Mastering DBT: Tammy Berman, LMHC, NCC, on BPD, Emotional Regulation & Healing

hello there fearfully and wonderfully made human it's me again Diana from through the valley therapy and transform mind Consulting and coaching today I have a guest who is an absolute Powerhouse in the world of DBT and high conflict family Dynamics Tammy and I are part of the same mental health associations here in Florida and if there's one name that comes up when talking about all things DBT it's hers with over 20 years of experience she's a

licens mental health counselor a national board certified counselor a supreme court certified family mediator a qualified parenting coordinator an accredited collaborative professional and a qualified supervisor for Mental Health Counselors that's a long list but it speaks to the death of knowledge she brings to her work Tammy completed the highest level of DBT training available through behavioral Tech founded by Marsha Lan herself back in 2004 I am not going to ask you your age girl because 2004

think about how long ago that is yes and she's been refining her expertise ever since her work focuses on trauma recovery parental alienation emotion disregulation and even bridging mental health with legal systems especially in collaborative divorce cases as a founder of my counseling connections she integrates DBT principles mediation skills and Trauma responsive care to help clients build emotional resilience and strengthen relationships she's also a sought after trainer and speaker educating both mental health and legal professionals

on evidence-based interventions that support individuals and families through life's toughest challenges I knew I had to bring Tammy on to help us dive deeper into DBT so here she is thanks girl for being on the show thank you so much for having me thank you thank you what an introduction geez I know I have a lot of a lot of uh certifications and training it's true yeah yeah which is good and I think that's so important

for us therapists to continue educating ourselves in different modalities understanding and this is why you're here girl because like DBT I know that's like um borderline personality disorders like that is something many therapists are like whoa that's a hard that's you know it's hard at times but for for me when I did research to try to help some of my clients who um wrestle with that because I hate to say suffer because I want to get

them to understand that there's hope yeah of course right DBT is the the number one boom boom boom and especially with teenagers I worked with teenagers a lot too and that you know that whole dear man and accept I I'm not certified in it so I will never claim that but those tools actually helped some and I wanted to know more and so before we even dive de deep into DBT I want to know you like

you have a story what led you up to becoming a therapist and then what Drew you to DBT oh okay so I um hm let me think about from high school it's not like I knew about psychology in high school but when I went to my undergrad I tried as many courses as I could in my first year and psychology was one of them I loved I also um loved another um anthropology was the other one

so I did a double major in my second year and then as I was like talking to professors and trying to find a career path I was discouraged from anthropology in terms of like actually finding decent work in that field so I was like okay so so I followed with psychology just because I it was fascinating to me um and then then in figuring out my actual next steps for a career path I mean I looked

at myself as what I found myself to be in through dorms and making friends and you know all the learning that I had done in my undergrad was that maybe a lot of therapists say this but um I found myself to be the person that a lot of people went to to talk to and the most non-judgmental the range of people and situations and things that I was exposed to in my undergrad in just being a

helper a listener I was like you know and I loved psychology so that kind of Drew me to pursue a master's degree um where so I I started I was born and raised in Canada my undergrad was in um University of Western Ontario which is kind of like the party school of Canada is it so it's like Florida State it's no it's UF it's like UF like it's it's academically really strong but also known to be

a party school so um and then I started a MERS in Toronto at the um Professional School of adarian Psychology but I was dating longdistance guy in Florida for eight years and it was like in the middle of my Ms he was like Tammy what are you doing like what's going what what's happening here between us you know like what's gonna happen here um he's like why don't you move to be with me so we could

be together you know like I'm paying for my cost of living anyways um all you need to worry about is your schooling and and it was kind of like you know now I am going to swe it was like or get off the pot you know what I mean like what are you going to do and I wanted to be with him and I was like okay so I transferred to the Nova Southeastern University go sharks

that's where I got my masters yes when did you graduate in 2003 so I I did the Masters in mental health counseling program there okay so you were ahead of me 20 yeah I graduated in 2007 but I I took the fiveyear route you know how your Masters was supposed to do two years but because I was raising kids working during the day last year was probably your first year then 2003 I got there in 2001

