DBT skills for creating better relationships with your emotions & the people in your life.

This subscription is for you if:



  • Your emotions are getting in the way of you having the relationships and life that you want;
  • You are avoiding important things because you're afraid that you'll get overwhelmed and make everything worse; 
  • Your relationships are suffering because it is really hard to contain your emotions in conflict, or because you shut down; 
  • You're getting jerked around by emotional urges or thoughts and want to have more choice about how you behave.


If you're a quirky queer or cultural renegade the chances are you've had a hard time finding support to create the relationships you want


It can be really hard to know whether a particular therapist or skills group will be appropriate for us, especially when we live queer lives. These skills help everyone to regulate their emotions and relationships more effectively, but this subscription will center quirky queers and cultural renegades and their closest people. This means it is especially helpful for you if you're: 


  • in queer relationships*

  • finding consensual non monogamy or BDSM is intensifying your emotions or bringing up new issues in your relationship

  • hoping to build skills with your family of choice, not exclusively romantic or sexual partners

  • doing work that makes relationships tricky to navigate sometimes and you're looking for a space where you won't be judged for doing sex work or being a performer

This subscription is all about learning skills to help you build your relationships with your emotions and the people in your life. We will teach skills primarily from Dialectal Behavior Therapy, but also Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Emotional Efficacy Therapy, to help you create more ways to thrive. We understand that out of control emotions and conflict filled relationships are often the result of a mix of biological, psychological and social factors (find out more here). We teach skills that can, with practice, change your brain, your relationship to your emotions and increase the choices you have available. You'll get insight into patterns that create conflict in your relationships and communication tools to help you get what you want more often & build your relationship. Many people experience these skills as increasing their freedom, self trust and connection to their closest people.



Once a month, you will get access to a new lesson that includes a workbook to guide you through the skill, and sometimes there will be videos, MP3s, or other resources to help you learn. You'll be invited to join the live class too!

“I have found ways to cope and been encouraged to use them as and when I’m up for it, long term. I feel like I can work with my traits that I used to think of as negative/ want to avoid.” 
Jade

This subscription is for you if:

  • You want ongoing support and encouragement to learn skills that help you build the life YOU want.
  • You want to befriend your emotions & understand what they are communicating.
  • You want to learn to cope with intense emotional experiences without making things worse.
  • You want to learn to accept uncomfortable emotional experiences and to change unwanted emotions.
  • You want to learn how to communicate what you want more effectively. 
  • Want to learn with other quirky queers and cultural renegades and their closest people.
  • You're motivated to learn new skills and put them into practice in your life.
  • You feel able to put learning into practice without needing to have homework assignments checked.
  • You're willing to try out new ideas!

This subscription is NOT for you if:

  • You're currently in crisis & need more intensive support.
  • You want a more traditional DBT group with more formal homework checking & accountability. 
  • You want to suppress or ignore your emotions & think that is always the best way to deal with emotions.
  • You aren't a quirky queer or cultural renegade, or doing the course with someone that fits that description.
  • You don't want to put the work into learning and practicing new skills.
  • You already have a deep and thorough understanding of your emotions and how to change them when needed.
  • You don't want to try new things that may make you feel a little uncomfortable sometimes.
"I was really surprised to feel more comfortable than I have in any kind of therapy setting I’ve ever been in. I’ve been able to be really open and bring my full self to the skills group and I feel really very grateful for that."
Gray

Who we are at Love Uncommon


Love Uncommon was founded by Dr Sophia Graham who is a sex and relationship geek trained in counselling, DBT & teaching. Sophia works with other peer educators, coaches and therapists to provide courses on emotion regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness and self consent.


Most of Love Uncommon's courses are intensive 2-hour a week commitments for 7-10 weeks. These include lots of time for assigning practice exercises and reviewing them. The subscription service is for folks wanting a longer term commitment to help keep up practice without weekly follow up for the homework. 


At Love Uncommon our courses center quirky queers and cultural renegades. This means we often work with folks outside of the sexuality, gender and relationship mainstream. We take a rights not rescue approach to sex work; believe trans women are women, trans men are men and that non binary people aren't (men or women that is). We think platonic, romantic and sexual relationships all matter & that folks can have healthy relationships with or without them being monogamous (or vanilla for that matter). 

