User:Synchestra23/sandbox

What I changed (added)
Dr. Linehan developed DBT as a result of her own transformation that occurred in 1967, while she prayed in a small Catholic chapel in Chicago. She describes the situation in detail; "One night I was kneeling in there, looking up at the cross, and the whole place became gold—and suddenly I felt something coming toward me… It was this shimmering experience, and I just ran back to my room and said, “I love myself.” It was the first time I remembered talking to myself in the first person. I felt transformed." Linehan, then, takes this “radical acceptance,” as she calls it, and incorporates it into the techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy meant to change the harmful behavior of a self-cutter or a person who battles chronic suicidal ideations. Along with Steven C. Hayes and Victoria M. Follette, Marsha Linehan has co-edited a professional volume, Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition. In the second article in the book, Linehan and co-authors Clive J. Robins and Henry Schmidt III discuss "Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: Synthesizing Radical Acceptance with Skillful Means. Here they explain radical acceptance even further: "As a practice, acceptance is highly important in working with impulsive, highly sensitive, and reactive clients. Validation is an active acknowledgement, often offered as an antithesis or synthesis to a distorted expectation or belief. It jumps the tracks of demand, soothing or defusing the emotional arousal associated with failure, feat, shame, unreasonably blocked goals, or a variety of other stimuli." In essence, DBT strives for a balance between acceptance and change, or integrating contradictory philosophies (“you are loved the way you are,” however, “you must strive to change”).