 Welcome to this week's book review. Each week, I review a book I believe would be helpful to the general public and or clinicians. I'm never paid to do the reviews. However, in some instances, I may receive a small commission if you purchase the item, which helps to free the cost of our podcast and providing the free educational videos. The cost to you, however, remains the same. This week, we're gonna talk about the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook. And this one was written by Matthew McKay. He is one of my favorite writers, so you're probably gonna see a lot of books by him. This is an excellent tool to use in conjunction with DBT Made Simple by Sherry Van Dyke. This is more the client workbook. It provides practical tools and is much lighter on theory in terms of what DBT is, et cetera. But it does provide a lot of activities to help people build skills in the areas of distress tolerance, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. So the book really progresses in four segments. It starts out with helping people develop distress tolerance. If you've got emotional dysregulation, you feel overwhelmed by your emotions a lot of the time. This is probably where you wanna start anyway, so great. He presents activities to help you learn techniques such as radical acceptance, distraction, self soothing, how to create a relaxation plan, exploring values and committing to behaviors that help you get closer to what is important to you and forgo behaviors which move you away from your goals. So all of those things can help you use your energy in a positive way and learn how to tolerate or get through emotional turmoil. The next part moves on to mindfulness and he presents activities such as the single object focus to help you start learning how to become more mindful. Now, mindfulness does not have to be meditation, which is what he teaches you in this book. There are ways to be mindful, to be present, to be aware without actually engaging in meditation. So if that makes you uncomfortable to do meditation, well, he's got a lot of suggestions for you. He moves on to thought diffusing and unhooking so you can step back from your emotions and instead of being consumed by them, you can see them as something that is there and will eventually go away. Then he talks about focus shifting to help you learn how to train your mind to focus on what you want it to instead of being all over the place, which is what sometimes we call monkey mind. He talks about beginner's mind, which is basically the principle that no matter what's going on right now, every moment is a new opportunity, every moment is a new beginning. So you don't have to wait till tomorrow or next week to try to make things better. You can start right now in the next moment. He talks about negative judgments and mindfulness and gives you activities for daily mindfulness practice. So you start becoming more aware of what's going on with you and what your needs are so you can prevent distress as often as possible. So now that you have some tolerance skills and you're becoming more aware of what you need, he introduces concepts of emotion regulation and helps you recognize and explore the rewards and costs of self-destructive behaviors, helps you look at ways to reduce physical and cognitive vulnerabilities, such as cognitive distortions, not getting enough sleep, poor nutrition, et cetera. And talks about things such as using opposite actions and problem solving in order to help you regulate your emotions and not feel like they're overwhelming you. The last section he focuses on interpersonal effectiveness because no matter where you are, you're going to interact with other people. And part of being effective and getting your needs met is first knowing what you need and want, then assertively asking for it in a win-win sort of way and learning how to set and maintain boundaries, say yes when you want to say no and be okay with that when you need to. And finally he ends with coping with resistance and conflict because some people are not going to take kindly to it right away if you start setting boundaries and you haven't had boundaries before and he talks about why it's important to maintain your boundaries and how to deal with conflict when it happens. My favorite parts are that it's a workbook so the activities for the individual or group are already created, they're in the book, the workbook is fillable so you don't have to have extra pieces of paper or notebooks or anything like that. It's an awesome self-help guide for clients. So if you're not interested in going to therapy or you're not in therapy right now, it's a great place to start. Or if you are in therapy or if you're a therapist, this is a great adjunct to individual and group therapy. If you're a therapist, you may wanna also look at DBT Made Simple by Sherry Van Dyke which is a book I have all my supervisees get so they understand the concepts of emotional dysregulation and some of the tools of distress tolerance and the mind-body connection and vulnerabilities. Both of these books provide excellent tools for coping with life in general. You don't have to be running a DBT program. As a matter of fact, like I said, neither of these books will make you a DBT practitioner. They will introduce you to the skills and tools and help you develop skills and tools that are helpful in feeling happier and living a healthier life.