Real People, Real Skills: The Girl Who Counted Backward From Ten

Real People, Real Skills is a monthly series on NoodleFodder. Each installment looks at a true, publicly documented story of someone navigating real hardship — and the specific coping skills that helped them through it. We’re not here to be inspirational posters. We’re here to show what actually works, and why.

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Hannah was 13 when the smallest things made her scream and cry.

Not just occasionally. Constantly. She was terrified of failing at school, convinced her friends didn’t like her anymore, and in near-constant conflict with her mother. The fights were explosive and seemingly came out of nowhere — a comment, a look, a homework assignment that wasn’t going well — and suddenly everyone was in the middle of something that felt way too big for what had started it.

“The smallest of things would make me scream and cry,” Hannah later said in an interview with the Child Mind Institute.

Her friendships were taking the hit. Her relationship with her mom was taking a hit. Her sense of herself — who she was, whether she was a good person, whether people actually wanted her around — was taking a hit. And no one had given her a single tool for what was happening.

She wasn’t a bad kid. She wasn’t broken. She was a kid with a nervous system that had gotten very good at flooding — and no way to turn off the faucet.

What nobody had ever told her

Hannah’s mom eventually got her into treatment at the Child Mind Institute, where she started DBT — Dialectical Behavior Therapy. And Hannah describes what happened next in a way that’s worth sitting with for a second, because it’s so simple it sounds like it shouldn’t have worked.

She learned to count backward from ten. Out loud.

“It’s very simple,” she said, “but it changed everything for me. I would be in huge fights with my mom and I would start counting back from ten and we’d be able to figure out a solution in way quicker time.”

That’s it. That’s the thing. Ten, nine, eight, seven — said out loud, in the middle of the storm.

Which sounds almost insultingly small for how big the problem felt. But here’s why it actually works: when you’re flooded with emotion, your prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain that does reasoning, perspective-taking, problem-solving — is partly offline. You are not capable of a nuanced conversation in that moment. You are not capable of hearing the other person’s point of view. What you are capable of is counting.

The counting isn’t the solution. The counting is the bridge back to the part of your brain that can find one.

The skills behind the skill

What Hannah was doing, without necessarily naming it, was using several DBT skills at once.

The counting backward is a form of distress tolerance — specifically, a way of buying time between the emotional spike and the action it’s pushing toward. In DBT terms, this is the gap between the urge and the behavior. Widening that gap is the whole game.

She was also, in a rudimentary way, practicing Wise Mind — the DBT concept of the place where your feelings and your logic are both present. When she counted, she wasn’t suppressing the emotion. She was holding it long enough for the rest of her brain to catch up. That’s Wise Mind in action: not dismissing what you feel, but not letting it drive unaccompanied.

And DBT also gave her something bigger: a framework for understanding that her emotions were valid and that she could work with them differently. Not change who she was. Not become a person who didn’t feel things intensely. Just learn to ride the wave instead of getting wiped out by it every time.

“DBT teaches you not how to live a perfect life,” Hannah explained, “but how to cope with everyday problems. To accept who you are as a person. Not try to change who you are.”

Where she landed

Hannah described herself, after DBT, as “a hundred percent a happier person.” Better student. Better friend. Better daughter and sister.

Not because she became a different person. Because she got tools that actually matched the problem she had.

The problem was never that Hannah felt things too much. The problem was that nobody had ever shown her what to do with feelings that size.

Try this

Next time you feel the flood coming — that moment when you know you’re about to say something you’ll regret, or cry in a way that surprises you, or shut down completely — try the thing Hannah learned.

Count backward from ten. Out loud if you can. Slowly. Let each number actually land.

You’re not trying to talk yourself out of the emotion. You’re just giving your brain enough runway to get the rest of itself back online. Ten seconds. That’s what you’re buying.

It sounds too simple to be real. Hannah thought so too — until it worked.

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Hannah’s story was originally shared in a first-person interview with the Child Mind Institute. This post draws on her account with attribution. The DBT concepts discussed are explored in depth in the NoodleFodder DBT Skills hub. These posts are educational, not a substitute for therapy.