Compos Mentis - Of Sound Mind

By Lorna Buechner

Have you ever suffered with your mental health?

Did you notice that all the CBT and self-help books, work in the longer term and want you to change your thinking?

And have you ever found that hard to do when you are feeling distressed in that moment?

Then this book is your answer!

Based on Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) which is a skills-based therapy designed to help you in that moment of distress. I have compiled a variety of skills based on this and on techniques I have learned over the years to help you the way they helped me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398475144

Lorna Buechner

Hi! my name is Lorna and I have written this book because what’s in here has helped me and I hope it will help you too. I have Asperger’s (on the autistic spectrum) and I have also lived with and currently live with depression, anxiety, schizoaffective disorder and PTSD for a lot of my life. I developed these conditions as a result of some situations I had in my life. In 2013, when I was 17, I was admitted to psychiatric hospitals, and that is where I properly started to get help, and where I was first properly diagnosed with Asperger’s. I found that talking therapies to start with did not help so much, for example CBT and just talking, because when I was in the moment of distress, I simply could not talk about it. This is when DBT (Dialectical Behavioural Therapy) was offered to me. This really helped, as it helped me deal with my emotions there and then so that I could settle and calm down, to then talk about the issues that were causing the distress. Once I had a variety of different skills in my arsenal, that I could apply to many situations, and when I could also link the skills to take me to a calmer place, that was only then when the trauma work, talking therapies and CBT could really take effect. I also found that there are a lot of self-help books out there based on CBT, but nothing for learning a skill to help you in the moment, so I have amalgamated all that I have learnt with DBT and other skills for learning difficulties and put it into this book.

Book preview

Copyright Information ©

Lorna Buechner 2022

The right of Lorna Buechner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398475120 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398475137 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398475144 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I’d like to thank all those that have helped me complete this book in providing their own experiences of mental health.

I’d like to directly thank my family, my partner and his family for always looking out for me and inspiring me.

I’d lastly also like to thank my physio and the NHS mental health teams that have supported me over the years.

Colour Your Way Through DBT

Brought to You by Geonimals

Did you know that one in four people will have experienced some sort of mental health problem or illness in their life?

These illnesses can include depression, anxiety, OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress

Disorder), BPD (Borderline Personality disorder), Bipolar, psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, and eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

Did you know that in the UK there are 1.5 million people who are recorded as having a learning disability?

These disabilities can include ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and those on the autistic spectrum.

These problems do not discriminate, so anyone can develop or get a learning difficulty or mental health problem.

The aim of DBT is to help you: understand and accept your difficult feelings, learn skills to manage them and become able to make positive changes in your life.

In this book, we will look at the four main sections of DBT, and these are Mindfulness, Emotional Regulation, Distress Tolerance and Interpersonal Effectiveness.

Each area comes with different skills to try and learn, some of which will be outlined in this book.

Purpose of This Book

This book primarily covers skills for mental health problems through DBT, but I will also cover skills and techniques for learning difficulties from dyslexia to dyspraxia, ADHD and those on the Autistic Spectrum.

This book has three aspects to it, DBT skills for mental health, skills for learning difficulties and colouring too so you are not reading everything all at once, and you can separate it into segments.

What is DBT? – DBT is short for Dialectical Behavioural Therapy.

The word dialectical in DBT does not describe dialect but actually that people can have different ideas that can be true at the same time, so in DBT there are multiple ways to think about a situation, and that all people have something individual to offer, to each situation.

So as an example, you can use multiple techniques to tackle one thought, emotion or cause of distress. Some of these techniques I have outlined in the book may work better for you than others and it is about finding which one works best for you.

Emotions

Emotions are very important as they play an important role in the way we think and behave. In the 20th century, Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and Robert Plutchik eight, which are shown in the image on the right. The image on the right also shows the complex emotions that come with the basic primary emotions.

The basic emotions are hardwired in us, so even babies display them. Whereas the complex emotions are learnt as you grow.

You experience emotions as a reaction to an event, and sometimes the emotions can last less than a second, and other times they can last weeks, months and even years. For example, depression