreciate all that you've shared. I can tell how much more wealth of knowledge and resources. Where would you like to direct people who are interested in getting your book, your co-author's book, or just getting more experience with practicing these skills? 

Yeah. Thank you so much. So our book is called Real Skills for Real Life. And you could have it published by Guilford Press, so you could get it at Guilford Press, guilford.com, or Amazon. You could also go to my website, where I have a lot of resources, and we have a lot of videos that teach the skills as well, including some resources from the book. And that website is shireenrizvi.com, LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/shireen-rizvi-  and I'll mention one other thing for your audience that might be of particular interest, is that there is another DBT expert named Alan Frazetti who has developed DBT for couples and developed a lot of work on DBT for couples. He wrote a book, but I can't remember what year it was published. It was a little while ago that's called the High Conflict Couple and DBT Skills. 

I don't love that title because the reason I don't love that title is that I actually think what he talks about in the book is DBT skills and validation and all of this that we've been talking about that could be relevant for any couple, not just high conflict ones. And so I hope that title doesn't turn people away if they're interested in that. But that's another resource that I would suggest. 

Excellent. I'll make sure to have the link to your book, your website, and also the book you're mentioning, High Conflict Couple. And again, thank you so much for all that you're doing and sharing here with us. 

Thank you so much for having me on, Jessica.