In individual psychotherapy, you will get a chance to explore your issues in depth, in a safe, supportive environment one on one. Together we will identify areas in your life in which you would like to make changes. We will then develop specific treatment goals based on these desired changes and we will identify behavior and/or thought patterns that interfere with their attainment. Once we’ve identified goals and behavior patterns, we will work on specific skills to change the behavior.
Individual therapy provides a space to:
Clients engaged in DBT attend a weekly skills group. Skills group offers clients the chance to actively practice mindfulness, share their work on skills, and learn new skills. The group covers the four modules discussed below: Mindfulness, Emotion Regulation, Distress Tolerance and Interpersonal Effectiveness. It takes roughly six months of weekly group sessions to cover all of the material one time.
Mindfulness
Goals of this module include:
- Increased ability to concentrate/focus on the present (as opposed to getting stuck dwelling on the past or worrying about the future
- Increased ability to focus attention intentionally
- Increased ability to fully participate in life without distractions
- Increased ability to reduce pain and stress associated with overwhelming emotions
- Increased ability to experience and manage reality as it is
- Increased ability to recognize how thoughts and judgments influence the experience and expression of emotions
Emotion Regulation
Goals of this module include:
- Increased ability to experience emotions without numbing or amplifying them
- Increased ability to recognize how emotions manifest in the mind and body
- Increased understanding and ability to manage what makes us vulnerable to being over or under emotional.
Distress Tolerance
Participants in the distress tolerance module work towards:
- Increased ability to decrease the intensity of emotions when feeling overwhelmed
- Increased ability to distinguish between what needs to be changed and what needs to be accepted
- Increased ability to accept what can not be changed (either right now or never).
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Goals of this module include: