BTECH Blog
Reflecting on DBT Assumptions about Patients and Therapy (Part 1)
This feature by Vibh Forsythe Cox, PhD is Part 1 of 4 in a series about assumptions about patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and therapy described in the treatment manual. In DBT, we adhere to several assumptions that help us organize our behavior towards our clients. The first is the assumption that “Patients are doing the best they can.”
The Role of Emotion Regulation in DBT (Part 2)
We sat down with Behavioral Tech Institute Trainer Dr. Sara Schmidt to learn all about the role that emotion regulation plays in DBT. In Part 1 of this interview, Sara took a deep dive into the idea of emotion regulation and what it means to experience emotion dysregulation, as well as a framework therapists can use to help their clients assess their emotions.
In part 2, we take a closer look at how we support clients in understanding those emotions and the specific DBT skills to give clients to help them regulate emotions and change problematic behaviors.
The Role of Emotion Regulation in DBT (Part 1)
We sat down with Behavioral Tech Institute Trainer, Dr. Sara Schmidt, to learn all about the role that emotion regulation plays in DBT. With emotion regulation being such a central topic to the practice of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Sara shed light not only on how it factors in, but specifically how DBT allows therapists to work with clients to regulate emotions in a way that will enable them to change problematic behaviors.
In part 1, we started by uncovering what emotion regulation is and what it means for clients when they have trouble regulating their emotions.
Zen Mindfulness in DBT
In our research and practice, we have seen the connection between Zen mindfulness and DBT. Behavior therapy has an inherent compatibility with Zen principles. Behavioral Tech Institute trainer and Zen teacher, Randy Wolbert, breaks down for us the seven points of overlap between Zen mindfulness and DBT and how these links came to be.
The Measure of Mindfulness
For the first years of this century, mindfulness-based interventions generated a lot of enthusiasm from the general public and researchers alike. Research on mindfulness treatments for education, health, and mental health increased exponentially (Farias & Wikholm 2016). Recently, however, reviews of mindfulness-based interventions have re-assessed the data, especially because of small effect sizes and a lack of real control conditions (Farias & Wikhom 2016). A serious, methodological problem common to most of the studies is the lack of a standard operational definition for mindfulness (Lutz 2015).
