This skill is extremely helpful in a short term crisis or situations where you need to distract yourself quickly from people, events, or emotions that are difficult for you to cope with to prevent the situation escalating. This skill should be reserved for use in a crisis rather than every day problems.
what does accepts stand for?
Activities Contributing Comparisons Emotions Pushing away Thoughts Sensations
activites
On of the main distraction techniques that you will come across is to engage in some kind of alternative activity in order to take you mind off any negative feelings, help you find a calmer place in your mind and in DBT it is used to help move you out of emotional mind and into wise mind. For ACCEPTS, we want to choose an activity that will engage us, something that you know you will enojy doing or something that is time consuming and will require you to focus you attention on it such as tidying the house, playing a game, going out for a walk with a friend, etc.
Have a look at our ACCEPTS specific list of distraction techniques so you have a list at hand for whenever you may need it.
contributing
When we feel overwhelmed with negative emotions it can be easy to fall into the spiral of feeling like we contribute nothing and feeling useless and that is not the case. When we do something to help others, we get a feeling of accomplishment which can help us to find meaning and purpose easier in those difficult times. Something simple such as writing a friend a lovely letter, sending a nice text to someone you love or volunteering can be extremely positive way of distracting us from intense and difficult emotions while simultaneously connecting us with another person.
comparisons
Normally comparisons are seen as a negative, right? But here we are using this concept in a more positive way. Instead of comparing yourself in a detrimental, negative sense to say, someone on social media and comparing your life to theirs we are using this as a way to compare ourselves right now to an earlier time when perhaps you were feeling as bad as you are now or worse. This part of the skills isn’t to invalidate how we are feeling but to remind us that we have maybe been here before and got through it or perhaps you are coping better now than you would have done a year ago for example. The idea of this step is to remember that you have felt like this before and it will get better. This particular part of ACCEPTS isn’t helpful for everyone and that’s ok. If this doesn’t work for you then concentrate on the skills and steps that do.
emotions
What are you feeling right now? What is the opposite? We need to find the opposite of our current emotions here and engage in something that cultivates that opposing emotion. An example would be, if you’re feeling sad or low then then you could listen to uplifting, happy music or watch a comedy.
pushing away
This step is to keep in mind that you are allowed to leave the situation. Whether that be physically or mentally, you are allowed to take a step back and leave it temporarily when you find yourself in a physical or mental situation that you just don’t feel able to cope with in the moment.
thoughts
Understandably, you mind is likely filled with whatever it is that is distressing you right now. This step in ACCEPTS is working to temporarily cover all of these bad thoughts up. To do this we need to very literally cover them up inside our heads with other thoughts. Now it’s sometimes almost impossible to think of other things during times of distress so starting with things to essentially should your new thoughts louder than the ones making you feel terrible e.g counting – this one is good to start because it’s easy to just think of each number after the other and can help you to regain enough control to move onto something like “singing” a song inside your head, using the lyrics to “shout” over the top of the bad thoughts swirling around, watching TV and focusing on the dialogue and storyline, reading and concentrating on the words and the plot or every putting a podcast or audio book on.
sensations
This step is essentially the same as the last except we are looking to distract our minds with sensations rather than thoughts e.g biting a lemon or eating some sour sweets, take a warm or cool shower, light some incense or a candle, hold onto and ice pack, etc. This could be a great time to crack out the self soothe box or try the temperature step of the TIPP skill.
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