Pineapple Support to Host New DBT Online Support Group

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LOS ANGELES — Pineapple Support has announced a free, online support group with a focus on using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) techniques to improve interpersonal skills.

The six-week support group, led by therapist Sophia Graham, will start on Friday, August 20.

“Our efforts to manage our own emotions are frequently challenged by our interactions with other people,” said Graham. “Sometimes this leads us to behave impulsively or to explode, damaging our relationships. Other times we can fail to speak up assertively for what we need, which can lead to resentment or misunderstandings later. This course is about empowering us to handle interpersonal situations more effectively.”

Pineapple Support founder Leya Tanit said, “This course invites you to reflect on the myths that can hold you back in relationships, while teaching you how to be more assertive.”

“Sophia is a disabled, queer coach and therapist working primarily with marginalized individuals and groups,” Tanit added. “Sophia’s work can help you gain control over your life and relationships. These flexible and scientifically supported dialectical behavior therapy techniques are a way to clearer communication and more fulfilling relationships.”

The two-hour “DBT Interpersonal Effectiveness” support group begins on Friday, August 20 at 10 a.m. (PDT), and will take place online each Friday at the same time until September 24.

Pineapple Support Sponsors Free Online Therapy Course

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A free, online therapy course, sponsored by Pineapple Support, launches Tuesday, April 14. The seven-week course will utilize Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) to help industry members develop tolerance skills while in isolation during the production hold.

The two-hour weekly sessions, led by Pineapple Support therapist Sophie Graham, will be held from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. (PDT) and focus on coping mechanisms that can be used during times of crisis.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is causing lots of people to experience distress,” explained Graham. “This might be because of fear of getting sick, or it could be financial stress, or the impact of being in closer than usual quarters with the folks that we live with. This course is all about finding ways to reduce your distress — using your body as well as your brain. It helps you to develop your capacity to manage distress better.”

To reserve a spot, email contact@pineapplesupport.org.

“It can be a struggle to cope with overwhelming events,” said Pineapple Support Founder Leya Tanit. “We can end up in crisis, and that can cause us to behave in ways that cause us shame or create practical problems in our lives. This course equips you with DBT skills to manage distressing situations without derailing your life or relationships.”

For the latest updates, follow Pineapple Support online and on Twitter.

Free Emotion Regulation, DBT Course with Sophia Graham

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Who am I?

I’m a disabled, queer coach and therapist working primarily with marginalised individuals and groups. I’m especially excited about working with people interested in building psychological skills so they feel more able to manage the challenges in their lives in their own way. I believe that we are the experts in our own lives and that finding new tools and developing new skills helps us to create the lives we want to live.
Why work with performers?

Therapy professionals, in general, have not been great at working with people outside the mainstream. This means that performers can really struggle to access high-quality support. As someone that has had been really let down in the past by judgemental and unprofessional therapists, I know what that is like. I also know that it takes a huge toll on people’s wellbeing, and sometimes costs lives. I want that to change, and I’m doing my bit to try to make that change in the world.

What is Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)

Dialectic Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is a non-pathologising approach that teaches skills for creating a life worth living. It focuses on the areas of mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance and emotional regulation. The DBT approach is one of the most heavily researched and validated forms of psychotherapy. It was initially designed for clients with a borderline personality disorder diagnosis but has been found to be effective in relation to a broad range of diagnoses including depression and anxiety. This is a peer group where we work together to learn DBT skills and practice them in our lives between sessions. One of the most important parts of this approach is working with others to understand the skills we are learning. Homework is an essential component of DBT, and you will be given worksheets to complete each week between sessions. We go through these in detail each session, and that’s where a lot of the learning happens, as people are able to share their experiences, successes and challenges.

Why emotion regulation?

Out of control emotions can make it hard to maintain friendships, romantic relationships and can even jeopardise our careers. Many of us never learned the skills we need to cope with difficult emotions, and that makes it impossible to deal effectively with stressful or distressing situations that inevitably come up in our lives. This course teaches participants how to recognise, understand and regulate emotions so that they have more choices about how to manage day to day stressors and distressing events.

Why interpersonal effectiveness?

Our efforts to manage our own emotions are frequently challenged by our interactions with other people. Sometimes this leads us to behave in ways that we later regret. Other times we can fail to speak up assertively for what we need, which can lead to resentment or misunderstandings later. This course is about empowering us to handle interpersonal situations more effectively.

