Introduction to Dialectical Behavior Therapy!

Welcome to my weekly series where I will be posting, week to week, about the amazing tool that is Dialectical Behavior Therapy! Follow along each week for new skills and ideas on how to make your life more effective!

Okay, so, you’ve probably heard your therapist (myself included) referencing this thing called DBT. Maybe they’ve even provided some kind of descriptions, but in an effort to demystify the counseling process, I am going to use this series to share the tricks of the trade from DBT! Tune in every Monday for DBT Mondays! Each week I will share practical skills (as well as my own musings on the skills) that can be used in your day-to-day life to help deal with the tough stuff! Let’s dive in a bit into what DBT actually is. 

I was trained in DBT during my time as an outpatient and inpatient crisis counselor at my first job in Greeley and used it to great effect with a group of people. The pandemic had just hit and my co facilitator and I had to make the transition to doing a hybrid group therapy model. Basically, some participants would be online on the big screen TV in our conference room, and others would be right in the room (behind some improvised cubicles out of shower curtains) learning DBT together, all while trying to maintain social distancing protocols. Despite these struggles, this is still the most successful, well-attended, and highest outcome group I have ever run in my career to date. I love DBT and I am so excited to teach it to you in this series! 

To give credit where credit is due, let’s talk about the creator of DBT: Dr. Marsha M. Linehan. Dr. Linehan is an amazing woman who created DBT both stemming out of her personal experiences with Borderline Personality Disorder and through years of research and study. DBT is one of the most well-supported models of therapy in the research and has been shown to be effective in treating all mental health issues, but mostly on people with severe and persistent mental illness, high risk suicidal behaviors, and mood instability (often part and parcel with Borderline Personality Disorder). Perhaps the most interesting thing to me about Dr. Linehan’s life is that she created DBT as a means of making up for a lack of clinical insight and effective treatment for issues like those she struggled with. She literally made her own therapy and has built an entire career off of it. Isn’t that amazing? We owe a lot to her work, so let’s dig right into it! 

The acronym DBT stands for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and references the concept of DBT as a whole, while also making reference to the four main skill areas that are paramount to the DBT process. DBT can be summarized in four main skill areas: 

• Mindfulness: skills focused on helping people combat mindlessness and lack of moment to moment presence of mind in their lives. 

• Interpersonal Effectiveness: skills focused on learning how to more effectively navigate interpersonal relationships and develop social skills (i.e. advocating for yourself, asking for what you need, etc.) 

• Emotion Regulation: skills focused on being able to develop insight into your emotions and how to more effectively regulate big, hot, or unpredictable emotions. 

• Distress Tolerance: skills focused on managing stressful situations with grace and being able to challenge yourself to take on more and more difficult situations with effectiveness.

You probably noticed me using that word “effective” quite a bit throughout my description of the four main skill areas. In my humble opinion, this is the heart and soul of DBT. Effective is the perfect way to describe behaviors, without moralizing or judging them. Indeed, our society teaches us time and time again that behaviors are “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”, or “should” or “should not” be done. This is contrary to the model of DBT, in that all behavior serves a function and in order to change it, we need to understand it. Throughout this process, and if you continue to follow this series or do DBT work with your therapist, I encourage you to start thinking of your behaviors as effective or ineffective, instead of one of the many moralizing words that can describe our behaviors. 

If you continue to follow this series, I recommend nabbing a copy of the manual for yourself. It can be purchased on Amazon or at most major bookstores. If you are having trouble securing a copy, reach out to me today and I can get you PDF copies of the handouts. The title of each weekly post will contain the specific handouts references so you can follow along on your own! If you are not already one of my clients, you are more than welcome to visit my site and get scheduled for a consultation or to begin virtual DBT therapy! Visit the Contact page today to connect with me!