At last night’s PMDD Monthly Zoom Group, we spent our time together on a theme that keeps coming up in my own life and in the lives of the people I work with: control, and how much of it PMDD seems to take from us. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder is a severe form of PMS marked by exhaustion, irritability, tension, rage, depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and a fog that makes it hard to focus. All of this interferes with daily life in ways that can feel impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. If you have PMDD, you already know this. What we explored together was what to do with that feeling of losing control, rather than just naming it.
This month’s session borrowed a framework from Mel Robbins’ Let Them Theory and pushed it further. Robbins’ idea is simple: release your grip on what other people think, say, or do. Let them. It’s not a new idea — it draws on Buddhism, Stoicism, and the therapeutic practice of radical acceptance — but it’s a useful, memorable way into an old truth. The half of the theory we spent most of our time on, though, was the second half: Let Me. If Let Them is about releasing what you can’t control, Let Me is about claiming what you actually can — your own response.
That distinction matters enormously for PMDD. The luteal phase can make control feel like it’s slipping away from every direction at once: your mood, your body, your relationships. Used alone, “let them” can start to feel like giving up. “Let me” is what turns it back into agency. And to be clear, this was never framed as willpower. Hormonal shifts genuinely change emotion regulation — that’s biology, not a character flaw. “Let me” is about identifying the small, real circle of choice that remains even when symptoms are loud.
We paired this with a few core Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills, since DBT already speaks this same language. Radical acceptance is essentially our “let them” — accepting reality as it is instead of fighting it — while “let me” is what we choose to do next inside that accepted reality. From there we walked through Wise Mind, the practice of noticing and naming what’s happening in the body without judgment; TIPP, a set of fast physiological tools (temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing, progressive muscle relaxation) for when a moment feels like a crisis; Opposite Action, for when an urge — to snap, to isolate, to cancel plans — doesn’t actually fit the facts of the situation; and DEAR MAN and FAST, two DBT scripts for stating a need clearly and holding a boundary without losing self-respect, even when someone reacts badly to it.
One reframe felt especially important to sit with: “let me” is not the same as self-blame. DBT’s self-validation skill reminds us that our reactions make sense given our biology and our history, even as we choose to respond differently going forward. Let me isn’t about being perfect. It’s compassionate responsibility.
We closed the evening by building a personal “Let Me” toolkit — naming a real trigger, a let-them statement, a let-me-plus-DBT-skill pairing, and one small concrete action, so that each person leaves with something to reach for before their next luteal phase arrives, not just during it.
If this resonates, our PMDD Monthly Zoom Group continues on August 20 and September 24, and our Rest & Restore group is running weekly through the summer. You don’t have to figure any of this out alone.
About Impart Therapy
Impart Therapy is a virtual practice dedicated to providing accessible psychotherapy services, including support for PMDD, ADHD, anxiety, depression, grief, stress, and life transitions. The Impart team runs a monthly PMDD Group Program (the third Thursday of every month). For more details about the PMDD Group, please visit: PMDD Support Group & Therapy | Join Our Community