Begin

A few small steps before we start: Reading the Room, a five-question baseline; two careful questions — please answer them honestly, neither changes your access; and your cue log, set up and ready for the next ambiguous moment. No skills yet. Just the starting line.

Welcome

I'm Iris. I want to start with the sentence I think your radar just ran, reading this screen: are they pulling away? A slow reply. A flat tone. A message with no kiss, no exclamation mark — nothing you could point to in a courtroom, and somehow you already know.

Here's what I want you to hear before anything else: that radar isn't broken. It's overtuned — most likely for a real reason, built from real history. So we're not going to turn it off. A radar that catches nothing wouldn't serve you either. We're going to teach it one new habit: wait for the evidence before it calls the verdict.

This is DBT for rejection sensitivity. Six weeks, one move underneath all of it: catch the guess, and check it before you act on it.

How the six weeks work

• Six weeks, in a fixed order: see the pattern clearly, catch the ambiguous cue before the verdict lands, spot the spiral you might be building yourself, stay and ask instead of assuming — then rebuild the reps, one small connection at a time.
• The engine is a two-phase cue log. The moment a cue hits, you log it — what happened, what you predict it means, how sure you are. Then, once the real answer is in, or forty-eight hours pass, you log what actually happened.
• Those two numbers — predicted, and actual — become the most useful chart in this program. A few weeks in, you'll see them side by side, and most people are surprised by the gap.
• Every week we read your numbers together — how often the guess was right, how often the reaction did more damage than the cue ever would have — and set the next step from them. Your radar, recalibrating, on your own record.

Before anything else

Two careful questions. If real history taught this radar to fire — a relationship where people actually did leave, actually did hurt you — I want to say plainly: that history is real, and it makes sense that it left a mark. If those symptoms are active now, Steady Ground is built for exactly that, and I'll point you there; this program stays on the present-day pattern only. And if the fear runs closer to terror — frantic efforts to keep someone from leaving, a relationship that swings between all-good and all-bad — I want to be honest with you: deeper machinery is usually at work there. A dedicated program, Anchored, is built for it and is coming; at that intensity, a clinician trained in DBT belongs in this too.

Crisis resources stay one tap away, the whole way through, for everyone in this program — not just if you flag something on this screen.

One thing about me, since we'll be spending six weeks together: I speak quietly. Please don't mistake that for uncertainty. Everything I tell you here, I'll mean exactly.