What is DBT?
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a powerful set of stress-management tools. It can work when other therapies have not and involves more than regular therapy. The full program includes weekly individual sessions, skill-building educational groups, and phone coaching to help integrate those skills into your life.
Building Skills
There are four main skills in DBT:
1. Mindfulness helps people observe, describe, and participate in their lives without judging these experiences as “good” or “bad.”
2. Interpersonal Effectiveness is a way to successfully assert your needs and manage conflict in relationships.
3. Distress Tolerance. During a crisis or major stress, you will learn ways to improve the moment, tolerate the distress, and avoid doing things that can make it worse in the long run.
4. Emotion Regulation helps people identify emotional reactions and act wisely in the face of them.
“You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.”
“Anybody who’s had to contend with mental illness actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they’ve had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.”
“For many people with mental disorders, the transformation of the self is one of the most disturbing things about being ill. And their despair is heightened when doctors don’t… help figure out strategies to deal with that loss.”