Cultivating Pride With Opposite Action

Shame arrives with a thought and an urge. The thought is some version of I am bad. The urge is to disappear.

Those two arrive together so reliably that most people never separate them. The thought supplies a verdict, the urge supplies an instruction, and by the time either one is noticed the instruction is usually already being followed. You have gone quiet, or changed the subject, or decided not to send the message.

DBT takes the pairing apart and works on it as a mechanism rather than as evidence about the person.

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In DBT, we understand shame to be an emotion that typically is accompanied by the thought like I'm bad, I'm broken, and typically drives us to want to hide.

That pairing is what makes shame different from guilt. Guilt says I did something wrong and points at a specific action you can repair. Shame says something is wrong with me and points at nothing you can do, which is why it tends to produce concealment rather than change.

The practical consequence is that guilt tends to resolve and shame tends to accumulate. An action can be apologized for, corrected, or made good. A self cannot. So shame keeps its object permanently out of reach, and the only move it leaves is to make sure nobody sees.

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The question DBT asks first

Before doing anything with an emotion, DBT asks a specific question: does this emotion fit the facts?

Emotions are not errors. They evolved to carry information, and much of the time the information is accurate. Fear that fits the facts tells you something is dangerous. Shame that fits the facts tells you that you have done something your own community would genuinely reject you for, and the response to that is repair.

But emotions can also be triggered by things that do not warrant them, and shame is unusually prone to this because it can be installed from the outside. A person can be taught to feel shame about something that carries no actual threat and no actual wrongdoing.

This is why the question comes first and why it has to be answered honestly rather than reassuringly. Deciding in advance that an emotion is unjustified is not the same as checking. The check is what tells you which of the two responses, repair or opposite action, is the one that applies.

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When it does not fit, you act opposite

When an emotion does not fit the facts, DBT does not ask you to argue yourself out of it. Arguing with an emotion rarely works. Instead it gives you a behavioral instruction: do the opposite of what the emotion is telling you to do, all the way, repeatedly, until the emotion changes.

Shame's urge is to hide, shrink, avoid eye contact, stay quiet, keep the thing private. So opposite action for unjustified shame is exposure: say it out loud, stay in the room, stand differently, tell someone.

All the way is part of the instruction rather than emphasis. A half version, where you stay in the room but say nothing and keep your eyes down, still transmits the original message to your own nervous system. The emotion reads the behavior, and a hedged behavior reads as agreement with the emotion.

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I may be noticing some self-judgment here. I may be noticing an urge to hide. I'm going to act opposite to that urge. I'm going to stand up a little bit straighter. I'm going to be a little bit more vocal, or a lot more vocal.

The physical details matter more than they sound. Posture, volume, and eye contact are not decoration on top of the emotion, they are part of how the emotion maintains itself. Changing them is not pretending. It is intervening at the level where the emotion actually operates.

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Why pride is the right word

Dr. Jesse Finkelstein points out that the name of the observance is not incidental. Of all the words available for a public event, the one that stuck is the exact antonym of the emotion the event exists to answer.

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I do think it is instructive that this month is called pride, because in DBT when an emotion doesn't fit the facts we are invited to practice opposite action.

The reasoning is direct. Shame about who someone is does not fit the facts.

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The idea that someone's sexual or gender identity or orientation is somehow shameful doesn't fit the facts. And so pride is an invitation to act opposite.

Read that way, pride is not a claim of superiority and it is not a mood you are supposed to manufacture on demand. It is the behavioral opposite of hiding, practiced in public, by a lot of people at once. That is opposite action at the scale of a community.

It also explains why the form it takes is so physical. Marching, visibility, volume, being seen in daylight by strangers. Those are not symbolic gestures attached to a feeling. They are the behaviors that shame specifically suppresses, performed deliberately.

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What this is not

Two clarifications, because opposite action gets misread in both directions.

It is not positive thinking. You are not required to feel proud in order to act opposite. The instruction is about behavior. The feeling follows the behavior, often slowly, and the work is valid on the days it has not caught up yet.

It is also not a recommendation to be unsafe. Opposite action is calibrated to the situation. Whether, when, and to whom a person is open is a question about their actual circumstances, and DBT takes real risk seriously. Acting opposite in a context where you are safe is the practice. Overriding a genuine danger signal is not.

The distinction between the two is a judgment, and it is one most people can make about their own life better than anyone can make it for them. The question is not whether you feel afraid. It is whether the fear is tracking something real in the room.

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The closing claim

The talk ends on a sentence that sounds like encouragement. Inside the model it is not doing that job.

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Despite what many people, many elements of society may tell you, you are not inherently bad. In fact, quite the opposite. You are a human. You have validity. You have meaning. You have beauty and love. Those are all things to feel proud of.

In DBT terms that sentence is not reassurance. It is a statement about the facts, and the facts are what determine whether an emotion is worth acting on or worth acting against.

The difference matters in practice. Reassurance asks you to feel better. A claim about the facts asks you to check, and if the check comes back the way this one does, it hands you an instruction about what to do next.

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Working with shame

Shame is one of the harder emotions to work on alone, precisely because its main instruction is to keep quiet about it. If it is shaping decisions you would otherwise make differently, that is worth bringing into a room with someone.

In session the work usually starts smaller than people expect. Not the whole history, but one recent moment: what happened, what the thought was, what the urge was, and what you did. From there the fit the facts question becomes answerable, and opposite action becomes something specific you can try during the week rather than a principle.

Related reading: validation as a way to connect, on the sense of being defective that sits underneath a lot of suffering, and the skills deficit model, on why DBT does not treat a person as the problem.

Dr. Jesse Finkelstein offers DBT informed individual therapy at Axis Psychological Services in New York City. You can book a free consultation.

If you want to practice opposite action with support, learn about DBT therapy in NYC, or join the DBT skills group in NYC.