ABOUT DBT THERAPY
Learning a new way to navigate your world.
What is DBT Therapy?
A structured approach to developing coping skills for all life can throw at you, DBT combines science and mindfulness to create new pathways for healing. DBT is based on principles of balance between acceptance and change. Our caring therapists support you in practicing self acceptance while making changes you want for your future.
Principles of DBT
In DBT, we understand emotional dysregulation as developing from the interaction between a person’s emotional sensitivity and their environment. Some people are born with a more sensitive emotional system. This can mean they react quickly to emotional cues, experience feelings very intensely, and take longer to return to a sense of calm.
When this sensitivity occurs in an invalidating environment — one that dismisses, criticizes, or minimizes a person’s inner experiences — it can make emotions even harder to manage. In these environments, emotional expression may be punished, inconsistently responded to, or treated as if it “shouldn’t be a big deal.”
Over time, this ongoing interaction between a sensitive temperament and an invalidating environment can make it difficult for someone to understand, name, or express their emotions. It may also interfere with their ability to solve emotional problems effectively or regulate their behavior in ways that feel aligned with their goals.
These principles of DBT guide what we do – how we understand our clients’ experiences, how we make sense of their challenges, and how we walk alongside them in their growth. At its heart, DBT is an emotion-focused therapy that helps people build the skills to notice, understand, express, and regulate their emotions in ways that align with their values and the lives they want to create.
Biosocial Theory
Due to the effects of an invalidating environment upon the individual, DBT focuses much of its efforts on teaching individuals to understand, accept, and validate their own experiences, emotions, and thoughts. Having validation and acceptance do not mean approving of the response or behavior, but acknowledgment of one’s emotional state and reaction and an attempt to understand it. Individuals are taught to trust their emotional responses to events and to learn ways to modulate extremes in emotions.
Validation & Acceptance
Dialectical Behavior Therapy utilizes principles of behaviorism to understand and modify behaviors that are causing an individual problems and distress. In individual therapy, the DBT therapist and client work together to understand the events preceding problematic behaviors and responses in the environment that may be keeping the behavior around despite an individual’s desire to stop the behavior. Clients are encouraged to engage people in their environment to change unhelpful responses and clients are taught new ways to respond to emotional situations.
Behavior change
Dialectics
Dialectics is a philosophy of inter-relatedness, continual change, and the idea that opposing viewpoints that are equally valued and understood lead to a greater understanding of a situation. DBT therapists use dialectics to help themselves and clients get “unstuck” from thinking in polarities and to balance opposites to achieve new perspectives.
The Stages of DBT
before treatment, we will start with 3-4 sessions of pretreatment to lay a solid foundation & determine if dbt is right for you.
During the first 3-4 sessions, our therapists will help potential clients identify their therapy goals, to learn about DBT, and to clearly define DBT therapist and client roles in obtaining treatment goals. Clients are not yet in therapy with us at this stage, but are exploring the possibility of participating in comprehensive DBT. Adult clients may decide to involve family members or other treatment providers in this process of assessment and treatment planning and family members are routinely involved during this stage for adolescent clients. At the end of pre-treatment, if the therapist and client agree DBT is a fit for the client's needs, you will be asked to make a six-month commitment to treatment.
Treatment begins to build strong roots
Typically the first 6 months of therapy, and may progress longer, this stage is devoted to helping clients eliminate any life-threatening behaviors and those behaviors that are most harmful to their quality of life (i.e. substance use, extreme anger, eating disorders). Clients participate in once weekly individual DBT therapy and once weekly skills group and they have access to telephone skills coaching with their individual therapist during this stage of therapy.
stage 1
Some, although not all, clients coming to a DBT therapist have lived with trauma and suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress. In this stage, clients work to resolve stress responses through exposure therapy using formal treatments, such as the DBT PE protocol.
stage 2
Sessions continue to foster steady growth
Clients address specific behaviors they want to change to meet their life goals and continue growing in areas they desire. For example, clients may engage in treatment of insomnia with the DBT-Sleep protocol, increase behavioral activation to treat depression, or address anxiety symptoms with cognitive and behavioral strategies.
stage 3
Clients work to gain greater spiritual fulfillment, increasing their sense of connection to others and satisfaction in living. Clients integrate all they have discovered in therapy and practice sharing the joy of their new emotional freedom with others.
stage 4
Progress toward a balanced life…