Why distress tolerance?

There are no lives without pain, and everyone has crises at times. These times of intense emotional dysregulation can lead to out of control behaviours that can damage our relationships, life and reputation. This course teaches techniques for reducing emotional activation and distress. It equips participants with skills to practice in their lives so they are able to deal with crises more effectively and cope better with intense distress.

Time commitment

You will attend a 2-hour session each week and complete homework between sessions which usually takes between 20 minutes and an hour.

What do you do in a group meeting?

We start with a mindfulness exercise, then in each session after the first, we go through the homework and discuss each of our experiences with it for the first hour. This hour helps us to consolidate our skills and troubleshoot any problems. Then we have a 5-10 minute break before learning a new skill.

To apply please please click on the link found at pineapplesupport.org/support-groups

Five ways to work with a social comedown

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If you haven’t read the last post, you might want to start there, since it has a much longer definition of what a social comedown is. In brief, social comedowns consist of difficult thoughts, sensations, feelings and urges arising after socialising that often include ruminating over past distress and judging yourself for having a hard time. They can include deep-seated feelings of shame, inadequacy, sadness, guilt, dread and embarrassment.

There are a huge range of ways to work with social comedowns; if they are having a big impact on your life, I’d recommend talking to a coach or therapist about how to find the best way for you. People are really individual, and because we each have our own histories and preferences no single option is going to work for everyone. Nevertheless, here are 5 ways that you could try to see if they fit for you:

  1. Focus on the sensations

Many people experience emotions in their bodies. If you are a person that can feel emotions in this way it can be a wonderful way of just being with one aspect of your emotional experience. Rather than doing things to avoid the sensations in your body, approach them with a sense of curiosity. Find a comfortable position to sit or lie in for 5 minutes, and just scan your body for sensations. When you find a sensation in your body that is related to your emotions be curious about it. Notice whether it is hot or cold, its density, whether it is staying still or moving. Notice its size and shape, and whether there is a colour or texture to it. Is there any tension to it? Just allow it to be exactly what it is in your body without trying to change it or move it. Notice what it is like to accept that you are experiencing this sensation. When your thoughts drift as they inevitably will, just bring yourself back and allow yourself to notice whether anything is different about the sensation.

This practice can help you to be with emotional experiences without ruminating or avoiding – which both usually make emotional experiences more intense and difficult to manage. It can help you to accept your emotions and allow you to move on from them. This is an exercise that you can practice in advance so that it is easier to remember when you are experiencing distress – and don’t be afraid to use it when you’re having nice sensations in your body as well as more difficult ones.

2) Mindfulness of thoughts

Creating space between you and your thoughts can be a hugely helpful alternative to ruminating. My favourite way of doing this is to imagine tiny boats going down a river, and then as I notice thoughts come up, I put them onto one of the boats and letting them go as they float off. Sometimes I can’t help jumping on the boat with the thought, and I have to ‘unhook’ myself by jumping off the boat back to the shore. That’s OK too. People often get caught by a thought and feel really compelled to follow it to its conclusion. Noticing that happen is a really important part of this technique, because it allows you to find the moment to decide not to follow the thought further, ideally without having further judgemental thoughts about yourself! Different people have different preferred ways to visualise their thoughts. While I prefer boats, others like leaves on a stream; trains on a track or balloons floating their thoughts away. Whatever your preference, noticing the thought is happening, and letting it come and go through your mind is a hugely powerful way to remind yourself that no matter how much a thought feels like your whole world, you can let it go.

Some examples of audio files to help you with mindfulness of thoughts are here:

3) Urge surfing

We all have urges to do and not to do things all the time. The urge may be to hide in bed all day or to lash out at someone or get really drunk. Sometimes it is helpful to notice what we really want to do, and just sit with that desire. You may notice the desire is located in a part of your body – and this process may be very similar to the first suggestion of sensation watching. Alternatively, urges may be a really different kind of experience for you than other sensations. Here are a couple of audio files to use for sitting with your urges:

4) Do intense exercise

People that know me will know that intense exercises isn’t something I’m usually keen on. Nevertheless, increasing your heart rate and keeping it above 120 beats per minute for 10-15 minutes helps a lot of people to manage distress. Some people think that it is because you get to complete the stress response cycle by using up some of the energy boost that you get when you’re facing a stressful or distressing situation. Some think it is an intense form of distraction that is helpful because it allows you to shift your attention to something else happening in your body. I think it is a mix of these things, and that it works really well for some people. If you want to try it, jumping, skipping or running can be a good way of getting your heart rate into that zone and holding it there.

