MDHB News

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) has been developed for clients with severe emotional problems, who meet criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) or Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). People with these disorders have problems managing emotional highs and lows, and are thus extremely emotionally sensitive and subject to recurrences of difficult mental health conditions such as depression.

Services provided

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is a comprehensive treatment package specially developed for these specific problems. To date DBT has had the most successful outcomes for treating people with BPD and CPTSD.

How does this programme work?

DBT is comprehensive and involves a year long commitment straight away from the participant. This involves:

A commitment to attend a weekly hour long session with an individual therapist.
Commitment to attend a skills training group once a week
Commitment to practice ongoing homework and do skills practice
Key Worker as usual
Psychiatrist appointments as necessary

The reason for this [and a key reason for the success of DBT graduates in international research] is that the problematic behaviours have been around a long time – so repeated practice is needed to help the client learn new behaviours and put these in place in their life.

What sort of skills are taught?

Mindfulness Skills

The core skill of DBT : This is about learning how to accept life as it is in the moment. The mindfulness skills in DBT come from eastern meditative skills which teach us how to focus our attention.

Distress Tolerance Skills

Building on the mindfulness skills, are the distress tolerance or crisis survival skills. These are skills for learning to bear pain skillfully, without making the situation worse.

Emotion Regulation Skills

Again based on mindfulness, i.e. learning how to observe, describe and participate in an emotion – and learning that the experience of emotion is not the same as the behaviour we do after feeling emotional. Through this we learn strategies to accept and also change painful emotions, and to increase more positive mood states.

Relationship Effectiveness Skills

Relationships can be hard for people with intense emotions. Skills from the other modules can also help people manage emotions in relationships. The skills taught in this module are very practical ones, e.g. how do I go about getting my needs met without damaging a relationship…how do I learn to say no to people…how can I ask for what I want?….

We run separate programmes for adolescents and adults and cover the whole MidCentral Region.