Real People, Real Skills: She Thought Her Feelings Couldn’t Change

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.

Ally thought her feelings couldn’t change.

For years, she struggled with intense emotions, suicidal ideation, and frequent self-harm — including overdosing on medication in what she describes as impulsive attempts she was afraid would one day accidentally kill her. She felt like she was constantly in crisis, and the loneliness of that was its own particular weight. “Having feelings like this can be very lonely,” she wrote later. “It always felt like I was constantly in a crisis.”

She was also stuck in shame. She blamed everyone else for her problems. She describes setting fires all around her and then having to go back and apologize for the unstable behavior. The cycle was exhausting and it felt like it had no exit.

Ally eventually found DBT. And then she went to college. And then she graduated from Rice University.

Her story is documented through the My Dialectical Life DBT success stories project, where she shared it publicly under her own name.

The binder that changed things

When asked what advice she’d give someone starting DBT, Ally said something that sounds almost too practical to be the answer: make a binder. Organize each skill into its own section. Do a “sheet of homework” every night until the skills become second nature — and that homework doesn’t have to be written. It can be a breathing exercise. It can be explaining a skill out loud to someone in your life.

What she was describing is how skills actually become skills: not by reading about them, but by practicing them until they’re available when you need them. DBT skills learned in a calm moment are infinitely more useful than ones you’re trying to remember mid-crisis. The binder is a delivery system for that.

Ride the Wave, and what it actually means

One of the skills Ally specifically named was Ride the Wave — a distress tolerance skill built on the idea that emotions, even the most overwhelming ones, are temporary. They peak and they pass. They do not last forever, even when they feel like they will.

“I know now that these emotions will not hurt me if I just sit with them and let them pass,” she said.

This is harder than it sounds. When you’re in the middle of an emotion that feels unsurvivable, the last thing your nervous system wants to do is sit with it. Every instinct says to make it stop — through distraction, through action, through anything that creates relief right now. The problem is that the quickest routes to relief are often the ones that create more problems later. Ride the Wave is the skill that inserts space between the feeling and the escape hatch.

She also used Observe and Describe — the mindfulness practice of noticing what’s happening without immediately reacting to it. Naming the emotion. Describing its physical location in the body. Watching it without becoming it. This is the skill that makes Ride the Wave possible, because you can’t surf something you’re convinced is going to drown you.

Building a life worth living

Ally’s therapist told her: “I can do hard things.” She took that with her to college, through the academic and social challenges, through the moments of wanting to stop. She kept pushing — not because the hard things became easy, but because she had skills that went with her wherever she went.

In DBT, this is called building a Life Worth Living — not a perfect life, not a pain-free life, but one with enough meaning, connection, and forward motion that you want to stay in it. It’s not a destination you arrive at. It’s a direction you keep choosing.

“These skills are for life,” Ally said. “I’ll find a way to use them tomorrow and the day after that.”

Try this

The next time you’re in an emotion that feels like it’s going to last forever — try naming it, specifically. Not just “I feel bad.” What is it? Where do you feel it in your body? How intense is it on a scale of 1 to 10?

Then wait five minutes and check again. Not to force it to go away — just to observe whether it’s exactly the same. Emotions move. They shift. They peak and begin to subside. Catching that movement even once starts to make the wave feel surfable.

Ally’s story was shared publicly through My Dialectical Life. For more on Ride the Wave and Observe and Describe, visit the NoodleFodder DBT Skills hub.