Dr. Kristi Webb

Dr. Kristi Webb I am a psychologist in private practice. I work with adults who are struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma, substance abuse, and life transitions.

Some are suicidal and/or self-harming. I am a DBT therapist as well as using other therapies. See my Pinterest board at www.pinterest.com/drkristiwebb/

12/01/2025

Skill of the Week: Mini-Vacation. You made it through Thanksgiviing! But there are still more holidays to come, and you may be very busy and stressed, or dreading the approaching dates, or perhaps you just don't have time to even think about them. Remember how renewed and refreshed you felt after your vacation, how much better you were able to handle the stressors of your work, your family, your pets, traffic? The wisdom of this skill is that we can take advantage of a mini-vacation without having to leave town - or even our bed! - and reap many of the same benefits. When we have Just Had Enough and can't deal another moment with our lives, it can be helpful to take a mini-vacation: crawl into bed for 20 minutes, sit on the porch and listen to the birds with your phone turned off, or watch an episode of your favorite guilty pleasure. Another useful time for this skill is when something has occurred that leaves us distressed, anxious, angry, confused, sad, and/or ashamed and guilty. When it all seems to much to bear, just hang it up for a while. The key is to make this a mini-vacation; don't let it drag on for hours or days. Take a break, then come back to the fray again, renewed and ready to try again.

11/24/2025

Skill of the Week: Make a Gratitude List. So here we are: headed into the holidays. Again. My friends know that I react with irritation to the suggestion that I focus on gratitude, because I don't like being told what to feel. So I'm not going to suggest that you feel grateful. But research does show that people who make regular gratitude lists are happier, and these results are strong and consistent. You don't have to make a long list; start with 5 things. And you don't have to be elaborate, either. I'm grateful that I have stable housing; that I can breathe easily; for food to eat. Here in the northern hemisphere, spring is coming. No matter how you feel about that - maybe you're an allergy sufferer and hate the blooming flowers and trees - I bet you can identify something to be grateful for: sunshine! more hours of light daily! another year! Some people make alphabetical gratitude lists - at what letter will you get stuck? Your gratitude list can be short and simple but I guarantee that if you make one regularly, you'll feel less anxious and depressed.

11/17/2025

Skill of the Week: Mindfulness of Your Emotion. People often tell me when they are experiencing uncomfortable emotions. They want to know what to do about them. My answer is, be mindful. Feelings do not require any action on our part; it is enough to have them. Further, since "what you resist persists", if we fight against them ("No! No! I won't feel sad, I won't!") they are likely to grow. Even if we can sweep them away for a while, they tend to sneak in through the back door and bite us in the butt. So mindfulness of our current emotion will allow space for the feeling(s), without watering them and tending them. This does require knowing what the feelings are (sadness, joy, anger, fear, shame/guilt, or love, or their relatives). Of course it's reasonable to ask, But why on earth would I want to feel sadness, or fear, or anger? Isn't the point NOT to feel those afflictive emotions? The answer is that until we've felt them, we cannot be rid of them (for this time). Paradoxically, giving our feelings attention results in not having to feel them as acutely. Many people subscribe to the belief that if they only knew WHY they feel a certain way, they could then control their lives so that THAT never happens again, and then they won't have to feel that uncomfortable emotion. Sadly, knowing WHY doesn't help. Feelings are like the weather: they just are. They're here; might as well dress appropriately for them.

11/10/2025

Skill of the Week: Attend to Relationships. I think we can all agree that these are troubling times. There are rules for getting through periods when we feel anger, despair, depression, or hopelessness and helplessness, and one of those rules is to attend to relationships. All relationships, even (or especially) our most intimate, require attention. Like a garden, if we don't give them care and tending, weeds will grow. Also like a garden, sometimes those weeds can look an awful lot like pretty flowers at first! Attending to relationships means keeping in balance your own priorities and the other person's; your needs and your friend's; what's important to you and what's important to someone else. Unattended relationships tend to either blow up or fizzle out. They can blow up when issues - such as how much time to spend together, or who calls whom, or who cleans the cat box - aren't addressed. We sit on our frustration until one day we blow and that's the end of that relationship. They can fizzle out if we don't put in the time and effort to maintain them, including when we don't repair broken places. The longer we don't make the repair, the harder it becomes, and the easier it is simply to walk away entirely. Attending to relationships means that we give our human friends and family the same care and attention we give our pets; it means we keep a balance between what is important to us and what is important to the other person.

