Rainbow, if you have a choice of programs, I would encourage you to do one that meets less frequently for a longer period of time, say once or twice weekly for 6-12 months. I think there is value in spreading it out over a longer period and having a longer period of time between sessions to work on coping skills on one's own. You can get a week between meetings to practice your distress tolerance in not contacting the therapist. And if you are unable to make it through the week, you can call the therapist and they talk you through your DBT skills to help you cope. At least that is my understanding of one aspect of DBT. It sounds like that part might be really valuable for you, since you often email your therapist between sessions when the impulse hits you. If you were going to a DBT program that met every day, there might not be the same benefit of having to make it through a whole week. It might be very easy to just wait until the next day, and so would not match up as well to that particular need.

I work at a psych hospital and we have partial hospitalization programs there. At our hospital, the partial patients come 5 days a week and join with the hospitalized patients for the therapeutic program 6 hours a day. So there is a mixture of inpatient and outpatient (partials) in the groups. The inpatient folks are more acute, often actively suicidal. The partials are often people who have been inpatient at the hospital recently and then will do the partial program as a "step-down" to being on their own. So the partials often have a lot of familiarity with the hospital since they are former patients. Sometimes we get partials who were not previous inpatients, but this is the minority. Also, when the partials are in the hospital with the inpatients, they have the same restrictions as the inpatients, i.e., they can't come and go as they please (they would need to get staff to unlock the doors for them to leave). There are a lot of rules! I don't know if the partial hospitalization program you are looking into would share any features with what I've described for my hospital, but it might raise some questions for you that you could get answers to before you make a commitment.

My experience has been that it's super hard to have that level of intensity for 6 hours straight, so the program in hospital is actually less intense because it is so many hours in a row. It is easier to do 6 hours of intensity if you do 1 hour a week, 6 weeks in a row, than 6 sequential hours in one day. Does that make sense? So it ends up the 6 hours in a row has pauses and breaks and lighter, less intense times. I'm not saying the hospital DBT program you're looking into would be like this, but it might raise questions for you to ask about.

I hope you hear back from the other DBT group too. Do you know if it is also a short program at a hospital?