When I Get Homesick, I Stop Being Homesick and Be Awesome Instead

As part of my #tbt blogs, I´m posting a story I wrote back in May 2010. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)was created in order to help individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder. However, many of the techniques used by this discipline can be helpful for people dealing with other psychological problems, or even emotional distress that can happen to any of us on any given day. One of the techniques DBT uses to deal with distressing emotions is ¨Opposite to Emotion Action.¨ In short, it means doing the opposite of what you feel like doing by carrying out an action that is going to have positive effects rather than negative ones. For example, if you wake up feeling sad and don´t want to get out of bed, you get out of bed. If you´re angry and feel like hurting someone, you walk away. It doesn´t mean you suppress your emotions, it means you put your energy towards doing something that may ultimately help to decrease the distressing feelings. And it can be a great trick to use to fight homesickness. 

Getting Bit by the Travel Bug

Back in March 2005, I travled abroad for the first time. For 12 weeks I traveled through Spain, France, Austria and Germany along with 30 students from my university and 2 professors. I hadn´t been in Madrid for more than a week when I wrote this email home to family and friends. I was already learning that travel was going to gift me with awkward moments that would turn out to be great stories to write home about (I would later say that they were ¨blogworthy¨). I´m still not sure when and why my initial dream of going abroad was born, but once I got a taste of travel…I was hooked!