Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Negative emotions make life difficult.

Do you feel your mind pulled in a hundred different directions at once? Do you have difficulty handling some of your emotions, and does this cause any problems in your relationships?

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) offers individuals comprehensive skills to manage painful memories and emotions and decrease conflicts in their relationships.

Through DBT, you can learn to deal with stress and receive ways to help you cope with issues that are hard to handle.

DBT helps you find ways to self-regulate rather than going into emotional overload.

Here are some life skills you will learn through DBT.

Being mindful means being aware of yourself and your surroundings, helping you live in the moment rather than overreacting. DBT enables you to gain this awareness.

It’s not easy to handle difficult situations, and when they occur, you go into emotional overload, feeling out of control. DBT helps you learn distress tolerance, allowing you to keep your emotions in check when challenges arise. Then, those negative feelings are less likely to create distress.

If you find your emotions out of control, the result can elicit extreme anger or sadness, making interactions with people and challenging situations difficult. Things can get out of control as a result. DBT can teach you emotion regulation, helping you learn ways to minimize your emotional response to specific triggers.

As humans, we don’t live in isolation from one another. Therefore, we must learn ways to interact in a way that creates positive effects. Communication is part of expressing ourselves; developing practical communication skills creates positive outcomes. DBT emphasizes interpersonal effectiveness, helping you learn confidence-building communication skills.

DBT helps us regulate our emotions.

Many of us in our daily lives are unaware of the constant stream of uncontrollable negative emotions right under our noses.

These emotions affect how we feel about ourselves and interact with others, including friends, romantic partners, and family members.

DBT essentially works with individuals to help them find ways to manage their negative emotions so they can feel balanced, in control, and able to interact respectfully and successfully. The message at the heart of DBT is acceptance and change.

DBT can help you gain control.

Initially, DBT helped treat those with a borderline personality disorder. Research has now shown that DBT can successfully treat people with depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, eating disorders, and substance abuse.

DBT treatment usually consists of skills groups and individual therapy sessions. The individual therapy sessions allow you to have one-on-one contact with a trained therapist who will help you apply DBT skills to your daily life, address any obstacle that may arise, and keep you motivated!

The DBT skills group interactions will help you practice skills with others and offer mutual support.

If you or someone you know may benefit from Dialectic Behavioral Therapy, please contact us for your free 15-minute consultation.