11/03/2025

Skill of the Week: Opposite to the Emotion Action (OTEA). This is one of my very favorite skills, as my patients will attest. This skill is used when we need to act opposite to our emotional urge to do something or say something. We tend to believe that we must wait until we feel like doing X or Y, then do it. Our brains don't actually work that way; if I wait to lift weights until I feel like it, I'll have been dead 45 minutes. OTEA might be as simple as acting opposite to our emotional urge to stay in bed where it is safe, and warm, and we don't have to deal with the day's challenges. Using OTEA we get out of bed. There are lots of other opportunities to use this skill: you know that asking your boss for a raise isn't a threat to your job or your health but you still avoid asking; you know that you have committed to exercising daily but you just don't want to; you feel hurt and angered by something a friend said, and even though you know she didn't mean to hurt you, you still feel angry and want to lash out. Using OTEA means not only that we don't act on the urge; we go all the way in the opposite direction. We practice asking for a raise so that we can sound confident and at ease - and then we ask. We put our walking shoes on and get out the door *right now*. We avoid interacting with our friend until we're sure we can resist the urge to lash out; we practice seeing things from her point of view; we express our love for her and let her know how glad we are to be friends. This is such a useful skill in so many circumstances - and it works!

10/27/2025

Skill of the Week: Accumulate Positives. Wow, it's so easy to focus on the negative! I can't do X, and even if I did it this time I won't be able to do it next time. Or if I did it this time then I'll be expected to do it again and again and again, just as well or better, and I can't do that. My life is not what I want it to be; I wanted to be a cowboy. And today was a really lousy day at work anyway. And then the cat threw up and I stepped in it. Of course none of this is amusing if you're the one suffering, but the skill of Accumulate Positives is one way to decrease the steady diet of unhappiness. There are three ways to do this: 1) do something pleasant every day (think of it as a challenge and make a commitment); 2) identify the long-term goal you want and list the steps you'd have to take to get there, then work on one of those steps every day (you want to be a cowboy so you put "learn to ride a horse" on your list and each day you work at that a little bit, building toward your long-term goal); and 3) do not give attention to your worries (push away those myths about how you can't do X well, or that you don't deserve the compliment because you didn't do X perfectly). Any or all of these approaches to the skill of Accumulate Positives will improve your mood and smooth out mental bumps.

10/20/2025

Skill of the Week: Meaning-making. This is the skill that suggests we make lemonade out of lemons. It is NOT the skill that suggests we be grateful for tragedy. The skill comes from Viktor Frankl's book, "Man's Search for Meaning", about his experience in N**i death camps; currently, Viktor Kravchuk is posting daily from Ukraine on Substack and is demonstrating his use of this skill. Meaning-making can help when we have to survive a crisis, whether it's war, illness, loss, waiting to hear about a job application, or being stuck in traffic. At the time we're going through any one of these situations, it's huge; it's overwhelming; even being at the end of the longest line at the grocery store will seem like it's too much to bear, some days. Making meaning of it asks that we find - or create - some purpose for the pain, some value in it - in short, some meaning to it. For some people, this is a spiritual skill, since it assumes that meaning can be made out of even a tragic event, that there is a purpose to tragedy. I'm not suggesting that you tell yourself, "I have so much to be grateful for, I shouldn't be depressed." That's invalidating, judgmental, and no help at all. You might, though, tell yourself, "Being depressed is giving me empathy for others in emotional pain; it's softening my heart." You can still wish you weren't depressed (go ahead) and you certainly don't have to be grateful for depression (there are lots of ways to find empathy, without being depressed). Meaning-making assumes that there are some positives to everything, and that it's worth digging to find them.

