{"id":3204,"date":"2026-02-03T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/?p=3204"},"modified":"2026-02-03T09:22:36","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T09:22:36","slug":"ro-in-turbulent-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/ro-in-turbulent-times\/","title":{"rendered":"RO in Turbulent Times"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic, many of my clients (with the exception of essential workers) were laid off.  As a self-employed therapist, I remained working from home.  My days were a series of sessions filled with confusion, grief, what -ifs and all <\/em>the emotions ranging from anger to sadness.  And as much as I filtered the news for my own sanity, due to the nature of my job, I could not escape the endless conversation about the pandemic.  What made my job particularly difficult is that there were no courses offered in my education titled \u201cHow to support your clients through a global pandemic,\u201d so I really had to cobble my knowledge of disaster psychological services with the humility of being another human in a pandemic too.  Another human who was scared, grieving the loss of a loved one, trying to figure out best safety practices for myself and my loved ones amidst competing and sometime contradictory sources. It was a strange, suspended place and I leaned heavily on the calls for kindness from our provincial health authority.  Fast forward 6 years and again I find myself with the relative privilege of being able to again filter the news but inundated with a collective new fear; a collective new grief.  When clients ask me \u201cwhat\u2019s the point in practicing any of this?\u201d given the state of affairs, I would argue that it is more important than ever to be examining ourselves, our actions, our capacity to set aside differences for the greater good.  So, it might be a good idea to revisit what radical openness is and is not. And perhaps also a time to remind ourselves that sometimes being closed to torture is the most radically open act we can do to signal to others you matter<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Radical Openness Is:<\/strong><\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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\u2022 Being open to new information or disconfirming feedback in order to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Learning to celebrate self- discovery\u2014 it is freedom from being stuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Rewarding\u2014 it often involves trying out novel ways of behaving that may help us cope more effectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Courageous\u2014 it alerts us to areas of our life that may need to change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Capable of enhancing relationships\u2014 it models humility and readiness to learn from what the world has to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 A process of purposeful self- enquiry and a willingness to acknowledge one\u2019s fallibility\u2014 with an intention to change (if needed). It can be both painful and liberating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 A way to challenge our perceptions of reality based on assumptions that we all have perceptual and regulatory biases and as a consequence we don\u2019t see things as they are\u2014 we see things as we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Being open to learning new things, which involves a willingness to consider that there are many ways to get to the same place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 About taking responsibility for our personal reactions and emotions\u2014without falling apart or automatically blaming others or the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Meant to help us adapt to an ever- changing environment, rather than being stuck rigidly responding to situations in ways that don\u2019t actually serve us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Radical Openness is Not:<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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\u2022  Approval, naively believing, or mindlessly giving in<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022  Assuming one already knows the answer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022  Something that can solely be understood intellectually\u2014 it requires direct and repeated practice<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022  Rejecting the past<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022  Expecting good things to happen<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022  Always changing <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022  Being rigid about being open<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Source: Lynch & Little, 2025, p.143)<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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For myself, radical openness means standing by my Canadian prime minster when he tells the world that our perceptual bias of how things have \u201calways\u201d been done can be challenged while also contending with the painful truth that my country has companies willing to monetize on the torture of fellow humans.  Within my control is not to support these companies or their subsidiaries; in this sense I can be closed and <\/em>still in line with my values. To be radically open means that I practice being vulnerable, saying to my partner \u201cI had a nightmare last night that those trucks were coming up our street\u201d or saying to my clients \u201cYour response is normal \u2013 the solution might not be self-enquiry but strategies for solidarity.\u201d Recall, we are hardwired to belong and evolved to help those outside our immediate blood line.  Importantly, radical openness is not <\/em>acquiescing to power or getting stuck in fatalistic mind.  Our fellow humans need us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The RO DBT community is, beautifully, a global one, and I acknowledge that likely none of us can say we live within borders that have not witnessed, perpetrated or tried to defend injustice or inhumane practices, many occurring as we speak.  As we remind our clients, we have all harmed and been harmed.  It is painful to grieve the expectation that we have not.  My ray of hope, however, is that if you lean to OC, you have some special superpowers in this time of turmoil.  Those superpowers are the capacity to plan ahead, exercise caution, to lean into moral certitude when warranted, and to fix sh*t.  My understanding of radical openness is to embrace flexible responding to the context at hand, and you betcha, that time is now.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n\n \n <\/clipPath>\n \n \n \"J. <\/foreignObject>\n <\n <\/svg>\n\n
J. Nicole Little, PhD, RCC<\/h6>\n

Nicole is a therapist specializing in eating disorders and other conditions of overcontrol in Victoria, B.C., Canada. She is passionate about RO DBT, animal assisted therapy and creating through writing and collage. She remains in remedial Flexible Mind VARIEs but her family loves her anyway.<\/p>\n \n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic, many of my clients (with the exception of essential workers) were laid off.  As a self-employed therapist, I remained working from home.  My days were a series of sessions filled with confusion, grief, what -ifs and all the emotions ranging from anger to sadness.  And as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3216,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3204"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3217,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3204\/revisions\/3217"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicallyopen.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}