Dialectical behavioral therapy treatment

In seeing many mental health conditions as disorders of emotion dysregulation, DBT is focused on emotions and how they feed ineffectual action patterns. Many elements of the therapy are aimed at teaching patients how to recognize, understand, label, and regulate their emotions and how to handle interpersonal situations that give rise to negative or painful emotions.

Each week, for individual therapy sessions, patients complete a diary “card” (often done via an app), a self-monitoring form that tracks individualized treatment targets relating to moods, behavior, and skills.

Patients identify and rate the intensity of emotions they experience each day—fear, shame, sadness, anger, pain, suicide attempts, and more—and space is provided to discuss emotional experience in more detail if needed.

In addition, using a checklist of skills—which also serves as a handy reminder to deploy them—patients note the frequency with wh