Are you looking for a way to connect with others and feel better about yourself? Following Anya’s example in K. O’Neill’s graphic novel The Moth Keeper and using the DBT Contribute skill might be worth your time. This skill was designed to help people get through a rough moment when whatever feels broken can’t be fixed right away.
Why would someone as young as Anya agree to wander a dark, cold desert in the middle of the night while her friends are enjoying the cozy warmth of their homes? Early in the novel, Anya has a conversation with her mentor Yeolen about how doing something for others can end up making you feel good about yourself. Anya says that caring for the Moon Moths, who are vital for the Night villagers’ survival, makes her feel warm inside. Yeolen, in turn, explains that he took the job because he wanted to try giving something away without “caring whether it was noticed or returned.” What he found, eventually, was that it made him feel more connected to the Night Village community.
What Anya and Yeolen are describing has a name in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and that name is Contribute.
What Contribute in DBT is
Contribute is one of the Distress Tolerance skills in DBT, which is the group of skills built for the moments when something hurts and you cannot fix it right away. The instruction itself is simple: do something for someone else, without asking for anything back and without thinking about what you might get out of it.
The skill works because our attention has limits. When we focus on doing something for another person, our attention shifts away from our own situation and what bothers us recedes into the background. Nothing about our own problem has disappeared, but it is no longer the one and only thing at the center of our world.
Contributing also doesn’t have to be big. Volunteering for an organization certainly counts, whether that’s a food bank, an animal shelter, or a youth program at your local library, and so do the small gestures: bringing a friend their favorite snack when they’re sick, texting someone to ask how they’re actually doing, helping a sibling with homework, doing a chore nobody asked you to do, holding a door for a stranger, or making eye contact and saying hello.
Two things are worth knowing before you try it. The first is that DBT Contribute is not a fix. Anya’s desert stays cold no matter how good the work makes her feel. The skill helps you get through a hard stretch without making things worse, which is a genuine win, though it is a different win from solving the problem. The second is that contributing is not the same as people-pleasing. What separates them is choice. Contributing is something you do because it means something to you. Doing things for others in order to earn approval, to keep someone from being upset with you, or to avoid dealing with your own life tends to leave you emptier rather than warmer. Yeolen’s example is the one worth following because he gave without needing anyone to notice or pay him back.
Teenagers are unusually well built for this
Andrew Fuligni, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at UCLA who has spent his career studying adolescents, surveyed a large body of research and reached the conclusion he lays out in a piece for The Conversation. The urge to give something to other people, he argues, isn’t rare in the teenage years. It’s a real developmental need, right alongside the need to become independent and the need for close relationships. In fact, pitching in on a shared goal is one of the ways teenagers work out several questions at the same time: who am I, can I stand on my own, and how do I get genuinely close to somebody?
The UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent, in its post on meaning and purpose through contribution, explains some of what’s happening underneath. The parts of your brain that handle social life go through a growth spurt during adolescence. As they do, you get sharper at picking up what other people are going through, and better at telling the difference between someone who needs advice and someone who just needs company. Around the same time, your brain’s reward circuitry turns up its volume, which is part of why a kind act can land differently at sixteen than it did at nine. Contributing also feeds a sense of purpose, and teenagers who have one tend to do better emotionally, do better in school, and bounce back faster when life gets hard.
That same post contains one finding worth noting: reflecting on what you did matters. Research on community service suggests that thinking the experience over afterward, whether through journaling, art, writing, or simply talking it through with someone, is part of what makes the benefit last. Doing the thing is only half of it. Noticing that you did it is the other half.
Three teenagers who started small
Jamie Margolin, Seattle. In 2017, wildfire smoke settled over Seattle thickly enough that Jamie’s friends with breathing problems ended up in the emergency room. Around the same time, Jamie watched Hurricane Maria devastate Puerto Rico on the news. She was still in high school when she and a few other teenagers founded Zero Hour, and by the following summer they had organized youth climate marches in cities around the world.
Marley Dias, New Jersey. At eleven, Marley had grown tired of school assignments that were, as she put it, all about white boys and their dogs, and when she said so at home her mother asked her what she wanted to do about it. She set herself the goal of collecting a thousand books with Black girls as the main character by February of 2016, and she reached it. The campaign has since gathered more than fourteen thousand books, which have been distributed to schools and community groups.
Gitanjali Rao, Colorado. Cyberbullying was doing real damage in Gitanjali’s community, and instead of looking for a way to punish it after the fact she went looking for a way to interrupt it before it happened. The result was Kindly, which UNICEF’s Office of Innovation describes as an open-source tool that uses machine learning to detect cyberbullying intent in a message and give the writer feedback in real time, before anything is sent. UNICEF, which credits Gitanjali with conceiving it at sixteen, is now developing Kindly as a digital public good for use around the world.
Marley was eleven, Gitanjali was ten when she started, and Jamie was a high school student with no platform and no followers. Not one of them set out to become known for the things they did. Each of them started by wanting to do something for others without expecting to end up in the spotlight.
So remember that practicing Contribute doesn’t require you to become famous. Small gestures not only count, they probably matter the most.
Going back to Contribute as a DBT Skill
Anya’s desert doesn’t get warmer. Anya still needs to chase after the Moon Moths, and the night is still long. What changes is what Anya carries with her as she walks out into the darkness of the night.
That is the honest promise of Contribute. It will not erase what is hard in your life, and it certainly will not make you famous, but it will remind you that you are someone capable of changing things for yourself rather than only someone to whom things just happen. On the days when your own life feels stuck, that reminder could turn out to be worth a great deal.
Here’s a small challenge, if you would like one. Sometime this week, spend some of your energy on doing one thing for someone else that nobody asked you to do, and then say nothing about it to anyone. Afterwards, reflect upon it by writing down what it felt like to do this or by drawing a picture about how you feel about yourself.
