Pines Recovery Life: Addiction Stops Here

Dialectical behavior therapy in South Florida

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) teaches you what to do with an emotion that feels too big to sit with. It was built for people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and has since proved useful for other conditions, including substance use disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and eating disorders such as binge eating disorder. Patients who do DBT at Pines Recovery Life Detox learn skills that keep working after they leave.

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Healthy coping for addiction recovery

How dialectical behavior therapy works

DBT therapists teach coping skills for managing intense emotions and for handling relationships. There are four core skill sets:

Mindfulness skills: Staying present with your own thoughts and feelings without judging them. With practice it widens the gap between feeling something and acting on it.
Interpersonal skills: Saying what you mean, setting a boundary and getting through a conflict without wrecking the relationship. Therapists run practical exercises so you rehearse it instead of just hearing about it.
Distress tolerance skills: Getting through a bad hour without self-harm and without using. These techniques matter most for people also dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.
Emotional regulation skills: Naming what you are feeling, lowering how vulnerable you are to the hard feelings, and building more of the good ones into an ordinary week.

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Mental health skills training

What to expect from dialectical behavior therapy

DBT runs as both individual and group sessions, so you get one to one attention and a room full of people working on the same thing. A licensed mental health professional trained in DBT leads every session.

DBT therapists meet as a consultation team. Those meetings are where they get support and supervision on live cases, and they are part of how DBT is meant to be delivered.

You may work from a skills training manual with exercises to practice. Your therapist tracks how it is going and adjusts as you start using the skills outside the room.

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Benefits of DBT for addiction

How DBT helps with addiction

DBT works well in addiction recovery, including for people with a co-occurring mental health condition, and for anyone dealing with self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Coping skills and radical acceptance give you something to do with distress other than use.

Therapists also work with you on facing what happened and on repairing the relationships that took damage. Handling intense emotions better lowers the risk of relapse.

Dialectical behavior therapy can help clients by:

Seeing your own actions and what follows from them
Getting on better with the people around you
Accept accountability for past mistakes
Building a support system that holds up
Knowing you are not the only one going through this

Clinical trials have shown better mental health outcomes and better emotional regulation with DBT. It has the strongest record in borderline personality disorder, and it has been adapted for opioid-dependent women and for substance use disorder generally.

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