5) Do a paired muscle relaxation exercise

This exercise can help because you’re both distracting from the distressing thoughts, feelings, sensations and urges that you’re feeling, and you’re doing something to physiologically relax your body and give it the message that you’re safe.  We know that tensing and then relaxing muscles helps them to relax more fully than trying to relax them without tensing first. If you want to do this you can find exercises here:

If you’d like to do more work on how to cope with social come downs and other mental health challenges think about joining one of my DBT groups. We work on psychological skill building to help you to manage interpersonal relationships, distress and emotions. You can find more information here.

Social comedowns: the morning after the night before

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So you’ve heard of the social hangover, but what about the social comedown? A social hangover is the experience of feeling drained, exhausted and in need of recovery time after a social event. There has been a lot written about it probably because it is a pretty common experience, particularly amongst introverts. But what about its lesser known cousin, the social comedown? A comedown is when you experience a physical and/or emotional crash, usually after having an intense experience or taking psychoactive substances. Whilst some comedowns are fairly mild and can be similar to hangovers, others can be really intense and longer lasting.

What is a social comedown?

Social comedowns consist of  difficult thoughts, sensations, feelings and urges arising after socialising that often include ruminating over past distress and judging yourself for having a hard time. They are most common the morning after an intense social situation, usually a group hangout, but sometimes one to one situations can provoke them as well. More unusually, some people experience a social comedown towards the end of hangout time or immediately after leaving a social situation. The physical sensations can start off really similar to a social hangover, and can include feeling tired, drained, and listless. The emotional symptoms can be wide-ranging, from sadness, guilt, dread, emptiness, lonliness, embarrassment or shame through to panic about having said or done the wrong thing. These emotions can lead to someone taking a mental tour of the social time, analysing in detail every potentially awkward or embarrassing social interaction. Every time they did something that could be seen as weird, every misplaced smile or frown.

Even when someone knows logically that everything was fine, and that their friends wouldn’t judge them for their behaviour it can be nearly impossible to step away from critically over-analyzing every moment. Worse, the analysis of the social event can lead people to a lowlights reel of all their most humiliating social interactions and ruminating over all the ways they have been awkward in the past. Because this is a cycle, people usually feel better a couple of days later, but rather than being able to move on from these feelings, they can get stuck being judgemental towards themselves about having the feelings at all. That, in turn, attacks their self-esteem and self-worth. If this resonates with your experience, know this: you are far from alone.

What if we understood social comedowns as a normal part of life?

As part of the kink community, I have long understood that comedowns are a normal part of life, but that message seems not to have spread particularly widely. Indeed, I’m aware of some kinksters that feel it’s a point of pride that they *don’t* get comedowns and others that feel like the fact they do have them sometimes is a personal weakness. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that comedowns are more or less inevitable if you play long enough and hard enough with someone, whether you’re a top or a bottom.  They can come in unexpected ways, at unexpected times and learning to cope with the emotional fallout is a skill that we have to learn. We work out how to engage with ‘comedown’ buddies if our tops/bottoms aren’t available for that emotional work. We have aftercare plans. We explore ways to treat ourselves and each other with compassion, kindness and gentleness in the days and weeks after we play together. I wonder what would happen if we extended this thinking to the social comedown. Would it make the emotions more manageable if they were normalised? Would we be able to engage with our own distress with less judgement about who we are? I think perhaps we would.

When I work with clients on this topic, many of them feel entirely alone. They have no idea that there are lots of people, particularly neuroatypical people, who experience intense comedowns after socialising. Just the fact that others have this experience is incredibly affirming and helps people to shift the self-judgement. The next post by Sophia is on a few ways to work with the strong feelings that arise with a social comedown, but in the meantime, I think it is important to have some conversations to normalise this idea. Here are some suggestions:

1) I’d invite you to open conversations with people about the concept of the social comedown, maybe even share this blog post.

2) Share your experience. What does it feel like to you? What helps you? What support could other people offer you?

3) At large gatherings like sexuality and kink conferences, make active plans with others about comedown support. Make it a community issue where we share emotional and practical resources.