This year we are working through key dialectical behaviour therapy skills.



January - Mindful moments

Learn core DBT mindfulness skills for experiencing the present moment with intention and awareness.

February – Wise Mind and the Middle Path

Once upon a time, Wise Mind was my least favourite DBT skill. It had me rolling my eyes a little and just finding it hard to connect with. Now that I've been working with it for 10 years, I feel really different. It is one of the most useful skills for me, and it helps me to feel more self-trust and self-respect. That is because it helps balance logic and emotion and move away from good/bad and right/wrong judgments towards doing what's effective. The Middle Path builds on the concept of Wise Mind to help us to apply it across our lives. 

March – Understanding our emotions

There is strong research showing that giving people language and concepts that explain how emotions work is very effective in helping them name their internal experience and regulate their emotions. Some of us already have language for our emotions, but others struggle to find the words to express how we feel.  This class will talk through the DBT model for emotions, and provide some exercises to help us express how we feel.

April - Emotion myths
Emotion myths are unhelpful, often deeply ingrained beliefs about the nature of feelings that arise from a complex mix of biological, psychological, and social factors. These myths, which can include ideas like "Negative feelings are bad," "Emotions should always be trusted," or "Being emotional means being out of control," shape how we interpret situations and ultimately determine our emotional responses. By treating these interpretations as facts, these myths can intensify emotional distress, block effective coping, we will explore some common emotion myths, and try to bust them together.


May – Check the facts

This session is all about moving from awareness of emotion towards changing emotion.  It is at the core of DBT's emotion regulation skills, and a precursor to other skills to change or accept emotions. It allows us to gently investigate our experiences and work out whether they are mainly about the here and now or the past. This can help us to feel more open to feedback and less prone to black and white thinking. 

June – Opposite action

This session is all about how to change and move through emotions effectively. Opposite action is about finding ways to act in opposition to your emotion while feeling it (rather than trying to suppress it). We talk about body language, ways of speaking and behaving in relation to a range of different emotions. 


July - Problem-solving

Problem solving is just what it sounds like, a way of finding practical solutions for the problems at hand – once you’ve worked out what problem it is that you have to solve. It teaches a process for coming to solutions and creating actionable steps to put them into practice.

August– Cope Ahead, an alternative to rumination

Rumination is very correlated with poor mental health outcomes, so this month we are working on alternatives to ruminating. We will spend a lot of time on the cope ahead skill, and also revisit some of the crisis survival skills we talked about last month.


October – Surviving a crisis without making things worse - TIPP skills

Crisis survival skills are about getting through emotional crises without making them worse. This session will focus on the STOP and TIPP skills, equipping us with body-based methods for reducing distress. 


November – Distraction, Self-soothing & sensory joy

We will continue focusing on rapidly reducing distress using distraction and sensory sensations to calm our nervous systems. 



December – Building mastery and Pleasant events

Creating more resilience and meaning in life is an important part of DBT. This session is all about identifying values and finding ways of incorporating them into life in big and small ways. Pleasant events are an important part of creating a life worth living, and maintaining mental health. We will also touch on the importance of learning, and reflecting on learning. When we build mastery by learning something new and recognising our progress it also builds our self esteem and often our sense of meaning in life. 


Join us!

£40 a month

  • Live classes on the second Wednesday of the month at 6pm UK and Irish time, 1pm EST and 10am Pacifc.
  • Workbooks, videos, and podcasts to support your learning.
  • A group of other quirky queers and cultural renegades & their closest people to learn alongside you.
  • Skills that give you more choices and control in your life

Sign up now!

“The skills classes gave me a lot of useable tools and skills with an emphasis on progressive learning and adapting things to different situations I was in to meet my needs.”
Robin
* By queer relationships, I do not mean only same sex relationships. If someone in the relationship is queer then I understand the relationship itself to be queer too. Bisexual and pansexual people are welcome to join the course and their closest people are also welcome irrespective of their queerness so long as they are willing to join a group that centers quirky queers and cultural renegades.