DBT for PMDD
Hey y'all, no surprise here, but need to disclaim; I am in no way a health care professional. These are not professional opinions. I am sharing my unique perspective on DBT and PMDD, and how I use different coping mechanisms in my personal life. My goal is to share these personal accounts in an attempt to help even one individual to feel seen and supported, less alone, or even better, find new ways of coping that helps them as well.** You will see the word Bleeder in my blogs. This is an inclusive term I use as a short hand to describe people who menstruate.Lately, I’ve been thinking about Dialectical Behavior Therapy and its major purposes, as it relates to PMDD. For those of you who are unfamiliar, DBT is a common tool of talk therapy that is used to help us regulate our emotions. It is similar to CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but is specifically designed for people who experience very extreme emotions. When you live with intense feelings of emotion, it becomes harder to separate yourself from the emotion. Some people may only experience some emotions intensely, while other people may experience most or all of their emotions very intensely.
When you can’t separate yourself from your emotions, you can react to things from a purely emotional standpoint, and logic can diminish. This is why most people when experiencing PMS or PMDD are familiar with other people telling them that they are being irrational. This is, more accurately, what that means. Your emotional mind is overpowering your logical mind. It doesn’t reflect on you as a person, because once again, you are not your emotion. When you’re experiencing such extreme emotions and someone tells you that you’re reacting irrationally, that can feel like a direct or personal attack or judgment.
When that happens, we start to feel that we shouldn’t trust ourselves, or that we have poor judgment when we are in our luteal phase. Or even still, have others who may say these things to us, even if only to try to be helpful.
I go on Reddit from time to time and joined the PMDD subreddit. I came across several posts, with hundreds of comments, about how people experiencing PMDD feel like they need to be away from everything and everyone, or they may explode. The bleeders** feel they become irrationally angry and act only from this emotional place. So many bleeders say they feel like they want to just break up with their partners, quit their jobs, all the things that would seemingly give them space and time to only themselves, yet would drastically alter their lives.
DBT may point to this and say, okay, yes there are emotions here, AND what is the emotion trying to DO for you?
In DBT the idea is that each emotion that we experience is meant to motivate us into action. So for example, if we are being harrassed at work by a coworker, we may experience frustration. This frustration is trying to call us into action; the emotion is saying, “this is not okay, you need to do something about it, because this is uncomfortable. We need to find a place of comfortability again.” This emotion will motivate us to do what frustration is meant to do; -vent to a loved one, who may help you to feel validated to report the coworker-tell the upper management that you’re being harrassed and it needs to stop-if you are the upper management, firing their ass. So what I take from DBT is that, if our emotions are SCREAMING at us during the Luteal Phase, maybe it’s not something we need to be trying to work around, but through. Yes, these emotions can be so intense. But what is the emotion trying to motivate you to do?
Example: You cannot stand to be around your partner when you are in your luteal phase. Everything that comes out of their mouths just feels like its condescending, or patronizing. You feel like this is becoming a HUGE issue and you need to just break up with them. You can barely stand to hold a conversation. Your emotions are causing you to react from a place of irritability. You cop an attitude, you are unhappy. You get into an argument with them because they don’t feel like you’re acting right, whatever that means to them, and they don’t appreciate the way you’re being short with them. This will just keep snowballing if you don't stop to see what the motivator is, and really truly look into what the emotion is here that’s being presented in the first place. Maybe its that you just haven’t had any real time to yourself lately to decompress, and you need to just be alone for a little while to center yourself. Maybe its that you don’t know how to handle their needs at the same time as your own in that moment (once again because your needs may not be being met). Maybe you have too much responsibility on you that week with work, and therefore don’t feel like you have the capacity to try and understand your partner. Or maybe, your partner changes their behavior around you when they know its your PMDD flare up, and what they think may be helpful is actually not. They may not understand what is actually is that you need from them. I think others with PMDD could understand that the person in the example just simply needs less stimulation, perhaps more sleep, a solid meal, and time away from things that are not those specific needs. I think when it really comes down to it, any time we are being told by an extreme emotion to quit the job, break up with the partner, end the friendship, quit the hobby, its simply showing us that we need space to just simply exist, alone, even if for a short while, to recenter and connect. There is a reason that our luteal phase is linked with a heightened sense of introspection and intuition! And I believe our minds, bodies, and souls need that on a deep level at this time of the month, some more than others. Although therapy is often recommended for those with PMDD, there are a lot of other voices out there telling us to treat the symptoms. While I think it’s important to treat our symptoms with tenderness and love, I do think it’s equally as important to check in with ourselves and see if us treating the symptoms is merely just masking them so that we can try to push through with our daily lives and obligations. It goes back to the concept of if you don’t let your body rest, it will decide to rest for you, and it won’t be at a convenient time.
Taking the time we need when we can get them, rather than pushing through, to see if we can withstand just one more work meeting, or one more late night tucking the kids in while our partner may still be working, or whatever it may be. It’s crucial to remember that everything we do creates a ripple effect. If we push ourselves too far and become sick, injured, or mentally/emotionally unstable, we will be out of commission completely for some time, and feel the need to only overcompensate once we are back on our feet, which further perpetuates this cycle.
One thing that helps me break out of this cycle is doing the work with DBT. I was concerned that therapy would be a way of actively suppressing my intense emotions, in order to regulate them. Like putting blinders on a horse. I had no idea that I would be able to actually explore and become intimate with these emotions with the use of therapy. My preconceived notion was that I would have to work through understanding why my reactions were not okay or appropriate during my luteal phase. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. DBT has forged a deeper connection with myself, and understanding why I do the things I do. I feel like this was a very important first step for be before utilizing the hermetic principles and other forms of spiritualism, of which this blog will mostly be comprised of (I promise!)
To be suppressed for me would have meant not implementing the expansive amount of awareness and intuition that I receive during this time of the month. I have a better understanding of how my emotion dance with my intuition, and how I can trust them, but only when I take a moment to really see them and explore them, instead of taking them at face value.
If you are not able to obtain therapy, there are plenty of DBT workbooks and information online, many as free resources that you can use to help yourself.
REDDIT FORUM: PMDD relief using DBT