The DBT group I was involved with for 2 years was handled in a very college like atmosphere which was something that I needed.....I needed the intellectual aspect & learning how the brain actually works & how the DBT skills & thought process in mindfulness actually functions in the brain & how the broken brain works & how it can end up being fixed by reprogramming the neuropathways that haven't been working or there wouldn't be the mental illness in the first place.
The good thing about the DBT is that I learned that I did have some of the skills already that I had been using much of my life anyway.....but it also taught me other things that I had been wrongly understanding from the way I had been thinking about things from the time I was growing up.
Like I thought people were either logical or emotional because my mother was emotional & I was always logical & I never saw logical come from my mother.
I had never dealt with any mental health issues all my life until it was like a switch that flipped at the age of 42....& all of a sudden I couldn't function any longer because of a situation that I had gone through.......then there was another trauma that hit 10 years later that just added onto what I had been dealing with. Since there wasn't a medication out there that didn't give me bad side effects....I figured that there had to be a switch that could be thrown again & it would make me all better.
DBT actually validated what I had gone through & it helped me understand that my reactions weren't so out of touch with reality & that any normal person would have reacted in a similar way that I did. It also opened up my mind to new ways of perceiving things & understanding how the mind really works in given situations.
I don't have BPD.......so DBT definitely works for depression, anxiety, & for my PTSD & dealing with the trauma that came from being in a bad marriage for 33 years. What DBT also did was give me words so that I could describe what I had been feeling for so long but had no words to explain. I would go into therapy & say that I was feeling horrible....but would have no words to explain what was causing that horrible feeling until I got into understanding emotions & how emotions work & what in the world they even were.......I remember sitting down with several pages of emotion words one time.....& I just started writing down the one's that applied to how I was feeling & then putting the why's with each word. I ended up with 2 pages of emotions that I was finally able to put words & explain why I was feeling them.....first time in my LIFE.
I do seriously think that it's all in how the DBT is presented....& the things like:
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Example A: If you're struggling with self-harm, one of the "aversive consequences" (I shouldn't have used negative reinforcements because they're two different things. Aversive consequences would be a more suitable term for this) would be that if you were to indulge your urges to use those behaviors your consequence is not being allowed to contact your therapist for x number of days.
Example B: Not completing homework assignments leads to negative feedback from group facilitators: acting cold and irreverent.
Example C: Storming out of a session = client is "grounded" from therapy and is not allowed to attend x number of sessions.
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are not normal ways of handling a DBT group....they are arbitrary requirements placed on the group by the leaders......I don't know if it has anything to do with the age bracket of the people involved but all of us in our DBT group were 50 + with grown kids of our own....so we were mature adults who didn't need those childish restrictions placed on us & there wasn't anything like those EVER considered as necessary in the group.
We were actually a very intimate group of people who were able to open up & share our experiences & learn how to express ourselves & what we were going through using the common DBT terminology so that we would all know what each other was talking about.....but we needed a lot of help with that from the group leader because we would all come in & say what we had to say in our own terminology.....then she would help us figure out how it actually worked in terms of DBT.
The DBT helped me put words to what I thought & what I was experiencing & what I had experienced along with reinforcing skills I already had & learning new ones that would help when the others I already knew didn't work.
I do seriously think it's all in how it's presented & taught & all of us were college grads who had high paying careers before becoming disabled..& the DBT was presented in a way that it related to us...not us having to lower our intellectual level down to some lower standard of presentation.
I think that was a serious key to why I was able to relate to the DBT group I went to for 2 years & also the Next Step group that I'm going to now that helps us continue thinking about what we are experiencing in terms of the DBT we learned.