The .Plan

I.

When Marsha Linehan began, in the late 1970s, to use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques to treat her patients with borderline personality disorder, she noticed that there were a number of problems with implementing CBT in such a setting. Many of her patients were highly disturbed in the sense that they suffered from severe emotional dysregulation and a lack of skills to self-soothe and manage these emotions. They often existed in one of two polarized states: a rational state of mind in which they completely suppressed their emotions, and an emotional state of mind in which their emotions tended to hijack their observational capacity leading to gross cognitive distortions in thought and experience.

It turned out that CBT’s unremitting focus on change was too invalidating a modality for many of her clients. Linehan began adding, in an eclectic fashion, new strategies to CBT, eventually producing what is now called dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). One of the central elements in the skills portion of DBT is its emphasis on helping someone to achieve a certain level of detachment from her experience, to learn to observe and describe and eventually to have a certain type of awareness in the moment, so that she is not so overwhelmed by her emotions.

II.

As it turns out, you can also achieve this state when you go running.

Or dancing. When you are whirling to Jerry Rivera or Frankie Ruiz, you aren’t thinking about what happened last month, or today, or about what will happen next year. You aren’t worrying about what time you have to wake up for the next conference call. Maybe you are dimly aware of how freely your hips are moving, but there is no mental Microsoft Word of uno,dos, tres… — left to right — cinco, seis, siete… — cross body lead… It’s just you and the follow, all the better if you have the groove and she catches it, and then things just start to happen. And there’s nothing else to do but enjoy the moment. Quiero cantar de nuevo y caminar! / y a mis amigos buenos visitar / Quiero cantar de nuevo y caminar / Y compartir mi libertad!

All week long, I’ve been in the lab / wit’ a pen and a pad, mixing music for a grand celebration. And come Saturday, there will be a four-hour joyous reprieve that will stand in the gap between hope and experience. This soul is exhausted and begging for rest.