After Multiple Traumas, DBT Helped Me Take Back My Mental Health

Trigger Warning: This article describes assault and suicidal ideation.

When I was 15 years old, my whole life changed. Unfortunately, I don’t just mean that I finally got my driving permit or started high school—instead, I found out that I had stage 3 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Flash forward to the beginning of college. I started my freshman year at UCLA in 2018, and I had never been more excited for anything in my life. Like most 18-year-olds, I thought it was a chance to reinvent myself and start over. However, one month after I started school, I was sexually assaulted, and it sent me into a deep spiral.

Instead of reaching out for help, I isolated myself in my dorm room and refrained from telling anyone what had happened to me. Even though I was in such a negative headspace, I entered an unhealthy relationship that left me feeling more alone and ashamed than ever.

All of this compacted on to the trauma I experienced when I was sick led to me self-harm and eventually attempt to take my own life. During this time, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, PTSD, and OCD. I began going to talk therapy regularly, but I needed more support than I was getting.

This was when Dialectical Behavior Therapy, better known as DBT, was recommended to me. 

I had no idea there were even multiple types of therapy before I started DBT. However, there are actually five unique categories of therapy recognized by the American Psychological Association: psychoanalysis, behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy, humanistic therapy, and integrative or holistic therapy.

According to psychologist Lauren Kerwin, Ph.D., DBT is “a treatment that blends humanistic interpersonal systems, zen philosophy, and cognitive behavioral approaches into a coherent whole that helps clients not only survive but learn the skills necessary to build a life worth living.”

For so long, I wouldn’t even question my negative thoughts; I would just believe them. For example, if I made a mistake and told myself “I am a horrible person who deserves to be punished,” I was convinced it was the truth. It made me feel horrible because for so long I let my thoughts determine how I viewed who I was as a human being.

After going to DBT, I was given the tools to question whether my thoughts were true or just something that I made up in my mind. I started to become more aware of my negative thoughts and realized that’s all they were: just thoughts.

Before DBT, I was really struggling with self-harming. When I made a mistake, my first urge was to hurt myself. Even if I didn’t want to self-harm, my emotions felt out of my control and I felt like there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

As much as I talked about tools I can use to stop self-harming with my talk therapist when it came down to the moment I needed to use them, it didn’t feel like enough. Like, how was I supposed to go read a book when I had an intense urge to hurt myself?

DBT taught me that we deserve to set boundaries and speak up for what we need from other people. If we don’t say something, then how will other people know when something is wrong? We can’t just go through life expecting other people to know what we want from them.