Dialectical Behaviour Therapy

[Banned]

I got an email from my therapist this morning and she wants to try this type of therapy with me, preferably, with a combination of meds. She wants to try and stop/slow the constant thoughts that invade my head day in and day out. I've read a bit about it...it mentions mindfulness. Last time we tried mindfulness she had me stare at a candle for two minutes. It was rather retarded. But...I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with DBT, good, bad, or otherwise, and what your thoughts are on it.

I told her that really I'm at the giving up point. This is my normal and I don't know if I need to change it. I'm not so desperate that I need to try anything and everything. But, if I can learn something from it, or it can give me a tiny bit of peace, then maybe I'll be williing to just try it...

 

[Halo]

Hey Turtle,

While I don't have any experiences or knowledge about DBT, I think that it may be something to try at least to see what you may be able to take away from it. If your therapist suggested it and she knows you better than anyone, it may not hurt to give it a try.

Maybe someone else on here will have some personal experience with DBT and can shed some additional light.

Take care
:hug: :hug:

 

[sister-ray]

I dont have any experinces of DBT either its sounds quite ok from what I just quickly read online, personally I would give it a try. I do have experince of staring at a candle for two minutes as I sometimes do that when I do my meditation I find it quite sort of relaxing

 

[ladylore]

I don't know anything about DBT but a whole lot about CBT. Mindfullness does help to quiet the mind. There are many techniques that help slow the mind down. The 'down' side to this is that it takes time and the techniques need to be repeated every time to disrupt the thought process. So if a certain technique needs to be done 100 times in a row to stop it, then that is what needs to happen.

This is my normal and I don't know if I need to change it. I'm not so desperate that I need to try anything and everything.

If memory serves me correctly, these thoughts have disturbed you quite a bit in the recent past.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

See Dialectical behavioral therapy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for an overview.

More information at [GOOGLE]Google "Dialectical Behaviour Therapy"[/GOOGLE]

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Dialectical Behavior Therapy DVDs
Florida Borderline Personality Disorder Association
January 25, 2009

Crisis Survival Skills DVD from Marsha Linehan
Dialectical behavior therapy is, perhaps, the most well-known therapies for treating self-injury and borderline personality disorder. Unfortunately, there are huge parts of Florida?as well as throughout the United States?where it is very difficult to find an intensively trained DBT therapist.

While books and DVDs aren?t meant to replace working with a qualified therapist, learning helpful emotion regulation skills such as mindfulness, distracting and self-soothing, pros and cons, and practicing reality acceptance really can make a big difference.

Guilford Press has 5 DVDs available that help to teach these specific DBT skills and more. While the price ranges from $49 to $65 per DVD, the entire set can be purchased for a reasonable amount of $275. Sample clips are also available on the web site.

While the DVDs were created for persons suffering from borderline personality disorder, they will also be an invaluable resource for parents, spouse, friends, and even graduate students who are wanting to learn more about this highly effective treatment.

 

[Daniel E.]

Wow, that was a good video clip The other video clips are good, too.

More info about about Marsha Linehan, the developer of DBT:
psychlinks.ca marsha linehan - Google Search
marsha linehan - Google Book Search
Marsha M. Linehan - University of Washington

She also wrote a positive review of a popular self-help book I am reading now, The Mindful Way Through Depression.

Additionally, some info from Linehan's company website:

How is DBT different from regular Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

DBT is a modification of standard cognitive behavioral treatment. As briefly stated above, Marsha Linehan and her team of therapists used standard CBT techniques, such as skills training, homework assignments, symptom rating scales, and behavioral analysis in addressing clients’ problems. While these worked for some people, others were put off by the constant focus on change. Clients felt the degree of their suffering was being underestimated, and that their therapists were overestimating how helpful they were being to their clients. As a result, clients dropped out of treatment, became very frustrated, shut down or all three. Linehan’s research team, which videotaped all their sessions with clients, began to notice new strategies that helped clients tolerate their pain and worked to make a “life worth living.” As acceptance strategies were added to the change strategies, clients felt their therapists understood them much better. They stayed in treatment instead of dropping out, felt better about their relationships with their therapists, and improved faster.

The balance between acceptance and change strategies in therapy formed the fundamental “dialectic” that resulted in the treatment’s name. “Dialectic” means ‘weighing and integrating contradictory facts or ideas with a view to resolving apparent contradictions.’ In DBT, therapists and clients work hard to balance change with acceptance, two seemingly contradictory forces or strategies. Likewise, in life outside therapy, people struggle to have balanced actions, feelings, and thoughts. We work to integrate both passionate feelings and logical thoughts. We put effort into meeting our own needs and wants while meeting the needs and wants of others who are important to us. We struggle to have the right mix of work and play.

