Читать книгу DBT For Dummies - Gillian Galen - Страница 107

There is an old saying that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” If this were true, there would be no need for therapy and particular DBT treatment. DBT is all about teaching new skills (tricks) to replace old behaviors when the behaviors have been maladaptive.

So, what does behavior change look like in the brain? Neural pathways are the bundles of nerves that connect one part of the nervous system to another. They are like the cable that connects your phone to its charger, or the TV to the cable box. These bundles of nerves are connected to each other by dendrites. Think of a dendrite roughly as the plug that goes into the wall or your phone. A big difference between plugs and dendrites is that the number of dendrites increases each time a behavior is performed. Another way to think about repetition is to consider the grooves that a car makes on a dirt road. The more cars that travel on the road, the deeper the grooves become.

The bundles of nerves communicate with each other via a process known as neuronal firing. When brain cells communicate frequently, the connection between them strengthens. Another process that happens is myelination. Myelin is the covering of the neurons. Think of it as the plastic sheathing around a copper cable. Over time, the more a behavior is repeated, the more myelin wraps around the nerve cells.

Over thousands of instances of the repetition of behaviors, myelination and dendrite formation leads to communication between nerve cells becoming faster and more effortless. With enough repetition, these behaviors become automatic. The behavior of walking is one example of this. When a child learns how to walk, they often fall and are clumsy. After thousands of repetitions, walking becomes automatic.

However, just because we have created the neural pathways that lead to certain behaviors, this doesn’t mean that we’re stuck with those behaviors forever. If we want to change our automatic behaviors, we must participate in new activities. By engaging in new behaviors, we’re training our brains and our brain cells to create new neural pathways. Just like our old behaviors, the new pathways get stronger the more we repeat the new behaviors. Eventually, the new behaviors can become the new normal.

If we go back to the behavior of the child walking, initially the child moves around by crawling, and crawling is the automatic behavior caused by the repetition of crawling and leading to the strengthening of the brain cells. When the child starts to walk, eventually the new “walking” pathways become stronger than the “crawling” pathways, and walking becomes the new normal. This can be done with all behavior, even though it can be more difficult if the behavior has lasted for a long time.

It can be easy to give up, because it can feel like nothing is changing. Research shows that it takes somewhere from three to six months for a new behavior to become more automatic, although this varies a lot by person. If you’re in DBT, your therapist will want you to persist until your new behavior becomes more habitual. This will include your DBT therapist providing you with ideas for overcoming obstacles that might interfere with engaging in the new behaviors. We delve more fully into these ideas when we review the skills in Part 3 of this book.