10/13/2025

Skill of the Week: Avoid All-or-Nothing Thinking. Also called red-light-green-light or black-and-white thinking, this approach to situations leaves out the possibility of a middle path, shades of gray, and creative solutions to problems. Going to the gym for 20 minutes isn't the hour you'd hoped for, but it's not nothing, either. Meditating for 5 minutes isn't the 15 minutes you'd planned on, but it's not 0 minutes. Some people are so engaged in all-or-nothing thinking that they only see extremes, and cannot understand that no person or situation is all good or all bad. All-or-nothing thinking is a key feature of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and borderline personality disorder, but most of us are prone to it at times. This is especially true of perfectionists. How often do you (hear someone else) say, ""I am completely incompetent" or, "Either I get a job at X law firm, or I am a complete failure and will end up working at McDonald's" or, "My dissertation/project/report/paper/speech must be free of mistakes, or it is worthless"? These are examples of all-or-nothing thinking. The key is to catch yourself hanging out at the extremes when thinking about a situation – in the either/or zones of good/bad, wonderful/awful. Avoiding all-or-nothing thinking means thinking in both/and terms, and remembering that most things are neither good nor bad, they are some combination of the two.

10/06/2025

Skill of the Week: What We Feed, Grows. Here's the deal: if you focus on the problems in your life, on what is unacceptable to you, on your complaints, then all of these will grow. You'll notice more problems, fewer acceptable events and people, and you'll be more and more unhappy. On the other hand, if you focus on what is working in your life, if you feed your life pleasure and appreciation, your happiness will grow. You can focus on the problem, and it will grow. You can focus on the solution, and it will grow. You can focus on acceptance that you cannot solve this particular problem today, and your acceptance will grow. What we feed, grows.

09/15/2025

Skill of the Week: Broken Record. When we are asking for what we want, or saying no to a request, it can be very tempting to get sucked into a discussion with the other person about the timing of our request, whether it's a reasonable request, about how busy the other person is, about how we left the cap off the toothpaste LAST WEEK and that justifies not getting what we are asking for now.... There are many examples of these big, fat, juicy worms that are on the end of a hook; we're the fish, and we bite down and are promptly dragged away from our original request or "no" statement. The skill of Broken Record can be very useful here. State your request (or say no) calmly and firmly, over and over and over and over again. Do not get dragged into a debate. Ignore verbal attacks. Stay on course. If you try this I'd love to know how it goes.

09/08/2025

Skill of the Week: Don't Talk to Anyone Else Today. Sometimes it seems like we're just not fit for human consumption. Every time we open our mouths, we get ourselves into trouble. We're cranky and irritable, or tearful, or tongue-tied. Maybe we pick a fight with the customer service rep at the cable company (this may be easy to do), or snarl at the barista, or get irritated with ourselves because we couldn't hear what the cashier was asking us and held up the line asking, "Excuse me? Excuse me?" If that's your day, stop. Don't talk to anyone else for the rest of the day. You know how an animal will freeze when it's scared, holding very still so as not to attract attention until danger passes? That's you. Just don't move, and wait for the danger to pass. It will, but in the meantime, don't talk to anyone else today. Keep still, and breathe, and enjoy the quiet.

09/01/2025

Skill of the Week: Think Dialectically. This means recognizing that there is always more than one side to any situation; there are very few absolutes in life. (Child abuse is wrong is one absolute). When we think dialectically we let go of extremes, of either-or; we look for both-and. We ask ourselves, "what am I missing here?" "Is there a middle path?" The choice may not be between going to the party or not going to the party; what if you went for 30 minutes? If you are committed to shopping locally, you may refuse to set foot in WalMart or Target but still use Kohl's. The world is full of opposites and opposing forces; thinking dialectically means that we look for the connection, the similarity, the way in which two things that seem like opposites can both be true at the same time. You are independent and you want help. You can be with others and be lonely. You can be mad at someone and still love and respect him/her. You can disagree with the rules and also follow the rules. You can accept reality and work to change it.

Address

104 So Estes Drive, Suite 206
Chapel Hill, NC
27514

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 7pm
Tuesday 1:30pm - 6:30pm
Wednesday 9am - 5:30pm

Telephone

+19192251569

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Dr. Kristi Webb posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share via Email
Share on WhatsApp Share on Instagram Share on Telegram

Category

Our Story

I am a psychologist in private practice. I work with adults who are struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma, substance abuse, and life transitions. Some are suicidal and/or self-harming. I am a DBT therapist as well as using other therapies. My page sends out the Skill of the Week each Monday morning. My pronouns are she, her, hers.