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The Four Components of DBT

• Individual Psychotherapy A strong, compassionate, and validating therapy relationship is key to motivate, support, analyze behavior patterns, and apply skills.

• Group Skills Training Groups are run in an educational class format involving learning effective skills to deal with life to reduce emotional suffering, increase happiness, improve relationships, and change ineffective behavior. Learn more about the skills.

• Telephone Coaching Your therapist is available for short calls to coach you on skills to use in difficult moments in order to generalize skills to real life.

• Therapist Consultation Team Team enhances therapist capability.  Your therapist is receiving consultation, support, and training throughout your treatment.

What Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) services are offered? 

Two adult services are offered.  Through an intake process involving pre-treatment sessions, a therapist will determine the best course of treatment for you.

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• Adult Standard DBT is a cognitive-behavioral treatment that works.  ​Controlled clinical trials have shown the effectiveness of Comprehensive or Standard DBT for a wide range of disorders and problems including impulsive & harmful behaviors, suicidality, depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, addictions, ADHD, traumatic stress, and interpersonal difficulties.  It is recommended that the skills are learned twice in group, which takes about a year.  Standard DBT involves four components:

  • Individual Psychotherapy A strong, compassionate, and validating therapy relationship is key to motivate, support, analyze behavior patterns, and apply skills.  Individual therapists track homework and use a diary card to monitor behaviors between sessions.

  • Group Skills Training Groups are run in an educational class format involving learning effective skills to deal with life to reduce emotional suffering, increase happiness, improve relationships, and change dysfunctional behavior.

  • Telephone Coaching Your therapist is available for short calls to coach you on skills to use in difficult moments in order to generalize skills to real life.

  • Therapist Consultation Team Team enhances therapist capability.  Your therapist is receiving consultation, support, and training throughout your treatment.

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• Adult Skills Training Group Alone Recent research has shown benefit of skills training only.  For clients who have an individual therapist already, coming to us for Skills Training alone is an option.  Learning the skills once takes six months.  Many clients benefit from going through the skills twice, which takes a year.  While you don't get the benefit of DBT Individual Therapy or Phone Coaching, your group leaders will have the support of a Consultation Team.

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How do I start DBT?

Contact Us to start the DBT intake process.  Pretreatment involves up to 4 sessions for Standard DBT to determine if DBT is the right treatment for you.  For Skills Training Only, clients have one intake session, and we contact your individual therapist.  New clients can enter the group every 5 or 6 weeks based on the start of each skills module.  

 

Skills groups are 1 hour and 45 minutes long.  You attend group once weekly at a regular time, and there are several group times to choose from during pretreatment. 

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What is DBT? DBT was developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan.  Visit Behavioral Tech to learn more. DBT views psychological challenges as caused by difficulty regulating emotions and ineffective behavioral patterns.  DBT is based on a dialectical world view of embracing the tension of the simultaneous truth of opposing views by bringing them together into a synthesis.  A fundamental dialectic in DBT is the balance of acceptance and change.   DBT also takes a behavioral perspective to do behavioral analysis in individual therapy, to understand what factors in our environment and ourselves influence our behavior, and to build skills to have more effective behavior. 

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What are the skills?  Research has shown that having specific names of effective skills to use during difficult times helps you reduce emotional suffering and to change ineffective thoughts, habits, and interpersonal patterns.  Four groups of skills in DBT skills training include

• Mindfulness is behavioral and cognitive practice taken out of the Zen-Buddhism tradition aimed at reducing suffering and increasing happiness, increasing self-control, and enhancing awareness in the moment.  Mindfulness is taught at the beginning of each module.

• Distress Tolerance helps you get through intense emotion, crisis situations, and accept long term life circumstances we cannot change.

• Emotion Regulation helps you understand and change emotions.

• Interpersonal Effectiveness enhances effective communication and building relationships you want.