Self Management Course for Living with Chronic Pain

This week we are going to talk about why DBT skills are helpful if you are living with chronic pain and introduce you to your wise mind.

In this lesson, you’ll explore the core mindfulness skills that are central to DBT: what mindfulness is and how to practice it. You’ll learn why these skills are so powerful for managing both physical discomfort and emotional distress, and how to begin applying them in daily life, even on the toughest days. Through readings, reflections, and practical exercises, this lesson will help you slow down, tune in, and respond more skillfully to your experience.

There are 3 main goals of distress tolerance:

1. Survive pain flare ups without them escalating.

2. Accept reality as it is in the moment.

3. To become truly free.

Crisis survival skills are about staying a float, they may not make things better, but they will help stop things from escalating further. At times staying afloat and not drowning is the most important thing.

When pain or distress becomes overwhelming, it can feel like your emotions—and your body—are in overdrive. The TIPP skills are powerful body-based strategies to help you calm down quickly and safely. Each skill targets your nervous system directly, helping bring down emotional intensity and creating space to think more clearly.

When life feels overwhelming, our first instinct is often to escape, avoid, or react impulsively. But DBT offers us something more powerful: the ability to ride out emotional storms without making things worse. In this lesson, we explore three key distress tolerance skills—ACCEPTS, Self-Soothing, and IMPROVE—designed to help you get through difficult moments with more ease and less suffering.

In the next two sessions we are going to learn about Radical Acceptance. To quote Viktor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms- to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s on way.”

In this lesson, we explore DBT practices that support emotional resilience. Turning the Mind is the practice of repeatedly choosing the path of acceptance, especially when your mind and emotions are pulling you back into resistance and suffering. Willing Hands and Half-Smile, is a simple yet profound body-based exercise. Together, these practices remind us that even when we cannot control reality, we can control how we respond to it—with willingness, openness, and grace.

This week we are going to learn two skills for practicing Radical Acceptance. Willingness and Half smile, Willing Hands.

Lets begin.

This week we are learning about how to be mindful of current thoughts

In this lesson we explore Observing, Describing and Naming Emotions

Sometimes our emotions feel so strong that they seem to take over completely. But not all emotions are “just right” for the situation. They can be too intense, last too long, or even be based on assumptions rather than facts.

DBT teaches that one of the first ways to change emotions is to Check the Facts.

Last week we learnt about using “Checking the Facts” to change unwanted emotions. This lesson we learn about how to use “Opposite Action” - acting opposite to your emotional urge to do something.

This week we learn about how to use problem solving as a technique for emotion regulation and review how to use opposite action and problem solving.

This week we are going to focus on the A in ABC. A stands for accumulating positive emotions. The reason why we do this is that by practicing accumulating positive events in your life you become more resilient over time to negative experiences and you can manage pain flares more effectively.

We pick up after learning about Accumulating Positive Emotions in the Long Term and learn about the B in ABC ie Building Mastery

In this lesson we focus on self care.

Chronic pain can strain our relationships. It can make asking for help hard, or leave us saying “yes” when we mean “no.” Interpersonal skills help us communicate our needs, set healthy boundaries, and maintain supportive connections. This lesson is about finding balance—between caring for others and caring for yourself.

In this lesson we are going to continue talking about boundaries, but this time it is about setting healthy boundaries in co-dependent relationships

In our last lesson on communication strategies, we are going to look at different intensities of saying no or asking for something.