DBT Therapy
What Is DBT Therapy?
We tend to think about life in very black-and-white terms, but in reality, life is not that rigid. You can have a great day and still feel sadness. You can be excited about a change in your life (such as having a baby or getting married) and still feel nervous and uncertain. And you can love a person deeply and still feel annoyed or hurt by them.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a form of counseling that embraces this way of thinking. It teaches you to live in the gray rather than the black-and-white. DBT is all about accepting the tension between happiness and sadness, nervousness and excitement, and other opposites. It replaces the “but” with the “and,” allowing two things to be true at the same time.
Practically speaking, DBT can help you both tolerate emotional distress and learn to reduce it. There are four main components to DBT: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. By working on each of these areas, you can improve your mental, social, and emotional wellbeing.
How Effective Is DBT And Who Can It Help?
DBT was created by American Psychologist Marsha Lineham in the 1970s. Lineham and her colleagues conducted the first randomized control trial of DBT in 1991, and they found that DBT treatment led to significant improvements for women with borderline personality disorder (BPD).*
Although DBT was originally used to help with BPD, the approach can also treat depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and many other mental health conditions. Part of what makes DBT so effective is its practical, easy-to-use nature. Unlike many therapeutic approaches, DBT is not confined to the therapy room. You can use DBT strategies anywhere and at any time.
What’s more, the skill-based nature of DBT means that you can learn and implement new strategies faster than you can in ordinary talk therapy. Due to its skill-based nature, some presenting symptoms can experience partial resolution relatively quickly using this direct and structured approach.
What Does DBT Therapy Look Like?
At Lift Wellness Group, we use DBT in both individual and group settings with kids, adolescents, and adults. Individual sessions are 45 minutes and group sessions are 60 minutes. Although it generally takes about half a year to learn and master DBT skills, many of our clients see improvement in their lives after just a few weeks of treatment.
What DBT skills you and your therapist work on ultimately depends on what’s best for you. Some of the many DBT skills that we use include:
Mindfulness—through meditation, visualization, deep breathing, and other calming strategies, you can increase your self-awareness and feel more grounded in the present.
Opposite action—This skill is all about doing the opposite of what your anxiety tells you to do. Instead of running away from your fear, you’ll move toward what is triggering your fear so that you can work on overcoming it.
Radical Acceptance—Instead of forcing yourself to try and feel good, you will learn to accept all your feelings—negative or positive. By telling yourself, “I can’t change my situation, so it is what it is,” you can experience a deeper sense of peace wherever you are in life.
The S.T.O.P. Skill—This strategy can help you avoid jumping to hasty conclusions and teach you to get in touch with your wise mind before making decisions (the S stands for Stop, T for Take a step back, O for Observe, and P for Proceed).
In the end, this is hardly an exhaustive list—there are many, many other DBT skills that our counselors utilize. To help you practice these skills in everyday life, we will give you worksheets that you can take home with you. This way, you’ll have a list of strategies that you can draw from whenever you feel distressed.
Additionally, DBT therapy involves diary cards that you can use to keep track of your emotions and rate the effectiveness of different skills. The diary card will ask questions about your urges and emotions, such as “What was your urge to run away from your feelings?” and “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your distress?” Answering these questions will help you gain a clearer understanding of what coping skills you need to implement.
How Can DBT Benefit Your Life?
Through the consistent practice of DBT techniques, you can gain a greater sense of control over your emotional distress, relationships, and mindfulness abilities. And if you choose to pursue group therapy, you’ll have the chance to practice your DBT skills in a setting with lots of other clients. The great thing about working in a group is that you can have other people hold you accountable and motivate you to achieve your goals.
Ultimately, not every DBT skill is the right fit for everyone. We encourage you to keep experimenting with different skills until you find the ones that work for you. Along the way, it’s important to be kind to yourself—progress is progress as long as you are showing up and doing your best. Part of the foundation of DBT is learning not to judge yourself. When you can practice radically accepting yourself, it becomes much easier to improve your mental health and successfully implement the right skills into your life.
Experience The Transformative Power Of DBT In Your Own Life
Many of our therapists have experience using DBT, and we run both weekly DBT groups and individual DBT sessions. What’s more, we are always willing to collaborate with other providers and loved ones in your life, as we prioritize taking a team approach to the healing process.
If you want to begin your journey of healing and empowerment today, we encourage you to use the contact form or call our intake number at 203-908-5603.
*https://behavioraltech.org/evidence/#:~:text=The%20first%20randomized%20controlled%20trial%20%28RCT%29%20of%20DBT,been%20viewed%20as%20untreatable%20%28Linehan%20et%20al.%2C%201991%29.
