Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
Online DBT Therapy in Colorado & Texas
Sometimes It feels like your brain is an exhausting place to be.
You could be going about your day, then all of a sudden something happens in your environment…a fight with your spouse, feedback at work, rush hour traffic, an unanswered text…and your emotions go from 0-100.
You’ve dealt with rejection and abandonment in your life, and the fear it will happen again can be consuming. You tend to change who you are for others around you; this can be through people-pleasing, codependency, low self-esteem, lack of boundaries, and growing up with dysfunction in the family.
You don’t know how to just “calm down”, you hate when people say that, it feels invalidating. Others make it look so easy, they decide not to worry about something and they don’t.
How is that even possible?
You have to be taught healthy coping skills
Coping skills are not innate, they’re learned; you can’t know what you don’t know. We learn about coping skills from watching those around us. If your parents didn’t, or weren’t able to, use healthy coping skills you simply never learned about them.
DBT helps you learn the skills that you weren’t able to when you were younger. You’ll learn how to cope in any situation, how to regulate your emotions when you feel them taking over, how to tolerate distressing situations and emotions better, and how to have happy, healthy relationships with boundaries. Through all of this, your confidence will increase, your sense of the world will become more clear, you will have control over your thoughts and actions, and you will become more mindful and present.
The belief of a DBT therapist is that you are doing the best you can in the situation you’re in with the tools that you have. DBT assumes that you are doing the best you can, AND you need to learn new behaviors in all relevant contexts.
I’ve been where you are.
Problematic behaviors evolve as a way to cope with a situation or attempt to solve a problem. While these behaviors might provide temporary relief, they often are not effective in the long term.
I’m a trained DBT therapist, but what makes me unique is that I have also gone through DBT as a client. I know how it feels when your emotions take over and you can’t get them back under control how hard it can be to just get through a day. I am so passionate about DBT because I have experienced the benefits and know how well it works.
I’ll help you learn how to change how you interact with your environment. The only thing you can control is you, that’s what we help you figure out how to do. When problems in your environment occur, I will coach you up on how to be effective and stay true to yourself.
The DBT skills you will learn will continue to serve you for years to come.
What is DBT?
DBT is based on a continuous oscillation between change and acceptance.
The balance between change strategies and acceptance strategies constitutes the fundamental dialectic that gives a name to the treatment.
Dialectic means “to evaluate and integrate contradictory ideas and facts in a vision that solves the apparent contradictions”.
There are three basic assumptions:
• All things are interconnected.
• Change is constant and inevitable.
• Opposites can be integrated to form a closer approximation.
The balance between these positions, that is the dialectic, implies that the therapist must “sustain change and acceptance simultaneously in therapy”.
Research has shown that with DBT therapy you can tame the amygdala (your flight, fight, freeze, and fawn trauma response part of your brain) and become more emotionally regulated.