200 2002 yeah because I like yeah and I graduated wait yeah yeah no no 2002 maybe we had some classes together yeah I mean there were some professors that I still um well actually I still talked to Dr Barnhill did you have Dr Barnhill back in the day well no I did not I had the other group therapy professor I can't even remember his name there's only two oh Ryder I have had he was awesome oh

my gosh I really loved him oh yes Dr wrer there professors I loved but I don't I'm not I'm horrible at remembering names but Barnhill I didn't have although I've his name was familiar because he was well known um and I know he's now working with uh um Melissa full circle yeah full circle therapy Melissa rgo yeah so yeah so I um I graduated 2003 I went out into the field in Florida um and working in

Community Mental Health um the first job I got was working with severe and persistent mental clients and um I was working as like a behavioral counselor like more case manager role than therapeutic but the program director um picked out three people from our program and offered us an opportunity to get trained in DBT and so that was in 2004 and I was like I never heard of it but I love to learn and I was like

sure I would love to and I was honored that she chose me I was fairly new in the program um and it was a year-long training of DBT um wow it was a week one week intensive six months of consultation then another week intensive and another six months of consultation and the goal was to implement DBT in this program to work with the clients that had been identified as borderline personality disorder there was a few of

them um and so we got a lot of support learning and implementing the program and I had no honestly no idea what I was trained in until I started to get the training and I loved what I was learning um and I got put on a list serve at the time um with through behavioral Tech as one of the extensively trained professionals so like over the next 10 years I would get emails from people across the

nation asking if I could help them with their aunt or their niece or their daughter or the like it was it people were learning about it and there was such limited resources of DBT Clin train clinicians it was a wild experience like having emails from people from around like from Kentucky or Indiana or like just random places that had found I was like how did you find me and that's how I came to find out I

was on a list serve but as I moved into private practice um I found myself pulling out DBT skills and tools peace meal like here and there not the comprehensive treatment protocol but um just with all kinds of different issues and clients and stuff like that and um so I I just I I loved everything I had learned I learned learning about mindfulness I had been trained in um Transcendental Meditation and that was such a hard

meditative practice to follow yes um but it was beneficial and it certainly taught me a lot that was the first meditation practice I was ever taught in and then mindfulness I loved because it was so simple and easy to do and so I was able to successfully practice mindfulness and it certainly benefited me personally with Stress and Anxiety and stuff like that and um anyway so there was lots of pieces of DBT that were slowly like

germinating through personal practice through professional use in private practice um and then as I grew my private practice um I was first a solo practitioner and I then um I credentialed with every major insurance company possible so I became this like very like systematized uh I was working like 35 client hours a week kind my work girl I'd be I'd be I'd be in a psychiatric ward in Fort La I would not be able to do

that it was intense yeah um and then insurance companies started cutting their rates and it was around 2017 there was a massive cut with Blue Cross Blue Shield cut their rates by $30 a session goodness half my case load was Blue Cross Blue Shield and all my colleagues that were out of network were charging like almost triple what I was getting paid through insurance and I just was like what am I doing here you know what

I mean so I terminated my every single contract I had and worked on completely revamping my business model to a feif for service and in that transition I realized that doing groups was a really great way to to help me move from managed care to fee for service and so DB DBT skills groups became the thing because I was competent in DBT and I loved working with teens um and that honestly DBT skills groups for teens

are um like it's such a amazing resource for them like with with whether they have problems or not right DBT skills groups for teens are amazing like I would love to social emotional learning it's like a social emotional learning so let's before we keep going all right we just keep saying DBT DBT and I'm telling you my listeners are not you know a lot of them might be clients they might just be learning about um therapeutic

modalities or just wanting to understand like what are they talking about so let's do DBT 101 it is a buzzword nowadays especially now that like ifs you know ifs people you know but because those that's our uh therapies you know like it's our language so it's so easy for us what isbt what tell me like what like I have no idea I just landed from a you know a planet onto Earth and TTT was like the

first three letters what were you tell me you're like what the hell um well it's a comprehensive evidence-based therapeutic approach that originally was developed to help I'm going to use Marshall Lan's words um to help people that were living in Hell get out of hell and as she did her research she operationally defined these people as um chronically suicidal chronically self-injurious they were living in hell and through that operational definition the majority of those people had

