What Is Distress Tolerance?

Greetings, and welcome to the second video in this module. In this lesson, we will answer the question, what is distress tolerance? So, let’s get started.

Distress tolerance is all about learning to survive the moment without making it worse. In other words, distress tolerance has a short-term rather than a long-term focus. In fact, you can think of distress tolerance as sort of like harm reduction or even damage control. The goal is not necessarily long-term change, that’s where later skills will come in handy, but rather short-term coping strategies so that bad situations do not get even worse. You can also think of distress tolerance as learning to turn unbearable pain into bearable pain. In other words, the purpose of distress tolerance is not necessarily to reduce or eliminate pain but rather to find ways to make pain more manageable.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.,Reutter, K. (2019). The dialectical behavior therapy skills workbook for PTSD: Practical exercises for overcoming trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (1st ed.). New Harbinger Publications.

The purpose of distress tolerance is to replace impulsive, dangerous, addictive, or suicidal behaviors with safer, more effective coping strategies. So What do we mean by impulsive, or dangerous, or addictive behaviors? Well, we mean behaviors such as cutting, or illegal drugs, or road rage, or random hookups, in other words, behaviors which tend to make things even worse or cause even more of a crisis. So put another way, the purpose of distress tolerance is to reduce a crisis orientation.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.,Reutter, K. (2019). The dialectical behavior therapy skills workbook for PTSD: Practical exercises for overcoming trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (1st ed.). New Harbinger Publications.