Are you looking for the best treatment center for dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) in Utah? Maybe you’re trying to better understand what exactly DBT is. At New Roads Behavioral Health, we’ll go over it all and answer your questions. Let’s get started.

A type of cognitive behavioral therapy, DBT is used to try and identify and alter any negative thinking patterns and works to inspire more positive behavioral changes.

Teaching patients new healthy skills for coping and to change their current unhealthy behaviors.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Explained

New Roads Behavioral Health | The Best Treatment Center for Dialectical Behavior Therapy in Utah

Providing clients with new skills to manage their painful emotions and help to decrease relationship conflicts.

DBT focuses mainly on providing new therapeutic skills in four key areas:

1. Mindfulness focuses on improving an individual’s ability to accept and be present in the current moment.

2. Distress tolerance is geared toward increasing a person’s tolerance of negative emotion, rather than trying to escape from it.

3. Emotion regulation covers strategies to manage and change intense emotions that are causing problems in a person’s life.

4. Interpersonal effectiveness consists of techniques that allow a person to communicate with others in a way that is assertive, maintains self-respect, and strengthens relationships.

When DBT is Used

Originally created to treat borderline personality disorder, DBT can also be used successfully to treat those experiencing:

Depression
Bulimia
Binge-eating
Bipolar Disorder
PTSD
Substance Abuse

The skills from DBT are enforced for the patients to gain capability of improving their ability to regulate emotions, tolerate distress and negative emotion, be mindful and present in each moment and to communicate effectively with those around them.

DBT is focused on high-risk patients who are potentially tough to treat. The patients also tend to have dual diagnosis.

DBT was first created to treat those with suicidal behavior and borderline personality disorder. Now adapting, it treats other mental health problems that are threatening someone’s relationships, work and overall well-being.

What to Expect

The DBT treatment will usually hold individual therapy sessions as well as DBT skills groups.

The individual sessions of therapy are usually one-on-one contact alongside a trained therapist. Who ensures that all of the therapeutic needs are being met.

That individual therapist should help motivate the individual and learn to apply the DBT skills to their everyday life. As well as addressing obstacles that may show during their treatment.

The DBT skills that group participants participate in and learn along others. The group members are encouraged to share experiences and give mutual support to others. The groups are led by a trained therapist who teaches the skills and leads the exercises.

Group members can be assigned homework regularly, like practicing mindfulness exercises. The group sessions last on average two hours and the groups will meet weekly for six months. The groups can vary in size, but depend on the needs for group members.

The sessions can vary in type by person as well. For example, some may take part in one-on-one therapy sessions but not attend weekly skill groups. Some may pick their group for regular one-on-one sessions.

How It Works

Comprehensive DBT focuses on four ways to enhance life skills:

Distress tolerance: Feeling intense emotions like anger without reacting impulsively or using self-injury or substance abuse to dampen distress.
Emotion regulation: Recognizing, labeling, and adjusting emotions.
Mindfulness: Becoming more aware of self and others and attentive to the present moment.
Interpersonal effectiveness: Navigating conflict and interacting assertively.

Developed by Marsha Linehan, Ph.D. in the 1980’s, DBT was, as stated previously, created to treat borderline personality disorder. Those who are diagnosed with BPD will usually experience intense negative emotions that are really difficult to manage.

The intense and somewhat uncontrollable negative emotions can be experienced when they’re interacting with others. Such as friends, partners, family members, or others. Those with BPD usually experience a lot of conflict in relationships.

As suggested by the name, DBT was greatly influenced by the philosophical perspective of dialectics: balancing opposites.

The therapist will work consistently with the patient in order to find ways to have two opposite perspectives at once. Which promotes balance and helps to avoid black and white, all or nothing styles of thinking.

In the balance of this, DBT also promotes a both-and outlook on life rather than an either-or outlook. The dialectic in DBT is all about acceptance and change.

What’s Unique About Dialectical Behavioral Therapy?

Dialectical comes from the idea of bringing two opposites together in therapy: acceptance and change. Bringing better results than either alone.

A unique part of DBT is how it focuses on acceptance of a patient’s experience as a way for therapists to reassure them. As well as balance the work needed to change negative behaviors.

Standard comprehensive DBT has four parts:

Individual therapy
Group skills training
Phone coaching, if needed for crises between sessions
Consultation group for health care providers to stay motivated and discuss patient care

Patients usually agree to do homework to practice their new skills. This may include filling out daily diary cards to track more than 40 emotions, urges, behaviors, and skills, such as lying, self-injury, or self-respect.

What to Look for in a Dialectical Behavior Therapist

DBT does assume that effective treatment, along with group skills training, has to have even attention to the behavior and experience of providers working with clients as it does to the client’s behavior and experience.

That’s why treatment of the providers is a crucial part of any DBT program. Therapists should practice the skills themselves. This is so they know the basic behavior therapy techniques, as well as DBT treatment strategies.

Finding the best treatment center for dialectical behavior therapy in Utah also means looking for a mental health professional that has specialized training and experience in DBT.

It is important to find a therapist with whom you feel comfortable working.