a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and had a high comorbidity because so most so does borderline personality disorder as a disorder in its own research has a high comorbidity and what's that mean having meaning that the there's the incidence of them with the diagnosis and also another presentation that's clinically uh statistically relevant okay um is comorbidity so like this feature also occurs in high incidents with border line which is um a history of sexual abuse or

physical abuse so trauma ums mean the three letters DBT what that mean DBT stands for dialectical behavior therapy and um the dialectical part is a philosophical concept um somewhat taken from Zen Buddhism Al also used within the realm of um physics like it's a it's a unique concept um in the concept in the in the context of DBT a dialectical approach means um the fact that there exists in the world many things in opposition contradicting each

other yes and yet it's finding the way finding the synthesis finding the truth in the fact that two things can and do coexist that are completely contradictory or oppositional to each other like like I'm scared and I also want to like I want to do this thing I'm excited to but I'm terrified I don't know I love and I hate this person whatever it is so it's it's the idea that you don't have to it's not

either or but it's that both it's and that's a dialectical approach and then the behavior part is that in dialectical behavior therapy there is a lot of structure and focus on behavior modification so it's so interesting because it's both of them together it's that there um well there was a therapeutic approach that followed DBT called acceptance and change therapy okay wow have you act act isn't it acceptance and change therapy I think think it's called acceptance

and change but it it kind of is a I don't know it well but from what I've understood it seems to follow a very similar like offshoot of DBT right it's oh commitment and change is it commitment and change no I don't know acceptance change or commitment whatever right um but it's but it's like radical acceptance accepting and changing at the same time and dialectical yeah so it's DBT is that it it incor at Zen principles

um it was the first therapeutic approach to incorporate Zen principles including mindfulness um into its protocol into its philosophical approach um and that's what DBT stands for and it includes five main components of four of them are main components of Service delivery the fifth one is an internal component that is part of the full model of DBT so that remember I was saying that it's it was developed for people living in Hell people living in hell

are operationally defined as chronically suicidal chronically self-injurious those people are mostly borderline um have the diagnosis or features of but on um what was I going to tell you though is that um I don't know what I was going to tell you but over the years DBT has kind of been applied to the application has been used in in a wider variety of clinical populations okay and there was a ton of research to inform Marshall in

aan on creating the protocol so on the on the back end she used so much research to create this model okay um like like experimentation and tweaking and like and and using research uh based on other research findings to come up with the protocol that she thought would be most effective at helping these people and so she developed this model and then the amount of research that she did and that has been done around the world

on DBT on the outcome data so when you apply DBT with the clinical population what's the outcome do they do they still exhibit these symptoms do they do are the symptoms do they go away do they resolve resolve and um the outcome data is so strong not not only with Marsha's work but with people that around the world research the outcome data of DBT in clinical populations around the world it's as far as I know and

I could be wrong but when I was trained and had done like was so into DBT and had read everything I was supposed to and then I was interested in I don't know of any other clinical approach that is known to cure cure borderline personality disorder w I I want to go there then because say that you like a brand new client's coming to you or patient whatever you want to call them and they have borderline

they might not know it but you know you know there's Tendencies where that emotional disregulation that anger that splitting I mean all these key words that we learn with borderline right true you they walk into your office like what do you do first with them like what is it if they walk into my office like you they hired you to be their therapist or whoever you've trained whatever like my counseling connections cuz you're a group practice

correct yes we're now a group practice yes yeah so say that you know I'm brand new I I'm suffering I'm in that hell I'm self-injuring I've been suffering now since I was you know a teenager I've been unmedicated I've been diagnosed with a bunch of different things I still can't regulate my emotions I still have my favorite person I mean these are like what I'm saying are things that borderline personality um I don't want to say

features but this is like the things like you know who Dr Daniel Fox is on um YouTube he's a very well-known borderline I think he's out of Texas and I watch his YouTube videos um because I always want to learn more right I always want to learn more and he talks I think he has a DBT workbook but but that's yeah so how do you approach the first time someone comes in and then they're like trying

