Episode Details

What if the two things you've been told to choose between: accepting yourself as you are, and changing, were never actually in conflict?

In this episode, I sit down with my longtime colleague and friend Megan Yale, LPC-S, LMFT-S, for a conversation about Dialectical Behavior Therapy that goes far beyond the acronym. Megan trained intensively in DBT at the University of Washington and with its creator, Marsha Linehan, and she tells the origin story most people never hear: how Linehan tried a change-only approach and it failed, tried an acceptance-only approach and it failed, and then built a therapy on the radical idea that two opposite things can be true at the same time.

We explore what that dialectic looks like in real life, why DBT is not just for any one diagnosis, and why the goal was never to get rid of emotions but to build a pause between feeling and action. Megan also shares two distress tolerance skills you can practice today (STOP and TIPP), and we wander into her other love, sandtray therapy, where the inner world gets built in miniature and people come face to face with their own truth.

Whether you're doing your own healing work or sitting in the other chair as a helper, this conversation holds one message at its center: struggling doesn't mean you're broken. Sometimes you were just never given the skills.

Connect with Megan: inlinemind.com where feelings are understood and skills take shape. Megan sees clients online and in person in the greater Austin area and offers Sandtray therapy training for clinicians.