DBT teaches clients how to increase awareness through a zen mindfulness-based approach. It emphasizes noticing thoughts, feelings, and body sensations, and then strengthening attention back to the present. With practice, clients are able to live life through a state of being called the “wise mind,” or centered intuition. They are no longer beholden to reacting to life through behavioral patterns, emotional impulses, and black and white thinking.
Created in the 1980s, DBT teaches clients how to control impulsive behaviors by helping them through tolerating distress, learning how to bear pain skillfully, regulating emotions, and improving relationships with others. As such, this treatment reduces impulsive behaviors like panic attacks, substance abuse, depression, aggression, dissociation, eating disordered behavior, rumination, self-harm, isolation, suicidality, and anxiety.It is also partcuicularly successful in treating Borderline Personality Disorder.
DBT is successful in assisting both adults and adolescents.
Clients will learn the following skills:
- Mindfulness skills help to integrate one’s sense of self by consciously strengthening attention via nonjudgmental practice onto the present moment within the person’s internal experience and in the outside environment.
- Walking the Middle Path is an umbrella of dialectical strategies that make up the basis of DBT treatment. This includes Dialectics which addresses how to synthesize beliefs, emotions, and behaviors that appear to be opposites. Validation skills are taught so clients see how their own experiences, as well as others’, make sense given their current situation, skill level, and past experiences. Behaviorism helps to teach behavior management and change via reinforcement and consequences.
- Emotion Regulation teaches clients about their emotions. Detailed attention is given to helping clients understand the process of emotion as well as how to reduce emotional sensitivity by preventative strategies. Clients will also learn how to reduce and let go of emotional intensity through mindfulness and behavioral techniques.
- Distress Tolerance helps clients when they are experiencing their most intense levels of suffering. Clients learn the importance of radically accepting things that cannot be changed in life, as well as how to tolerate intense pain and distress. Skills are learned that help the client cope with behavioral urges that, if left untreated, can lead to making the situation worse.
- Interpersonal Effectiveness includes skills to help clients get needs met when interacting with other people while preserving self-respect, the objective of the conversation, and the relationship. This helps with people who have intense and/or volatile relationships, fear of abandonment and rejection, as well as people who have difficulty asking for something or saying no.
Regardless of what problems you may have and what you are working through in your life, IntegraPsych can help you. With a passionate, dedicated, and caring staff, clients find that despite initial feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, they are supported in starting to build a life worth living one day at a time.