to call you all I mean you need boundaries I get all that but like yeah what is it about DBT that's different than CBT or you know trying to help clients with whatever Theory or modality that a therapist might um it's got very very it's got incredible structure and infrastructure to the therapy okay um and at the same time so this is where the like dialectical and the behavior like the behavior part is very structured there's

key um components to individual therapy and to this there's a skills group so I was telling you that there's forced treatment delivery components of DBT there's individual therapy that's highly structured there's skills group there's phone coaching and then there's ancillary treatment which is basically treating assessing and treating this the support system around a client so the system right to make sure that they are not reinforcing ineffective coping and that they know how to reinforce effective coping

and the fifth component is treatment team which is internal we meet on a weekly basis and support each other but let's say this client comes in and why is it so effective for them there is there's a train track that is highly structured a track of therapeutic um a therapeutic Journey that we follow but within that especially with borderlines this is why it's so great is like the dialectical piece of like meeting a client where they're

at um constantly using strategies of of validating their experience and yet redirecting them com and getting them to commit to this track that why should they buy into this track you know what I mean like they've done a million tracks and they're suffering you they're suffering um yeah so there's there's a there's a nuance to being a therapist for clients like this that just has to do with this like acceptance and change validation and change um

that there's just so many different strategies you learn in like specifically through being trained in DBT but also as a human being um in working with clients with borderline where you're using your own relationship you're being real with a client about what you know what you've learned how you're they're affecting you as a human being um so that's another piece of DBT that's super cool is that you use the relationship as part of your um strategy

for change is that you're real with the client you are genu you genuinely develop a relationship with this client um and you genuinely use it with that as a form of treatment you know when when for for example therapy interfering behavior um shows up that's a part of DBT that we work on in stage I want to say stage three there's four stages of therapy so in the very beginning we're orienting clients to this track that

we are supposed to follow and why are we is there a workbook is there certain um worksheets like what what what do you mean because you're telling me like four um you know four phases or five phases so like is there like this thing saying okay you're going to agree on doing this with me for how many weeks and here is your workbook or whatever it is you know your yeah so the you in the pre-treatment

stage which is like three to four sessions you start orienting the client to all the components of therapy and so there's there's two main components maybe a third when they need it the two is the individual therapy that they should come to weekly and then the skills group same they need to go to that weekly and the skills group has a whole curriculum um of of teaching them the four core skills of DBT these skills are

a mix of I was telling you Zen principles so a mix of Zen principles as well as cognitive behavioral skills that have been uh like packaged into the most easy to follow instructions like like guide like tools um so the skills group is a part of so you Orient them to the individual therapy and what that entails where there's homework involved in the individual therapy it's highly structured um in therapy there's two key components that really

affect change um and they're collaborative in nature so one is the diary card clients learn how to fill out a diary card this diary card is basically a daily inventory of emotions they experience as well as targeted behaviors that are identified as problematic um that could be as intense as like suicidal ideation self-harming Behavior or like I snapped on like snapping on people like and regretting it you know like I always anger anger management issues so

those are targets and so they just track them and it's like takes 30 seconds to a minute a day to track this and we use this tool as a tool of assessment in therapy to identify how they're doing in terms of where their vulnerabilities are and where their coping skills are working and where they need to implement coping skills so and also we learn about them their nature like well I guess I was saying yeah you

learn about their true like intricate vulnerabilities the thing like over the course of ye weeks and weeks and then months of doing therapy with somebody with DBT you really dial into this like just such Nuance specifics to that person of where their vulnerabilities are right and and there's true healing that comes when you continually assess and and like dial into so it's it sounds like coaching and accountability that's what I'm hearing it's like you're coing coaching

absolutely and holding them accountable because sometimes in therapy you know it is it's good to go like I encourage people to go but sometimes you stay in a in a I hate to call it victim mode and it's like okay you've been in therapy for 15 years already and you're still talking about the same thing I want to validate you I do like I get it but you're you're paying me some money and all you want

to do is continue to talk about the same thing over and over expecting different results and we all know what that meaning is like everybody talks about that so like let's go here for a second because not everyone can afford you or me in private practice right that's true right and so is there anything any any you know do you have a favorite free or lowcost resource or you know where can they start if they're listening

listen going to a therap therapist like Tammy and and and her and her posy would probably be very beneficial if you're suffering because you're going to pay anyway like why don't you like try it and do the work and and go because like if you're suffering that bad like you know get the help and and right and stuff but when people can't because remember you and I you said you came from Community Mental Health we got

to remember our people from back then because that's like yeah so what what do you have anything is there any work yeah there's a bunch there's a bunch of amazing resources and I would say like even when I bring in my student interns because I often will use my student in train them to be the phone coaches for for the clients um but the resources that I would say as a starting point is YouTube and Tik

Tok honestly if you put in DBT skills yeah to like you will find amazing resources people of all kinds not only psychologists but actually clients that have gone through the whole protocol and they're on their journey of healing and they're at different stages like you'll find all the range from clients to professionals teaching DBT skills um and that's a great starting point um there in locally for us there's Community Mental Health Resources that do offer DBT

like therapy um you know some DBT therapy to like a decent DBT protocol I just learned of um Memorial Hospital hit in Hollywood has an outpatient DBT program and so those kind of programs often will um get coverage through Medicaid or be very low fee they may have some grant funding so there are some Community Mental Health um resources that offer DBT Services um but I would say YouTube as a starting point and then you asked

about workbooks there's a ton of amazing workbooks um starting with Marshall L A hands she has a worksheet a handouts and worksheets DBT skills skills um training book and one of my most successful clients um I worked with him for one year almost like to the day and he had OCD as one of his diagnoses and I feel like that lent to his success because he was so diligent he went through the handbook literally in perfect

sequence and did like diligently every day went one from one sheet to the next to the next he learned so much and he gained like it it was just an incredible turnaround from where we started to where we ended but anyways so Marshall lahan has her own workbook but so many other clinicians have published great resources of workbooks on learning DBT skills and using the DBT protocol um so that's a good starting place okay yeah that'

be great yeah I mean for real and then I talked about Dr Daniel Fox I'm pretty sure it's all DBT but but she's right like there's workbooks out there there's um you probably could get like a free worksheet like deer man I use the I love that okay tell tell the audience what that is dearm man is um one of the key um DBT skills you learn in the core skill interpersonal Effectiveness so there's four core

skills that work the original um the original books that were published came out with a second edition so now there's a fifth core skill but the four core skills of DBT are mindfulness distress tolerance emotion regulation and interpersonal Effectiveness and these truly are like life skills they really are um so interpersonal Effectiveness teaches you how to balance the demands and your needs in a relationship it teaches you how to resolve conflict effectively how to advocate for

yourself etc etc dear man is one of the key ones that's taught in DB in interp personal Effectiveness and um it's a lot of her skills are acronyms so it's it mean so d stands for describe e stands for Express a stands for assert R stands for reinforce and the dear part are the things that you do in sequence in practicing and then actually communicating to somebody um where you are advocating for yourself in some way

you're asking for um your needs to get met in some way where you want somebody to stop doing something or to do something more of or to do something in lie of something else like you're asking for some accommodation in some way um and then the man part is the the how do you communicate effectively so the m stands for being mindful being very focused on well I'll start from the d d is describe so describe

the situation um factually not subjectively but as objectively as you can like what happened be specific uh in the context of the situation you're trying to bring up the a is or the E is Express how it made you feel so how did you feel as a result of this context um the a is what are you asserting what are you asking for that you would like to be different next time from this person what could

they do differently more of less of differently the r is reinforce meaning um you share with them how if they were to able to cooperate with your your ask then how would it help the relationship so you reinforce them in some way and so those are the things of what do you do and then the am the man is how do you do it so the m is being mindful meaning that you're focused on your objective

um the a is that you appear confident and then the N is that you're willing to negotiate so um there's so much to be said about learning and understanding the wise behind all of that and and like more about what those are but that's dear man and it's an amazing skill amazing skill yeah I've taught this skill to family law attorneys to mediators yeah it's awesome so how do you deal with the emotional because like that

is one thing I saw working with the teenagers is the emotional regulation because they get disregulated so quickly and they react and and it's also how old they are and then those that you know that's gone through childhood trauma and abuse and everything they they have that I mean they could be grown adults Age and and still have that pop off you know it's like and then they feel super bad that they did that and so

what what would you say to someone like that like if they're listening right now and they've never been to therapy and they are like oh my gosh she's describing me like what DBT skill can they start utilizing now anything oh well so what you're describing to me sounds like distress tolerance skills so um if you had an emotional barometer or thermometer 0 to 10 let's say is your range of your thermometer what you're describing to me

sounds like disregulation hits like somewhere around a five to a 10 five six S 8 nine 10 you're in like the Red Zone and you usually snap you lose it you get disregulated you either hurt someone else or you hurt yourself in some way um and I call that the Red Zone that's my wording for the red zone so in the red zone the the set of skills that is most helpful there is called distress tolerance

skills because you need to learn how to tolerate the distress and distress tolerance skills their focus is to help you get regulated enough to buy yourself some time so that you can access your wise mind and make a decision about what do I need to do next to be most effective in this situation um distress tolerance skills alone are not always sufficient to deal with a actual problem in the environment but they certainly are enough to

get you regulated to figure out like what to do do I stay what do I do if I stay or do I go what you know what do I do if I go um so an example of a distress tolerance skill that people love is called um is a tip skill so again another acronym the tip is spelled TI p p the T stands for tipping your body temperature the I stands for intense exercise the P

stands for Pace breathing and another p is Progressive relaxation a lot of distress tolerance skills especially the tip are focused on well the tip especially is focused on calming your physiology because we in mental health and psychology know that when you're dis when you've hit a level of disregulation it's that you know your fight andlight system is kicking in and so the structure the way the structure and the functioning of the brain works is that when

your fight andlight system kicks in blood flow gets redirected away from your reasonable thinking mind and gets redistributed to your inner cortex and to the rest of your body to mobilize you for either fight flight freeze spawn whatever so if you don't have good blood flow in your outer cortex where there's lots of thinking and reason happening that means you don't have good access to think or be reasonable yeah um so you so the tip skill

is calming your physiology to help restore blood flow to give you better access to your reasonable mind your wise mind um so the tip the T of the tip skill is super cool people love this we have a dive it's like a called a dive reflex I only learned this because of DBT that if you immerse your fa in ice cold water for like 20 seconds your heart rate will plummet um and I think it's an

evolutionary response to help preserve oxygen in the blood from like back in the day when we were Nomads if you fell in like a ice ice Lake you know and you're trying to struggle to get out like everything would just like shut down so um to preserve your life to help you to give buy you time but anyway so that's a tips the te is that so if you can't dip your face in ice water you

could take an ice pack um and specifically put it on your like your cheekbones under your eyes and around your nose and hold it on your face for like 20 seconds and breathe calmly and what will happen is your heart rate will start to go down and down and that will give you some access some give you some like grounding yeah to buy some time um to kind of get to a more reasonable place of uh

thoughtfulness and and what do I do in this moment what's the best course of action so that's one skill there's so many others there's um self soothe which is a series of skills of soothing your s senses in the moment if you can't get away from a stressful situation and self soothing is working to calm you like pet therapy is a perfect example of Soo self self soothing um and then there's you had mentioned wise mind

accepts MH that's another acronym and the a stands for activities the C stands for contributing the other C is comparing etc etc but those skills are all about um how you can reframe a very intolerable or like yeah overwhelming situation yeah how to reframe it how to make lemons out of lemonade or lemonade out of lemons um how to Red distract yourself and do other activities right um so those are distress tolerance skills and I'm GNA

try findy of skills yeah um some PDFs and put it in the show notes unless you have any bad but I could do that because like in the show notes I always try to put the resources we talk about on there for for sure for the for the listener in case they are curious or they want to try it or they're trying cuz you know um yeah cuz she could keep going cuz I know that when

I was learning oh my goodness accepts tips and and it's it's a great idea because when you are in the moment of reacting an emotion like it is really hard to be like oh what she say what they say what I do you know but uh an Acron like tips tips tip oh tip tip tip tip like you know and to try to figure that out that would makees sense it's it's learning to respond in wisdom

and not react in Emotion no matter how old you are because to me correct when you react an emotion you're giving the power that you you could utilize for yourself away to to assumptions of what's happening or or automatically thinking these things without having full on I mean there's abuse so I'm I don't want to you know there's traumatic events and abuse that's happening domestic violence you know uh spiritual abuse and stuff like that but my

point is that when those reactions are happening you want to have the skills in order to respond wisely so you don't go further painful situation yeah so I I want to piggy back on what you're saying just as a simplified way to the very first skill we teach in mindfulness which is the very first core skill we teach is called three states of mind and there's three states of Mind wise mind emotion mind reasonable mind the

goal of all DBT skills and all DBT training is to operate from Wise mind kind of exactly what you're saying not from emotion mind like you were just describing um not from reasonable mind either because you're not really sensitive to emotions so you may regret some actions you take in reasonable mind but from Wise mind where you have access to both your emotional self others em other emotions as well as be able to contemplate pros and

cons and strategize and understand rules and whatever so the goal of all DBT is teaching people to operate from a wise mind place and I I recently started to use the analogy both in collaborative as well as DBT of learning how to be the captain of your ship so we teach people that their life is their ship it's their journey and they need to know how to be the captain of their ship and we don't get

to choose the kind of ship we get you know what I mean we don't get to choose the weather I'm just holding on to a dingy in a hurricane girl right so like for some of these clients truly with with borderline or with a history of trauma sometimes um like nobody's at the helm and the ship is being like strewn yeah from left and like from the storm um so it's a process of learning how to

get to the helm and learn how to steer your ship and figuring out you know just that like it's they need to learn how to be the captain of their ship and operate from a wise mind place so everything kind of in DBT is in service of empowering a client with what their experience and what their perception is of everything um so that that's their best guide is is their own experience and then giving them the

tools of how to manage their experience in an effective way yeah that's that's like the essence of DBT is that love that all right I mean like I could keep going and going but I understand we both have clients after this and so um is there anything else you want to say to the audience before we go um H you know I would say that there's like DBT is applicable in almost in so many contexts it's

so valuable as a resource for not only clients with severe um treatment resistant issues like borderline personality disorder features of it um it's so excellent for like I was saying before like the range of teenage issues and teaching teens social emotional learning because of the DBT skills um but also with with clients it's very it's valuable there's so many different issues that CBT can help and there's research that has now kind of been applied to a

variety of clinical populations like eating disorders and Trauma um just depression like bipolar disorder um but yeah even life skills like it's just so valuable so DBT is great I'm definitely a DBT nerd I'm happy to answer any questions anybody ever has about so so where can someone find you or work with you um if you go to my website that's a great place to learn about me and find all my contact information which is my

counseling connections.com um they can call the main number and schedule phone consult anytime with me at no cost just to ask questions about whether it's treatment they're pursuing for themselves or questions about DBT or treatment they're pursuing for someone else a loved one um you know I'd like to be a resource to everybody that's great well thanks for being here and thank you listener for joining us if you enjoyed today's conversation please share it with someone

who could benefit from it or leave an honest review it truly helps more people find this work and if this episode resonated with you don't stop here there's a whole library of past episodes filled with wisdom practical tools and encouragement waiting for you so go back find a topic that speaks to where you are right now and keep growing on this journey and as always trust in the Lord guard your heart and renew your mind bye

and now for the disclaimer to make sure you understand that you are responsible for you the content provided on the holistic counselor podcast is for entertainment and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified mental health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical or mental condition never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because

of something you have heard on this podcast the views expressed on this podcast are my personal opinions and do not represent the views of any professional organizations with which I am Affiliated call your doctor 911 or 988 immediately if you have a medical emergency the holistic counselor podcast does not recommend or endorse any specific tests Physicians products procedures opinions or other information that may be mentioned on the podcast Reliance on any information provided by the holistic

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Bound by confidentiality and will not respond to any disclosures of this type on this podcast I am committed to upholding the ethics and confidentiality of the therapeutic relationship which extends to all forms of communication in accordance with the laws and professional guidelines that govern mental health professionals I want you to know that your privacy is of the utmost importance and you are responsible for protecting it when interacting on this platform or any other public forum thank

you