Could anyone that's done DBT group work explain it

So, collecting all of the thoughts about therapy yesterday, one thing mentioned was a suggestion of doing DBT in a group.

So... I'm a little anxious in general, but it really helps to know what to expect.

What's it like? What are you expected to talk about or do? Do you share stuff with the group? Or the leader?

I've read a little from a couple of google hits, and I see homework is mentioned. I'm just interested to know how it works from an actual life participant.

Thank you very much in advance

Talk about skills and how you used them. Theres a group leader who teaches all the skills and then group members practice usually inside and outside of group. Doesnt usually get too personal cause thats for your individual therapist. Homework is filling out a diary card about skills and how used. Good group to join.

Could you give an example of the skills? Or an exercise you might do?

Here is a full list of all the DBT skills: Connecting Skills

There have been threads about DBT recently on here. You could look them up if you want; I'm not good at figuring out how to post links to threads.

I am in my second cycle of DBT. Each cycle is about 6 months, and my group meets weekly for 1 1/2 hours. It's quite structured, not really like group therapy. You don't interact very much with the others in the group though I've become close to a couple of them. In my group, and probably in others, people keep coming in and out. No one necessarily starts at the same time.

We follow a manual based on Marsha Linehan's book on DBT. She's the founder of DBT. We have homework, as well as the diary cards, and we share them in the group. We learn the core skills, which are basically mindfulness training, and then learn distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotion regulation skills.

The diary card isn't hard. There's not much room to write, so you can be brief. You describe a trigger situation, your feelings and intensity, your urge, the DBT skills you used, if you did, what you did, and your distress level before and after.

It's not like therapy, though some of us shared personal stuff more than others. My group wasn't stressful at all.

I also liked that in the beginning of each week, we did a different mindfulness exercise, as instructed by the DBT leader.

I think DBT has been very helpful for me though it takes time to remember to use the skills, and what they are, at the time I need them.

There was a thread really recently where a few of us answered some questions about our DBT experiences, and that would probably give you some good info.

http://forums.psychcentral.com/psych...ences-dbt.html

If you have any other/more specific questions, let us know.

Just wanted to say thank you to all for sharing so much useful information.