Starting Early is a DBT workbook for emotional cycles built on one core idea: you do not have to wait for a crisis to use these skills. The whole point is to practise them before you need them most.
Written by a certified senior peer mentor with lived experience of bipolar disorder and trained at the McGill University Health Centre, this workbook introduces five DBT skills chosen specifically because they are relevant to navigating intense emotional cycles. No prior experience with DBT is required.
DBT — Dialectical Behaviour Therapy — gives you concrete, practised tools for working with intense emotions rather than being swept away by them. Coping ahead DBT skills, in particular, use the same neural pathways as real experience. Mentally rehearsing a skilful response before a difficult moment arrives means you are not starting from zero when it does.
The five skills covered are: Wise Mind, Coping Ahead, TIP/TIPP, Radical Acceptance, and DEAR MAN.
Each section explains what the skill is, why it matters for emotional cycles, and how to use it. There is space throughout to write, reflect, and practise. You can work through it in order or go directly to whatever feels most relevant to where you are right now.
This is a radical acceptance workbook as much as it is a communication and regulation guide — grounding you in reality, preparing for emotions DBT-style, and giving you language and structure for the moments that tend to be hardest.
One of the core resources at upsanddowns.xyz, created from lived experience — not as a clinician, but as someone who has walked the same road.
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