I visited with my family a few days, we all got together. It was a horrific scene, completely filled with mania and invalidation, mixed messages, angry outbursts, breakdowns ... the spawning ground of borderlines. Rare, terrible form even for them. I rode it out mindfully, day after day, and set a really good example for the small impressionable ones, that not all adults are bat-shit insane, that they can grow up and choose to be calm and compassionate in any situation.

My problematic pattern is, usually on the way home, I'll sink into full-blown crisis over something trivial. There is something about that environment takes its toll on me when I leave, and I lose days (sometimes weeks) to self loathing, shame, whining, helplessness, sadness, loneliness, all immense and completely overwhelming. I'll want it all to be over at any cost.

But this time I stopped it. I had the skills to watch it happen from different angles. I had the ability to observe deeper into my experience, and the words to describe it. I have experience noticing these things now. I used my support lines, and the skills I've been studying, to calm myself enough to get in touch with what was really going on. I was able to step back far enough from my hell to choose my actions wisely and not make things worse. It was unpleasant as fuck, don't get me wrong, I cried a lot. But I got through the night without blaming anyone else for my intense situation, without arguing, without self-destructing, without making it worse. This is one of my biggest, hardest triggers, and for the first time in my life I got through it. Today has been good. Tomorrow will be better. It's a massive departure from normal behavior.

DBT taught me how to take better care of myself. I struggled with trying to do DBT for years, because truly it is so damn hard, but DBT is making my life better in permanent, significant ways, like nothing else ever has.