Specializing in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
The Phoenix Center in Lynchburg, Virginia specializes in treating mental health concerns using Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Our team of counselors are trained in a variety of therapeutic approaches to make sure you are getting the treatment that you need. Read about Dialectical Behavioral Therapy below and see how it can help you.
What is DBT?
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a well researched and comprehensive treatment approach designed to help people who have difficulty in regulating their emotions. This often results in a high degree of impulsivity, self-destructive behaviors, and volatile relationships with others. DBT works by teaching participants to become more aware of their particular sensitivity to emotions such as anger and anxiety. At the same time, it provides the skills necessary to tolerate these feelings and then begin to regulate them. DBT also teaches assertiveness skills to enable participants to effectively begin asking for what they want from others and saying no to things they do not want.
Who can benefit?
DBT is used to treat a broad range of people with many different characteristics. People with a tendency towards impulsivity, an unstable sense of worth, high emotional reactivity, unstable relationships, fear of abandonment, and rapid mood changes with mixed anxiety and depression especially benefit from DBT. Mental health conditions of anxiety, depression, trauma, panic disorder, borderline personality disorder, and other personality disorders benefit from DBT.
Mindfulness and DBT
Most of the time we are caught up in our own thoughts: worrying, judging, planning, regretting. This prevents us from truly noticing and appreciating the present moment to the fullest extent possible. Mindfulness can help with that. Mindfulness is a form of meditation based on the Eastern spiritual training of Zen. It is the practice of awareness, being in the moment, taking a non-judgmental stance, attending to each moment in time with our fullest attention.
By learning to be in the moment we are able to take control of our mind instead of our mind taking control of us. In DBT we learn to allow our reasonable mind to keep our emotional mind in check, thus allowing us to operate and make our decisions with our wise mind. Mindfulness teaches us by taking small steps to pay attention, we can reduce our stress, lighten up our mood, and improve our relationships.