DBT
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) was created by Marsha Linehan, Ph.D. as a treatment for persons with Borderline Personality Disorder. Individuals with BPD lack many of the fundamental skills required to regulate emotional experience, engage in successful interpersonal relationships, tolerate painful experience, and manage cognitive dysregulation.

Over time, DBT skills groups have been demonstrated to be helpful not only in persons diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, but for many clients who have engaged in a pattern of self-destructive behaviors. For these persons, their frequent attempts to escape emotional pain (e.g., drinking, cutting oneself, binge eating, explosive anger outbursts) may provide temporary relief yet produce an increase in shame and less opportunity to practice more effective ways to reduce emotional pain.

Groups have a didactic skills training orientation, and include four modules:

• Mindfulness skills: Learning to increase awareness and control over attention in order to balance reason and emotion.
• Interpersonal effectiveness skills: Learning strategies for obtaining changes, maintaining relationships and self-respect, and coping with conflict.
• Emotional regulation skills: Learning how to modulate emotions in effective, non-harmful ways.
• Distress tolerance skills: Learning to accept painful events that cannot be changed, without resorting to harmful behaviors.

Please contact us for more information or to schedule an appointment.