DBT
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
What is DBT?
A specified form of cognitive behavioral therapy, the main goals of DBT are teaching people how to: live in the moment, cope with stress in a healthy manner, regulate their emotions, and improve relationships with others. We work together in creating a balance between discovering unconditional self-acceptance and creating the internal dissonance to motivate lasting changes for positive growth.
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DBT is composed of four main modules of skill building and application of skills how to effectively change their behavior using four main strategies:
Counseling
Mindfulness
Core mindfulness skills, perhaps the most important strategies in DBT, teach you to focus on the present and “live in the moment.” By doing so, you can learn to pay attention to what’s going on inside of you (thoughts, feelings, sensations, impulses) as well as what’s outside of you (what you see, hear, smell, and touch).
These skills will help you to slow down so you can focus on healthy coping skills during emotional pain. Mindfulness can help you to stay calm and avoid engaging in automatic negative thought patterns, as well as impulsive behavior. The goal is to respond, rather react!
Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation provides a set of skills that help to keep your emotional system healthy and functioning. It teaches you to adjust the intensity of your emotions, when to express your emotions, and how you react to it. By recognizing and coping with negative emotions, such as depression, you can reduce your emotional vulnerability and have more positive emotional experiences. Learning to properly recognize emotional cues, identifying obstacles to changing emotions, and increasing mindfulness to current emotions are paramount skill taught in this module.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Interpersonal effectiveness helps you to become more assertive in relationships while keeping those relationships positive and healthy. The skills taught are intended to maximize the chances that a person’s goals in a specific situation will be met, while at the same time not damaging either the relationship or the person’s self-respect. This happens by learning to listen and communicate effectively, deal with difficult people, and respecting yourself and others.
The interpersonal response pattern, how you interact with the people around you and in your personal relationships, taught in DBT includes effective strategies for asking for what one needs, as well as how to assertively say ‘no,’ and learning to cope with inevitable interpersonal conflict.
Distress Tolerance
Most approaches to mental health treatment focus on changing distressing events and circumstances; they do not focus on accepting, finding meaning for, and tolerating that distress. DBT emphasizes learning to endure pain skillfully and teaches you to accept yourself, and the current situation, as exactly as they are supposed to be at this moment. More specifically, you learn how to tolerate or survive crises using four techniques: distraction, self-soothing, improving the movement, and thinking of pros and cons.
By learning distress tolerance techniques, you’ll be able to prepare for intense emotions in advance and cope with them effectively. DBT is concerned with tolerating and surviving crises through accepting life as it is in the moment. Acceptance skills include radical acceptance, turning the mind toward acceptance, and willingness versus willfulness. Although the stance advocated here is a nonjudgmental one, this does not mean that it is one of approval: acceptance of reality is not approval of reality.
Finding Balance
A specified form of cognitive behavioral therapy, the main goals of DBT are teaching people how to: live in the moment, cope with stress in a healthy manner, regulate their emotions, and improve relationships with others. We work together in creating a balance between discovering unconditional self-acceptance and creating the internal dissonance to motivate lasting changes for positive growth.
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DBT is composed of four main modules of skill building and application of skills how to effectively change their behavior using four main strategies:
Contact
Brave Spaces Health and Wellness PLLC
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Kelsey R. Worfler, LCSW, LAC, RYT-200
Fort Collins, Colorado
Tel: 970-586-5882