Dialectical Behavioral Therapy for Mental Health

When you’re diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, such as generalized anxiety disorder, it can lead to persistent worry that disturbs your ability to function. These can lead to unpleasant emotions that worsen your symptoms. During DBT sessions, your therapist will teach you to focus on now instead of anticipating future catastrophes. Using emotion regulation techniques, you’ll learn to ride out the wave of negative emotions that manifest when you’re anxious.

In bipolar disorder, you go through episodes of depression and mania that affect daily functioning and relationships. During episodes of mania, you feel irritated or distracted easily. You may have increased energy and confidence, which can lead to risk-taking behavior.

Meanwhile, depressive episodes can lead to feelings like hopelessness and guilt. With DBT, you build an awareness of where these feelings come from. So, the next time you experience these feelings, you tolerate them instead of engaging in negative coping behaviors.

Disorders like major depression can lead to persistent low mood and lack of interest in things you previously enjoyed. Through regular DBT sessions, your therapist will guide you on ways to tolerate low mood.

As you become more mindful of how your mood irregularities affect you, you try to stay in control. You can learn how to resolve conflicts and build healthy relationships with others despite experiencing low moods.

PTSD develops due to exposure to a single traumatic event or prolonged exposure to complex trauma. As a result of the condition, you avoid places, events, and people associated with that trauma, which can prevent you from functioning.

Through using mindfulness skills, you ground yourself in the present instead of thinking about the event. You’ll also implement distress tolerance techniques that stop intrusive thoughts from worsening. Most importantly, interpersonal effectiveness is used to interact with other people without being fearful or hypervigilant.

Because schizophrenic disorders include hallucinations and/or delusions, most treatment plans include a combination of therapy and medication. Mental health practitioners may recommend DBT as a way to manage intense emotions during psychosis.

In these sessions, you build emotional awareness and understand the connection between your symptoms and how you feel. By doing so, you start to accept the feelings and work on adaptive responses to hallucinations and delusions. This effectively prevents harmful behaviors.

Treatment for OCD requires a method that addresses both components: obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. Therapists usually rely on CBT as a way to change your thought process and resulting behaviors. However, they also recommend DBT to help you practice acceptance when you fail or encounter disturbing thoughts.

For instance, your therapist will teach you skills for distress tolerance so you experience intrusive thoughts without engaging in compulsive behavior. There’s also emotion regulation skills too, which helps you realize that anxious feelings eventually subside without the need for compulsive behavior.

When you have a diagnosis of panic disorder, you’re constantly worried about encountering situations in which you may experience a panic attack. During a panic attack, your body experiences physical sensations like increased temperature and heart rate. With DBT sessions, you’ll learn to target those sensations to activate your parasympathetic nervous system (for example, through paced breathing and muscle relaxation) and relieve anxiety as a result.

Whether you have a nonsuicidal self-harm disorder or any other mental illness, you may have experienced the urge to self-harm as a way to cope with overwhelming emotions. Your therapist will use DBT to teach you distraction techniques that take your mind away from distressing thoughts.

DBT is a major component in the treatment of borderline personality disorder. That’s because BPD is marked by impulsive behaviors, unstable relationships, and mood swings. In DBT sessions, you’ll build skills that help you cope with strong emotions while sustaining healthy relationships with others. Moreover, you’ll become more accepting of the pain you experience and understand that it’s a part of life. Gradually, you’ll start to show more control over your emotions, which can prevent dysfunctional behaviors.

Depending on which dissociative disorder you have, you may experience lapses in memory, issues in perception, and problems with your sense of self, identity, and personality. Usually, these disorders occur because of trauma, so you’ll need therapy to re-process the trauma and reduce the intensity of symptoms.

However, keep in mind that symptoms like forgetting important personal information and feeling uncertain about who you are can be quite upsetting. Here, your therapist will suggest DBT skills as a way to tackle distress in situations and manage overwhelming emotions.