Intro To DBT

I feel as though my lack of sleep has finally caught up with me. I fully expect to pass out face-first on my keyboard at any time now. For that reason, I'm not going to post a really long blog, especially considering that I already posted a rather long-ish one this morning.

I mentioned DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, in several other posts. I didn't really talk very much about what it is and how it helps, though. So I'm going to write a quick intro to DBT, partly to educate anyone who might find it useful and partly to give myself a quick refresher page to come back to in case I ever need it.

Marsha Linehan created DBT back in the 90s for use with patients with Borderline Personality Disorder. Back then, everyone thought borderlines were more or less beyond help, so anyone who got slapped with the borderline label would get shit on at every turn because therapists didn't know how to deal with them. Linehan, however, wanted to help the people psychology forgot, so she spent time developing this method of therapy based partly in regular cognitive-behavioral methods and partly in Zen Buddhism.

Nowadays, DBT has been studied extensively. It's the only thing that's been shown to really work with borderlines, but researchers are just now starting to branch out into studying its efficacy with other mental illnesses. It appears to be faring pretty well in the things that I've read.

Anyway...to make a long story short, DBT is made up of four parts:

~Mindfulness: Learning to live in and experience the present moment, rather than reliving painful experiences from the past or worrying about what may happen in the future

~Distress Tolerance: Learning to deal with unpleasant, uncomfortable, or painful events and/or feelings with grace

~Emotional Regulation: Learning to identify emotions and emotional triggers and learning to stop being a slave to one's emotions

~Interpersonal Effectiveness: Learning to set boundaries, have self-respect, manage one's relationships, etc.

Keep in mind that these are very, very abridged definitions of what the whole thing's all about. I just wanted to run through it really quickly, so I could cement in my mind what I'm trying to do and give at least a little bit of an explanation, so I won't look nuts doing these exercises.

Oh, the book I have is The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder: Using DBT to Regain Control of Your Emotions and Your Life by Sheri Van Dijk. I'll be using the exercises in this book to help me, and I'll most likely be writing them down in this blog.

Now that that's over, it's bedtime. Vain bunnies have to get their beauty rest and all.