Dialectical Behavior Therapy

While offering a stable of counseling services, Restoration is one of the region’s leaders in DBT and wishes to position the brand on this increasingly high-demand service.

So what is DBT? It’s a cognitive behavioral treatment that is seen as the gold standard psychological treatment for a wide range of emotional dysfunction such as substance dependence, depression, post-traumatic stress, and eating disorders.

“Dialectical” Behavior Therapy means the synthesis or integration of opposites. Developed in 1980 by Dr. Linehan (Linehan Institute), the treatment approach intentionally exposes clients to both “acceptance-oriented” and “change-oriented” skills to help them confront the fear and then change the emotional response patterns that trigger harmful behavior.

The skill sets of DBT therapy are:

Acceptance-Oriented

• Mindfulness: The foundation to the skills, it practices being “fully aware and present” in the one moment (not straying into the emotional mind by a lack of focus). At this point of entry, the client’s miserable and their behavior is out of control. The goal of stage 1 is for the client to move from being out of control to achieving behavioral control.
• Distress Tolerance: How to tolerate the pain in difficult circumstances, not change it (calmly recognizing the negative situation). At this stage, they’re living a life of quiet desperation; their behavior is under control but they continue suffering often due to past trauma and invalidation. The goal is to move them from a state of quiet despair to one of full emotional experiencing.

Change-Oriented

• Interpersonal Effectiveness: How to ask for what you want and say no to potential unhealthy environments while maintaining self-respect and relationships with others. The goal is to learn to live; to define life goals, build self-respect, and find peace and happiness. Ultimately, to have the client lead a life of “ordinary” happiness and unhappiness.
• Emotion Regulation: How to change emotions that you want to change. Some clients need to find a deeper meaning through a spiritual existence, hence a life of “ordinary” happiness and unhappiness fails to meet their personal sense of connectedness of a greater whole. The goal is to move them from a sense of incompleteness towards a life that involves an ongoing capacity for experiences of joy and freedom.

The four traditional DBT modalities (Restoration has a unique fifth), are as follows:

• DBT skills training group: It’s a collaborative exercise that focuses on enhancing clients’ capabilities by teaching them behavioral skills. Groups meet on a weekly basis.
• DBT individual therapy: It helps enhance client motivation by helping them to apply the skills to specific challenges and events in their lives. It occurs once a week and runs concurrently with skills groups.
• DBT phone coaching: Is a 5-10 minute phone conversation that focuses on providing clients with in-the-moment coaching on how to use skills to effectively cope with difficult situations that arise in their everyday lives. Clients can call their individual therapist between sessions to receive coaching at times when needed most. Therapists at Restoration are committed to responding to their clients’ coaching needs between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. Clients are encouraged to remember that their therapist might be in session or have other activities during the day and will respond as soon as they are available.
• DBT therapist consultation team: It’s therapy for the therapists to support DBT providers in their work with people who often have severe, complex, and difficult-to-treat disorders.
• Family therapist: The fifth modality, that’s unique to Restoration, is providing a family therapist to ensure families of clients know how to help and validate the client between professional counseling.

Overall, in a nation where suicide attempts and self-harm are up by 250%, DBT has strong results, accounting for a 60% success rate with suicidal patients.