How to Help Clients Build a Life Worth Living

Building a Life Worth Living: The Heart of Emotional Regulation in DBT Every client who walks through your door is chasing the same thing, even if they don’t know it: a life worth living. It’s not about perfection, constant happiness, or never feeling low. It’s about building a life that feels meaningful, connected, and true. The Psychology of Accumulating Positive Events One of the key structures of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is the concept of accumulating positive events. It’s the emotional equivalent of putting money into a savings account. Every positive experience - no matter how small - becomes a deposit. Over time, those deposits grow into resilience, self-worth, and happiness. When clients rarely experience positive events, they don’t have emotional savings to draw on when things go wrong. Part of our role as practitioners is to help them identify what needs to change so that those positive events start happening more often. But it isn’t just about doing more enjoyable things. A life worth living is built around values. Those values must be chosen, not inherited or imposed. And for many clients, that’s where the discomfort begins. To build a life worth living, clients must first decide what makes life valuable to them. From Short-Term Pleasure to Long-Term Fulfilment In DBT, we help clients distinguish between short-term pleasure and long-term happiness. Pleasure soothes, but it doesn’t last. Lasting happiness comes from achieving meaningful goals and building relationships that reflect our core values. Helping a client make that shift often means guiding them through layers of fear, guilt, shame, or hopelessness. It can also mean challenging their avoidance patterns. In DBT terms, avoidance is the enemy of a life worth living. Avoidance is the reason people don’t do what they know they need to do. Emotions, mood swings, or the inability to accept that life can be unfair often stand in the way of progress. And yet, when we avoid the hard work, we avoid the very path that could make life meaningful. The act of facing life as it is - not as we wish it to be - is one of the bravest things our clients can do. Helping Clients Discover What Really Matters When clients begin exploring their values, they sometimes realise just how far their current lives are from the lives they want. It can be confronting, even painful. That’s why our job is to hold space for both courage and discomfort. It takes thoughtful questioning to help clients uncover what truly matters to them. You might ask: “If you could act in a way that served your value, but no one would ever know, what would you do?” or “If anything were possible, what direction would you want your life to move towards?” These questions prompt the client’s authentic values to surface, free from social conditioning or external expectations. Once values are known, change becomes possible. As practitioners, our work isn’t to hand clients a map. It’s to remind them they already have one inside them. Develop the Skills to Help Clients Build a Life Worth Living The DBT Skills Training 2026 will equip you with the exact methods, worksheets, and frameworks to help clients identify their values, reduce avoidance, and accumulate the positive events that make life genuinely worth living. See the full training prospectus here: https://peoplebuilding.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/DBT+Training+Info+2026.pdf Early-Bird Prices (until 2026) £180 per module (10 weeks each) – Dates and times confirmed early next week 👉 Book a single module here: https://peopleb.infusionsoft.app/app/orderForms/DBT-Modules £594 for the full four-module course – Dates and times confirmed early next week 👉 Book the full DBT training here: https://peopleb.infusionsoft.com/app/orderForms/DBT-Full-Training 2026 Prices: £250 per module £849 for the whole course DBT is not just a therapeutic toolset - it’s a philosophy of living. By training in DBT, you’ll gain the confidence to guide clients toward meaning, while also refining your own emotional regulation and purpose as a practitioner. by Gemma Bailey (with the help of Ai) https://www.peoplebuilding.co.uk/franchise