My name is Leslie Dulle and I recently celebrated my 64th birthday. I have struggled with my mental health for about 50 of those 64 years. Most people describe me as a gregarious, outgoing and carefree individual. For many years I felt like a fraud, but I finally realized that those descriptors are indeed part of me; however, I am also someone who has struggled. My grandmother used to tell me that God never gives you more than you can handle. I respectfully told her that he had me confused with the lady next door. Life was never promised to be easy, but it also does not have to be filled with struggles and suffering. My life and my mental health improved once I was able to build a tool box of coping skills and learned how and when to use them.
Mental health struggles are overwhelming and exhausting. They cause your inner voice to doubt yourself and can often leave you feeling hopeless. What I have learned throughout my life is that you have to keep learning. It requires tremendous resilience and a will to keep seeking out help and resources. I spent many years in and out of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which definitely had its purpose. There were parts of me that benefited from it a great deal; but, I still struggled with a lack of skills and an even greater inability to use the ones that I did have in my arsenal. I was iIl equipped to deal with my mental health issues.
In the spring of 2019, it all came to a head for me in a very detrimental way. I was suffering and my struggles had hurt my family. I was tremendously ashamed and knew that something had to change. I was completely beat down and felt like I would never conquer this beast.
Over the years I had read about a treatment program called DBT. It stands for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. It was created by Marsha Linehan. She wrote a book called Building a Life Worth Living that I would highly recommend. DBT is a group based program that focuses on skill development and I truly believe that my participation in the program changed my life. It taught me many useful coping skills, as well as the ability to be able to take a step back and go to my toolbox. In the past, by the time I recognized that I was out of control, I no longer had the ability to pull myself back and that is no longer the case for me.
DBT focuses on four basic core skills: Interpersonal Effectiveness, Mindfulness, Emotion Regulation and Distress Tolerance. While none of this is rocket science, the hope is that by practicing these core skills, you learn better how to cope when you are struggling. We all have our emotional mind and our rational mind and many of us may lean more frequently towards one or the other. The goal is to learn how to spend more time in a wise mind which is part reason and part emotion. A wise mind is often a difficult place to locate, especially during times of stress or struggle.
DBT uses the phrase Parking Lot Practice quite often. This really resonated with me. When we are learning to drive, we do not go directly to the highway. We start in a safe place such as an empty parking lot, and we practice and practice until we learn the skill. The same is true for developing coping skills. After a year of steady practice and consistent effort, I developed a tool box that has made my life so much better. I will not pretend that I have it mastered, because I simply do not. We are always going to have hard days; That being said, I recover so much more quickly than I have in the past and I cannot explain how much happier I am now.
In June of 2023, I suffered an accident that left me with 2nd and 3rd degree burns on my face. I woke up in the burn unit at the University of Cincinnati intubated, hands restrained and eyes swollen shut. In the past, this would have thrown me into a dark place and I believe whole heartedly that Leslie pre 2019 would have completely fallen apart. Who would have thought that the coping skills I learned in DBT could shape my mindset and equip me for the most difficult challenge of my life? Not me – but it did. The last three years have been the hardest three years of my life. I have undergone ten surgeries and endured lots of pain and discomfort in my healing journey and I am the happiest that I have ever been. It is hard to believe that I can put those two things in the same sentence. Dialectic: two things can be true at the same time.
The moral of this story is that our mental health is something so many of us struggle to manage but it does not mean that we cannot build a life worth living. It just requires a willingness to keep trying, to continue to seek out resources and to keep our toolbox stocked.