A preliminary skill type you can identify with a client is something DBT refers to as distract skills. They can be used in a treatment that is not DBT. Distract skills are those that just take your mind off your problem, your distress. They don't necessarily teach you to sit with your distress or reduce it, they distract you. Common examples are playing a video game, calling a supportive friend, watching a movie, something that just takes your mind off the distress.
Distract skills are something that people often have in their repertoire already. They're not sophisticated skills in that they don't actually reduce suds but they preliminarily can be useful to add to the list of skills as a way of starting to move away from self injury. If you only have distract skills in your quiver, you've got an underdeveloped skill set. The reason distract skills can be helpful, an individual may have a rather set pattern of escalating to self injury.
If you insert some sort of distraction activity early in the pattern, you can reroute what has been automatic into something that is not self injurious. As an example of productive use of a distract skill, a client of mine has the collected works of those great intellectuals, the three stooges. And one of the main things he'll do early on in treatment was to pull out the DVDs from The Three Stooges and he said they cracked them up and often would de root his despair into a more positive place. That's a simple example of a distract skill.