In DBT, there are treatment strategies that are specifically dialectical; these strategies help both the therapist and the client get “unstuck” from extreme positions or from emphasizing too much change or too much acceptance. These strategies keep the therapy in balance, moving back and forth between acceptance and change in a way that helps the client reach his or her ultimate goals as quickly as possible.

Frequently Asked Questions about DBT

Also:

An interview with her about DBT:
An Interview with Marsha Linehan, Ph.D. on Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Transcript of above interview

There is also a lecture by her here on DBT (after a boring intro by someone else):
http://blogtalk.vo.llnwd.net/o23/shows/show_273900.mp3

(From what I have heard so far, I like the lecture more than the interview. The interview is kindof slow, but the transcript of the interview is pretty good.)

A basic slide presentation on DBT from Linehan's website:
Mindfulness, Willingness, & Radical Acceptance in Psychotherapy

 

[Meg]

BPD is not the only problem DBT is used for, either. I'm quite sure that it's been found to be a useful intervention in depression.

 

[Daniel E.]

Yes, and it does remind me of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy:

ACT is sometimes grouped together with Dialectical behavior therapy, Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy as The Third Wave of Behavior Therapy which Steven C. Hayes defined in his ABCT President Address as follows:

"...The third wave reformulates and synthesizes previous generations of behavioral and cognitive therapy and carries them forward into questions, issues, and domains previously addressed primarily by other traditions, in hopes of improving both understanding and outcomes."

Acceptance and commitment therapy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

last time we tried mindfulness she had me stare at a candle for two minutes.

There is certainly much more to DBT and mindfulness than that, e.g.:

Dr. Marsha: ...I have to tell people all the time, "meditation is one practice of mindfulness but only one of many..."

interview transcript: Marsha Linehan, Ph.D. on dialectical behavior therapy
​

One thing patients learn very early, for instance, is to notice when their emotions begin to stir, allow themselves to feel the storm whip up, then let it pass -- all without doing anything. This Zen-like self-observation, called mindfulness, is an exercise not in avoidance but in feeling and enduring emotional pain. It dramatizes one principle of the therapy: that what patients do can be independent of how they feel. Emotion does not have to rule behavior.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy: With Toughness and Caring - Psychlinks

And if you are brand new to mindfulness, you may respond with either “I can already do that” or “Why on earth would I do that?’

My reply is:

a) it’s a lot harder than it sounds
b) the reason you do this kind of practice is to gain control of your attention.

I hope you’ll stop and think about the following sentence:
Whatever your attention is on, that’s what life is for you at any given moment.

http://behavioraltech.org/downloads/Mindfulness_for_clients_and_family_members.pdf

After mastering control of attention, some therapists say, a person can turn, mentally, to face a threatening or troubling thought — about, say, a strained relationship with a parent — and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass, without lapsing into rumination or trying to change the feeling, a move that often backfires.

Lotus Therapy: Mindfulness Meditation gains ground in therapy - Psychlinks

 

[Banned]

Thanks for all the information. It definitely gives me some stuff to think about and research.

I don't know what I want at this point...I am really close to giving up altogether (on therapy, not life) and just figuring stuff out myself. I have been through so many different types of therapies and I feel like I'm as good as I'm gonna get...I've basically just plateau'd.

Anyway I will do some reading and research and go from there...thanks for all the info...I knew you guys would have some answers!

 

[Daniel E.]

BTW, regarding the candle exercise, another reason not to be turned off by it is that it is just the first step, apparently:

A graduated procedure is recommended, where first the patient refines their mindfulness skills on innocuous external objects, and only after weeks of practice of these new skills are patients invited to be mindful of themselves and their emotions. (pg. 239)

Amazon.com: Dialectical Behavior Therapy in Private Practice

 

[Banned]

That's actually good to know. At the time I told her I thought it was retarded. Nice to know it might have gone somewhere, in time

 

[Daniel E.]

Sample clips are also available on the web site.

Also, the transcripts of the videos are freely available here:
http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/dbt_video_text.html

 

[Marcel]

Hi Turtle - I read on a more recent post that you were trying biofeedback stuff now. Did you ever end up doing any DBT and if so, how did it go?