DBT Assumptions

This feature by Vibh Forsythe Cox, PhD is our fourth and final part in this series of blogs about DBT assumptions. In DBT, in order to organize our behavior towards our clients, we adhere to certain assumptions. Through the first three parts of this blog series, we examined the assumptions that “Patients are doing the best they can,” that “Patients want to improve,” that “Patients need to do better, try harder, and be more motivated to change,” that “Patients may not have caused all of their own problems, but they have to solve them anyway,” that “the lives of suicidal, borderline individuals are unbearable as they are currently being lived,” and that “patients must learn new behaviors in all relevant contexts.”

In this fourth part, we will shine a light on the last two assumptions: that “Patients cannot fail in therapy” and that “Therapists treating borderline patients need support.”

This feature by Vibh Forsythe Cox, PhD is Part 3 in a series of four blogs about DBT assumptions. In DBT, we adhere to several assumptions that help us organize our behavior towards our clients. In our first two parts we examined the assumptions that “Patients are doing the best they can,” that “Patients want to improve,” and that “Patients need to do better, try harder, and be more motivated to change.” In this third part, we take a closer look at three more assumptions about patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and therapy described in the treatment manual. First, that patients may not have caused all of their own problems, but they have to solve them anyway. Second, that the lives of suicidal, borderline individuals are unbearable as they are currently being lived. And finally, that patients must learn new behaviors in all relevant contexts.

This feature by Vibh Forsythe Cox, PhD is Part 2 in a series of four blogs about DBT assumptions. In DBT, we adhere to several assumptions that help us organize our behavior towards our clients. In this second part, we take a closer look at two of the assumptions about patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and therapy described in the treatment manual: that patients want to improve and that patients need to do better, try harder, and be more motivated to change.

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.”