​Austin DBT Groups

DBT was originally created by Marsha Linehan to treat Borderline Personality Disorder.  The DBT Skills group, individual therapy, and phone coaching are the three modes of treatment to help an individual with BPD retrain the brain and learn new thinking patterns.  Symptoms of BPD that DBT treats include:   impulsivity, difficulty managing extreme emotions,  feelings of emptiness, fear of abandonment and unstable relationships (due to all or none thinking and push/pull behaviors), tendencies to go to self-destructive behaviors and self-harm, suicidal ideation, and difficulty managing anger.  Here are the specific ways that the DBT modules address these symptoms:  

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Mindfulness:  these skills help individuals with BPD symptoms to learn to access their Wise Mind instead of allowing their Emotion Mind to rule their behaviors. Skills are taught to observe and describe emotions, thoughts, urges, and sensations without judgment.   This can then help individuals to make more effective decisions in terms of how to cope with triggers and stressors, how to manage emotions, and how to handle relationship issues without being driven by intense or impulsive emotions and urges.      

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Interpersonal Effectiveness:  these skills help individuals to become more grounded in using their Wise Mind to think things through in relationships before reacting impulsively or out of one's mood.    Skills are taught to learn how to identify one's priority (out of objective, relationship, and self-respect), figure out how to challenge worry thoughts in relationships,  figure out how to firmly to stand one's ground or say no to others, and how to be assertive instead of passive or aggressive.   A common BPD symptom is fear of abandonment.   It is touched on in this module how trust issues from the past contribute to this and there is processing on how to work through these anxieties and fears so that it does not affect current relationship patterns.   Dialectical thinking is taught and modeled to replace all-or-none thinking patterns and behaviors in relationships.   

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Emotion Regulation:  these skills help individuals with difficulty managing intense emotions learn how to look at the whole context in which emotions occur so that one can intervene when triggered. Emotion Regulation is all about working through the root issues and thoughts that led up to the emotion instead of going to self-destructive behaviors (i.e. self-harm, alcohol abuse, binge eating, anger outbursts, avoidance) as ways to cope. A significant focus of this module is also about learning skills to be less vulnerable to one's Emotion Mind and how to increase positive emotions and experiences.    

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Distress Tolerance:  these skills help individuals with BPD learn crisis survival skills to bring down the intensity of strong emotions so that they don't go to self-destructive behaviors to cope.  This module teaches acceptance based skills so that individuals with urges to go to harmful behaviors can self-soothe, distract, and use other skills to calm their nervous system and gain more confidence sitting with uncomfortable emotions and urges instead of making their situation worse.   

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