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The Quote I Have On My Office Wall As A DBT-Informed Therapist
- Kat Schultz
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
There are some amazing quotes about DBT out there. But there are also some very famous quotes that I feel connect brilliantly to DBT despite having nothing to do with this evidence-based therapy.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a synthesis of Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Zen Buddhism. It incorporates mindfulness skills into the foundation of CBT. It's used to treat emotion dysregulation and self-destructive behaviors, among other mental health struggles.
I'm a therapist who has a lot of personal and professional experience using DBT. I have a print of this James Baldwin quote on my wall, right where my clients (and myself!) can read it. I got it to display because it reminds me of the DBT skill Radical Acceptance.
Radical acceptance is a skill meant to reduce distress by facilitating acceptance of the current (usually painful) reality. Radically accepting the present moment doesn't mean that you approve of it or like it, it means you stop rejecting its truth. Radical acceptance is not the end of the journey; it's the beginning. One cannot move forward and towards change until reality is accepted. To use a metaphor, one cannot get warm by putting on a coat unless one accepts that it is, indeed, cold. To make the change to warm up, we have to admit we are cold.
The quote from James Baldwin that I have on my wall reads "Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed unless it is faced." Doesn't that sound like radical acceptance?
James Baldwin was a Black, queer writer and civil rights activist. His essays, novels, plays, and poetry often focused on race, sexuality, and class and the struggle to find oneself in the face of these powerful, often oppressive forces.
Radical acceptance is not only important in our personal lives to reduce distress and open up the possibility of change, but it is also important on the grander scale of societal change. Nothing can be changed unless we accept that reality is not as we want it to be in the present. In other words, dream of a better future, accept that we are not there yet, and create change to move us closer.
The specific print of Baldwin's quote that I have is this amazing block print from PerlaAnne Press.
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