When I first started working at a children’s comic book camp back in 2012, I gave my fictional self the power to manipulate the emotions of others. My fictional self reflected my strong desire to control how others behaved which I believed would make my life less painful. Other times I would imagine myself as a puppet master and I could pull the strings of the people in my life regardless of what they wanted. I completely understand how horrible it sounds to so consciously want to be in control of others but this was my response to my experiences. From the time I was in my early years at elementary school I found myself being controlled by others; whether that be a friend saying, “If I don’t get to be Sailor Moon I won’t be your friend,” or a boyfriend telling me in my late teens, “I’ll leave you if you don’t stop talking to your guy friends.” My strong desire to please those around me coupled with my extremely low sense of self-worth made me extremely vulnerable to manipulation. I gave up myself to maintain relationships that hurt me so I eventually wanted to do everything I could to take that control back which, before DBT, meant trying to control the people around me. Needless to say, I failed at it and it’s something I am now perfectly ok to have failed at.
I was very nervous when I first started learning the interpersonal effectiveness skills. I found emotion regulation, mindfulness, and distress tolerance “easy” in the sense that they were skills I did by myself. I can control myself. Interpersonal effectiveness requires 
working with other people. I can’t control other people. This was very scary. My first DEAR MAN I used with my partner to express my concerns over money. I had written out a script (which I had worked on for a decent amount of time while in Wise Mind) and kept it off to the side for reference during my conversation with him. I was very proud at how I used my body language and tone to communicate calm and openness, I was ready to negotiate and felt firm in what I was saying. When I was finished, my partner proceeded to make excuses and blame me for not understanding him. I cried and felt like a failure. Wasn’t DEAR MAN supposed to make him see that I was right?
When I went to my next DBT class a week later, I thought it was important to share my experience. The therapist expressed that my experience is a great example of how a DBT skill can still be effective even if it didn’t “work”. In my case, I was very successful at using DEAR MAN because I had gone through the process of thinking about what to say, writing it down and then saying it in a manner that stated what I wanted, preserved my self-respect and encouraged positive communications with my partner. She reminded the class that using DEAR MAN can help us influence how others may respond but it will not guarantee their response. We cannot control them, only ourselves. I came away from that class full of hope that even though the conversation with my partner didn’t have the outcome that I had intended I had been skillful in my approach to it. I had shown myself that I have the ability to talk about a difficult subject without becoming overly emotional. I came away with confidence knowing that I did my part to appropriately resolve an issue within my relationship. I cannot control others, and that is how it should be. I can control myself and that is most important to ensure I do not continually fall prey to my emotions.
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Past blog posts on DEAR MAN:
