Lists with Skills are awesome and inspiring. But you need to work with them to shape them into a tool you can use. This post will help you organize your Skills so that they are ready when you need them.
When it comes to Skills I want to give you biblical advice: “Test them all; hold on to what is good”.
Skills work differently for different people. Often they don’t even work the same way for one person over different situations. That is why it helps to have a great variety of Skills at hand. Create your own, personalized, Skill list.
Select
- Do I know this Skill/ what is meant by this Skill?If you don’t understand it, research it later, but don’t just put it on your personalized Skill list.
- Is this Skill available? How could I make it available?You cannot use “swimming” as a Skill when there is no water around. If a Skill is not available for you, don’t put it on your list. If you can make it available, lets say by buying a certain item, buy the item first, test the Skill and then put it on your list.
- Does the use of this Skill trigger any bad memory/feelings?If the skill is actually a Trigger, don’t use it! And make sure that any T or clinic staff you get in contact with knows not to use it either. (We find spiky massage balls triggering and they are standard in most clinics)
Evaluate
After this rough selection we can turn to those that made it through and start to evaluate them.
Divide your Skills into color-coded groups, like we have done it here on the blog. We use yellow for feeling stressed, red for high arousal and danger of self-harm and blue for dissociation.
[Please note: color-codes for Skills on this blog are taken from our own experience. For some people things we marked as “yellow” will work in the “red” area, other things we marked as “blue” might only be good for “yellow” for you. That is why you have to test them for yourself!!]
For the evaluation of your Skills you can use a scale of 1-5 to describe how well they worked for you (one being barely, 5 being excellent) all relative to the color group they belong to.
The goal is to make out the best Skills for the blue, red and yellow area for you personally. Write down a list for every color group, starting each list with the Skill that works the best.
Chaining skills
When this is done you can put together a chain of skills. It’s meant to be a step by step guide of what to do when you went outside your window of tolerance.
Write down one or two Skills that work well in the red/blue area. Then add a few Skills that work really well in the yellow area (use both self-regulation and relational regulation options). The goal is to slowly bring you down to a 4 or 5 on the scale, safely within your window of tolerance. Chaining Skills will help you get there.
The extreme Skills might interrupt the dissociation but you will still need something to help you calm down after that. Write down at least one chain of Skills and keep the list near. Actually, learn it by heart, so you could recall it, if someone woke you in the middle of the night. When there is an emergency you can just follow through with it.
Make sure that the Skills you need for your chain are available. We always carry our most important Skills with us. It is called a “Skill kit”, more about that here: SkillKit to go
Re-evaluate
When you have some experience with Skills you can return to your lists and evaluate which ones you actually use the most, if your chain has been working well and if you want to switch things up a little. Never stop learning new Skills. Never stop evaluating what you have. People change, situations change, you can’t afford getting sloppy with this.
A note for people with DID:
It might be helpful to make separate lists/chains for different parts of you. Some just react differently and it is good to know what works best for each one of you to get good results. I know that this is a lot of extra work, but doing it will not just give you good tools to work with, the communication this will need is part of therapy, getting to know each other and learning how to help each other. The making of the lists is already part of the healing.
Skill lists for the red category:
Skills for the yellow category:
and an overview over the categories
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