How Can Dialectical Behavior Therapy Improve Your Mental Health?

DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) is a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy that helps to identify and transform negative patterns of thinking and pushes for better and positive behavioral changes.

How does Dialectical Behavior Therapy work

There are four main aspects of DBT, mostly known as the four skills or modules. Two of them are related to acceptance, and the other two are behavioral change-related.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is normally the first technique a DBT therapist will assist promote acceptance. This includes observing your thoughts, actions, and emotions without judgment.

Distress tolerance

Behavior change doesn’t always come immediately, especially in crisis times. Distress tolerance is the next acceptance skill created in DBT after mindfulness. It helps in coping with changing situations’ emotional pain, accepting them the way they are, and letting go of what one can’t change.

Emotional regulation

Emotional regulations help people operate with intense emotions, formulating strategies to regulate them. To begin with, this includes studying how to identify emotions for what they are (for instance, sadness, anger, anxiety). Over time the therapist helps one to learn techniques to:

• Reduce the susceptibility to risky emotions
• Experience more positive emotions.
• Cope well when extreme emotions arise

Interpersonal effectiveness

The last way DBT works is by bettering how one communicates in associations with others. This can assist one to become more assertive, communicate your requests clearly, and set boundaries for your mental health protection.

What can DBT assist with?

Borderline personality disorder

The first condition to be treated using dialectical behavioral therapy was borderline personality disorder. BPD is a problem that affects how an individual feels about themselves. Intense emotions are features of BPD since they are unstable associations with others. Studies show DBT is good in managing BPD symptoms, mostly in individuals who also self-harm.

Eating disorders

Although CBT works for many individuals with eating problems, it does not work for everyone. Studies show that DBT is a working alternative. For some individuals with eating problems, their condition is a method of escaping, controlling, or managing intense emotions. DBT can assist the person in learning different ways of coping with emotions. There are high chances that it works better for individuals having binge eating disorder or bulimia and not anorexia nervosa.

Self-harm

Deliberate self-harm can occur on its own or alongside other mental health conditions—an individual who self-harms does so to escape difficult experiences or feelings.

DBT can assist these individuals in knowing different methods of coping with these emotions, urges, and memories. Firstly, DBT helps the person accept the way they feel like a normal part of their experience, and afterward, it develops tolerance to distress and regulates emotions better.

Depression and the thought of suicide

Treating individuals with BPD using DBT significantly minimizes the risk of suicide attempts, a prominent feature of BPD (borderline personality disorder). Individuals having suicidal thoughts mostly struggle to manage intense 

emotions, distress, and communication with others. DBT treats all of these as assisting the person with alternative coping strategies.

What is the importance of DBT?

It betters your relationships

A good support system is vital with it comes to mental health challenges. Unfortunately, most kinds of therapy don’t consider this. They assume you will do it alone. However, DBT advocates knowing the benefits of the social relationship in dealing with challenges. Developing healthy relationships together with trust and respectful boundaries can better the well-being and health of people in many ways.

The skills are beyond mental illness

Although the goal of DBT is to better the symptoms of an individual with mental illness, it can go beyond that. The skills learned from the DBT therapist can be used in different areas of life too.

It betters quality of life

One of the key aims of DBT is to better the quality of life. It is impossible to change what has already happened to our lives. So DBT aims to a better quality of life by helping individuals make changes to carry on in the right direction and letting them understand it’s normal to find things difficult.