What Is DBT?

I'm all for discovering new ways to take care of my mental health. Recently, I noticed there was a buzz around Dialectical Behavior Therapy. (DBT) Everyone from Lady Gaga to Mika Brzezinski was talking about how awesome it is and how their lives have been forever changed thanks to DBT.

Since I am always looking for something to improve my depression situation, I decided to look into DBT and share my findings here with you, my sweet reader.

DBT is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy. (CBT) It teaches people how to live in the moment, cope with stress in a healthy way, regulate emotions, and improve relationships with others.

Sign me up. Sounds magical.

Originally DBT was designed specifically for people with borderline personality disorder, but it has since been adapted for other conditions where patients exhibit self-destructive behaviors, like eating disorders and substance abuse, and is sometimes used for pot-traumatic stress disorder.

History

DBT was developed in the late 1980s by Dr. Marsha Linehan. Dr. Linehan and her colleagues discovered that CBT alone did not always work as well as they expected it to in patients with borderline personality disorder. So they added new techniques in order to meet the needs of these patients. DBT is derived from a physiological process called dialectics. The concept is that everything is made up of opposites and that change can occur when one opposing force is stronger than the other. Dialectics makes three basic assumptions:

• All things are interconnected.
• Change is constant and inevitable.
• Opposites can be integrated to form a closer approximation of the truth.

In DBT, the patient and therapist work to resolve the contradiction between self-acceptance and change in order to bring positive change in the patient.

How It Works

When a person is undergoing DBT, they can expect to participate in three therapeutic practices:

• In a classroom, patients are taught behavioral skills by completing homework and role-playing new ways of interacting with people. Typically these classes are two to three hours long and occur weekly.
• There will be individual therapy with a trained professional where patients will take the behavioral skills that they have learned and work with their therapist to apply them to their personal life challenges.
• Phone sessions between the patient and their therapist in between therapy sessions. During these phone sessions, patients receive guidance on any challenging situations they may be dealing with.

DBT patients are taught how to change their behavior using four main strategies:

Core Mindfulness

Perhaps the most important strategy in DBT, mindfulness skills teach you to focus on the present. This enables you to learn to pay attention to what is going on with your thoughts, feeling, senses and impulses. This will help you to slow down and focus on healthy coping skills when you are dealing with emotional pain. Mindfulness will help you to remain calm and avoid engaging in automatic negative thought patterns and/or impulsive behavior.

Distress Tolerance

Distress tolerance teaches you to accept yourself and your current situation. By learning this technique you will be able to tolerate or survive any crisis using four key techniques-distraction, self-soothing, improving the movement and thinking of pros and cons. After mastering these techniques, you will be able to prepare in advance for any intense emotions and handle them with a more positive outlook.

Interpersonal Effectiveness

This technique helps you to become more assertive in a relationship. Think expressing your needs and learning how to say "no" but while maintaining a positive and healthy relationship. This is achieved by learning how to listen and communicate in effective ways, deal with difficult people and respect yourself and others.

I just want to take a break here to acknowledge a sample exercise that I found to improve interpersonal effectiveness because I think it's really helpful.

Practice G.I.V.E.- use the acronym G.I.V.E. to improve relationships and increase positivity in conversations:

G entle: Don't attack, threaten or judge.

I nterest: Show interest with good listening skills. (don't interrupt to speak)

V alidate: Acknowledge the person's thoughts and feelings.

E asy: Try to have an easy attitude. (smile and stay light-hearted)

These are simple steps that can make a huge difference in the way you approach communication in your relationships.

Now back to the DBT strategies.

Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation helps to provide skills that work to keep your emotional system healthy and functioning. It teaches you to adjust the intensity of your emotions. When you experience certain emotions and how you react to those emotions. When you can recognize and cope with negative emotions, you reduce your emotional vulnerability and in return have more positive emotional experiences.

Who Can Benefit From DBT?

Most of the research that has been done on DBT so far has been focused on treating borderline personality disorder. But DBT has been proven to work on a variety of other mental health conditions including-ADHD, generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and substance abuse disorder.

If you think that you or a loved one could benefit from DBT, I encourage you to seek guidance from a doctor or healthcare professional who has been trained in DBT.

You can start your search by checking out Clinical Resource Directory. This resource is maintained by Behavioral Tech, an organization founded by Dr. Linehan to train mental health professionals in DBT. You can also ask your doctor, therapist or psychiatrist for a referral to a BDT specialist.