Begin

Four small steps tonight: two check-ins so we can measure where you're starting, a few careful safety questions — please answer them honestly — and setting up your diary card. No skills yet. Just the starting line.

Welcome

If you're here, I'm guessing your emotions arrive big. Fast, full volume, out of proportion to the moment — and slow to leave. Maybe they cost you things: words you didn't mean, messages you wish you could unsend, whole evenings lost to a feeling. And maybe people have told you, your whole life, that you're overreacting.

Here's the first thing to hear: your emotions make sense. You have a sensitive, powerful emotional system — it fires fast and it fires strong. That's wiring, not weakness. And here's the reframe this whole program stands on: an intense emotion isn't a flood that swallows you. It's a wave. It rises, it peaks, and it ends. Every single wave you have ever had has ended.

We're not going to make your feelings smaller. We're going to make you a rider. These are DBT emotion-regulation skills — the best-tested tools there are for exactly this.

How the six weeks work

• Six weeks, in a fixed order: understand the wave, name it, stop making it worse, act opposite, lower your baseline — and then keep the skill for good.
• The engine is a sixty-second diary card, every evening: your top emotions today, how high each wave peaked, your strongest urge — and whether you acted on it. That card quietly becomes your own evidence: a few weeks from now it will hold dozens of waves, and every one of them will have ended.
• A weekly review where we read your numbers together and rank your skills by how much they actually helped you — then pick next week's focus skill from your data, not from a manual.

One honest thing up front

In week four I'll ask you to do the opposite of what an emotion is demanding — on purpose. It sounds wrong today. By then, your own card will show you why it works.

Before anything else

A few careful questions — please answer them honestly. If overwhelming waves ever come with urges to hurt yourself, you'll see a crisis-resources card that stays pinned for the whole program. Skills practice is not crisis care, and you need to know the difference. If you have, or suspect, bipolar disorder, this program alone isn't the right tool — we'll point you to the care that is. And if you're working with a therapist, tell them you're here: the diary card is designed to be shown.

Then: a short check-in, your goals, and your card — set up and ready for tonight.