Emotions Controlling Your Life?
You do your best to cope with the chaos around you, but it gets overwhelming…so quickly.
Gain insight into your feelings and experiences, as well as important tools to effectively respond to the world around you. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a therapeutic modality designed to effectively treat those who struggle with impulsive behavior, emotional dysregulation, and chaotic or unstable interpersonal relationships. In addition, DBT skills can be helpful for those that find themselves unable to fully engage in relationships as they wish due to experiencing restricted emotional responses.
Connect More.
You crave to connect more fully but end up feeling needy and more alone.
You can learn new ways to responding to stressful experiences in a healthier way. Allow yourself to really engage with others without feeling so disconnected. Stop being controlled by your emotional responses. Learn to mange your emotions not just react to them.
Could DBT Help Me?
Just as everyone experiences distress in life, everyone copes with the distress in some manner. Some responses are healthier than others, and some are potentially harmful or even destructive.
Sometimes the things a person does to cope with feelings of distress are impulsive behaviors/reactions that offer immediate relief in the moment but can actually make things worse in the long run. This may mean that there is an unproductive reaction that ranges from a volatile display of emotion to an almost complete shut down and withdrawal. Wherever you fall in the reaction spectrum, DBT skills can help you develop new skills to improve general functioning levels.
DBT skill building focuses on four areas:
- Emotional Regulation – Coping skills to address emotional experiences
- Distress Tolerance Skills – Techniques for handling the emotions triggered by distressing circumstances, including those that cannot be immediately resolved
- Interpersonal Effectiveness – Maintaining positive relationships with others, asking for what they need, and establishing appropriate boundaries with others.
- Mindfulness Skills – Seeing different viewpoints and staying present.
DBT at PeoplePsych
DBT’s focus is on teaching coping and life skills to address the emotional issues, in an environment of validation and acceptance. PeoplePsych therapists incorporate DBT in their therapeutic work in different ways.
Some clients seek and benefit from a structured DBT intervention where sessions focus on a particular problematic behavior or event that occurred between sessions. In this case the problematic behavior is discussed in detail during the session, including what led up to the event, alternative responses and what the prevented the you from reacting in a healthier way.
However, most of our clients benefit from PeoplePsych therapists simply incorporating the DBT skills into their ongoing clinical work. This perspective encourages continued deep clinical work while ensuring that simultaneous efforts are being made to address the present experiences and relationships. Just as in the more structured DBT work, the focus is on teaching clients to better handle their emotional responses in real time.