What Is Interpersonal Effectiveness
United States Department of Homeland Security
Key Points
- Mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and dialectical thinking are for self-regulation.
- Interpersonal effectiveness is about learning to deal with other people.
- Interpersonal effectiveness skills include all of the other skills
- Interpersonal effectiveness is meeting your wants and needs while balancing acceptance and change within relationships.
- This balance includes skills that make healthy relationships stronger, and terminate unhealthy ones.
- Interpersonal effectiveness is the middle path between independence and dependence
- Assertiveness refers to the middle path between too passive and too aggressive.
- Too passive, too aggressive, and passive-aggressive are all ineffective because they require a loser in order to work.
- The most effective approach is to be assertive
Materials Downloads
DBT for Trauma Online Training
Learn how to support clients struggling with trauma and complex trauma without reliance on traditional exposure methods.
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Transcript
Greetings, and welcome to the first video in this series on interpersonal effectiveness, which is the fifth and final skill set in TF-DBT. So far in this training program, we have covered mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and dialectical thinking. Interpersonal effectiveness is all about taking all of these skills and applying them to relationships. So let’s get started.
Okay. So, so far in this course, like I just mentioned, we’ve covered all of these great skill sets, right, such as mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and dialectical thinking. So what all of these skills have in common is learning to self-regulate, in other words, learning to deal with yourself. Interpersonal effectiveness, in contrast, is learning to deal with other people. Self-regulation can be challenging enough. Dealing with other people is exponentially more difficult.
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. New Harbinger Publications.
For example, how can you be mindful in relationships if you’re not even mindful of your own thoughts and feelings and triggers? Or how can you tolerate someone else’s distress if you can’t even cope with your own? Or how can you deal with someone else’s emotions if you can’t handle your own emotions? Or how can you see something from someone else’s perspective if you don’t even understand the idea of multiple perspectives in the first place, right? So in other words, interpersonal effectiveness skills inherently include all of the other skills we have learned so far.
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. New Harbinger Publications.