Riding the Waves of Emotion: How Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Distress Tolerance, and Pendulation Work Together
Do you ever feel like your emotions hit you in a single, overwhelming wave, too big, too fast, too much? Or maybe you’ve heard, “You’re too sensitive,” enough times that you’ve started to believe you can’t handle your own emotional world.
The truth is, there is nothing wrong with feeling deeply.
The skill lies in learning how to feel without being flooded, and how to return to safety without shutting down.
This is where Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), especially its skills of emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and a body-based technique called pendulation, come together.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), created by psychologist Marsha Linehan, offers practical skills to help you stay grounded, compassionate, and flexible with yourself even during intense emotional moments. At its core, DBT balances two key ideas: acceptance (softening toward your emotional experience) and change (choosing actions that help soothe or regulate that experience). Its four pillars, Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness, are designed to help people live more skillfully and intentionally, especially when emotions run high.
DBT is often effective for individuals who struggle with intense emotions, self-harm urges, trauma responses, chronic invalidation, or Borderline Personality Disorder. But its tools are helpful to anyone who wants to better understand and regulate their feelings.
How DBT Helps Us Work With Big Emotions
DBT teaches a balance of acceptance (“This emotion is here, and I can soften toward it”) and change (“What can I do to take care of myself in this moment?”).
Its core pillars, Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness, help people who experience intense emotions, trauma responses, or chronic invalidation. But these skills truly benefit anyone trying to understand and manage their emotional life with more compassion.
Two of these pillars, emotion regulation and distress tolerance, are especially important for people who feel emotions strongly or quickly.
Emotion Regulation: Understanding and Soothing the Feeling
Emotion regulation helps you:
understand what you’re feeling
lower the intensity of emotions
respond rather than react
build habits that prevent emotional overload in the long term
It’s the skill of naming and navigating your emotions with clarity.
Distress Tolerance: Surviving the Moment Without Escalation
Distress tolerance helps you get through emotional intensity without making the situation worse. It’s about grounding, soothing, and stabilizing, especially during moments when the emotion feels bigger than your capacity.
Think of it as the “first aid kit” for emotional overwhelm.
Pendulation: The Bridge Between Feeling and Soothing
Pendulation is a gentle oscillation between two states:
Activation: feeling the emotion in a mindful, tolerable way
Resourcing: returning to safety, warmth, or grounding
A helpful metaphor is cold plunging: you step into the cold water briefly, and then wrap yourself in warmth. The point isn’t to stay in the cold (the discomfort) or avoid it entirely. It’s to move between the two with intention.
Pendulation teaches the nervous system:
“I can feel something intense… and I can come back to safety.”
When paired with DBT, pendulation becomes a way to practice both emotion regulation and distress tolerance at once.
A Combined Practice: Feel, Soothe, Return
1. Step Into the Emotion (Emotion Regulation + Mindfulness)
Use the RAIN acronym:
Recognize: “I feel sadness in my chest.”
Allow: “It’s okay that this sadness is here.”
Investigate: “What does this emotion need from me?”
Nurture: “I can be gentle with myself right now.”
Stay with the emotion for 10–30 seconds,enough to notice, not enough to overwhelm.
2. Step Out Into Safety (Distress Tolerance + Resourcing)
Choose a grounding tool, such as:
slow breathing
warm blanket or hand on the heart
imagining a supportive person
feeling your feet on the floor
splashing cool water or holding something warm
Let your body register comfort.
3. Pendulate (Move Between the Two)
Go back and forth: feel → soothe → feel → soothe.
This builds emotional tolerance and helps the nervous system learn resilience without shutting down.
Feeling deeply is not a flaw. With the right tools, your emotional intensity can become a source of strength, insight, and connection.
DBT, combined with pendulation, teaches you that you can experience the fullness of your emotions and return to steadiness, again and again.
Resources
Emotional Agility by Susan David, PHD
References
NAMI Honors Dr. Marsha Linehan, The Creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy
RAIN: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture
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