Accumulate Positive Experiences

This skill helps combat the warping of memories by the strong emotions characteristic of certain mental illnesses. All memory is emotion dependent, it’s easier to remember happy things when you’re happy and sad things when you’re sad, but in a person with a heightened emotional response (such as someone with borderline personality, bipolar, or certain kinds of PTSD), the mood swings can be strong enough to block out chunks of memory.

Borderline is particularly famous for this, and the phenomenon is typically referred to as “splitting,” or more clinically as idealizaton-devaluation. When someone upsets this person, they will be unable to recall a time when the person has been kind and supportive to them, and will devalue them. This can also cause them to unhealthily idealize another person, which is often not recognized by even professionals because it rarely causes issues in the short term, but it is still indicative of the same maladaptive thinking patterns. If someone is capable of idealizing another person, it means their emotional spectrum is wide enough to suddenly devalue them when that person fails to live up to their unrealistic image.

Building positive experiences (and recording them in an easy to access space) helps the person stabilize and take back control of their emotional memory; when they are upset with a friend or loved one, they are easily able to look back at all the good memories that seem blurry at the moment. This also makes it a valuable skill for people who are depressed and/or anxious who have a tendency to catastrophize (my life has always been horrible/this will never get better) because it provides concrete reinforcement of times that actually were better.

Examples: