Dialectical Behavior Therapy in San Antonio, TX
If you experience intense emotions and struggle to control your responses, have a borderline personality disorder, a substance abuse disorder, or suicidal thoughts, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) may be an effective treatment option. At its core, DBT aims to help individuals find healthy ways to deal with intense or negative emotions rather than rely on problematic behaviors like self-harm or drug and alcohol use.
Blue Heron Recovery provides DBT services to help individuals cultivate better emotional regulation and communication skills. Review our brief guide to this type of treatment and who may benefit from it, then get in touch with our San Antonio, TX, center at (888) 403-6608 to learn more about getting the help you need.
How Dialectical Behavior Therapy Works
Dialectical behavior therapy improves patients’ mental health and emotional regulation through therapeutic activities designed to validate their feelings and personality while showing how change can be beneficial to their overall wellness.
Therapists also:
- Support the development of new skills to replace unhelpful or destructive behaviors
- Help patients identify the patterns and behaviors that block their progress
- Set and reach goals
- Provide support to protect patients from self-harm
DBT starts with an assessment to determine whether you’re a candidate for this approach. If so, treatment will include
- Individual and group therapy
- Telephone crisis support
- Skills training
Much of the therapy involves tracking your emotions between sessions and learning to identify response patterns.
Skills training is also critical to DBT. Typically done in a group setting, these sessions prepare you for managing everyday life through training in:
- Mindfulness, or paying attention to what’s happening in the present
- Emotional regulation
- Distress tolerance, meaning accepting current circumstances without resisting them or trying to change them
- Setting boundaries
- Effective interpersonal communication
For most people, DBT requires a minimum of six months of intensive work, with at least three hours a week of therapy sessions. In some cases, recovery and significant progress can take years of work.
The Benefits of DBT
The DBT approach combines two opposite ideas: accepting your life and how your behavior affects it and learning new strategies to change behaviors to improve your quality of life. Where cognitive behavioral therapy helps you understand how thoughts influence behavior, DBT goes further to help you modify your behaviors. Therapists work to motivate patients to change and reduce or stop behaviors that don’t align with a healthy and productive life, such as substance abuse.
Provided that patients commit to treatment, research shows that DBT can:
- Reduce substance use
- Reduce anger
- Reduce self-harm
- Reduce the risk of hospitalization
- Reduce depressive symptoms
Commitment to the treatment and a willingness to focus on getting better for the future, not the past, are essential to the success of DBT.
Blue Heron Recovery: Choose Therapy Services in San Antonio
Blue Heron provides comprehensive outpatient treatment programs for Texas residents who are struggling with substance use disorders, major depressive disorder, and other treatable disorders.
Our Dialectical Behavior Therapy treatment programs are very effective in helping clients change their disruptive behaviors and learn new coping skills for managing their symptoms and triggers.
If you are living with substance abuse or any other problem that could benefit from DBT, reach out to Blue Heron Recovery in San Antonio at 888.403.6608 to learn more about the treatment approach and what it can do for you.
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