Transcription
It turned out, without my knowledge, the people I was treating had four or five other psychological disorders. So they had major depression, an eating disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, all sorts of other disorders.
So it turned out that if I wanted to work on one problem, you had to be able to put another problem on the shelf, at least for a while. And that's when I discovered that the clients had no distress tolerance.
At that time in history, behavior therapy was very focused on change and was not focused on distress tolerance. So I had to build a set of skills to teach the clients how to tolerate one thing while we worked on something else. And that's where distress tolerance skills came from.