Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Between-Session Homework Strategies That Actually Get Done
If you've ever asked a client to fill out a thought record between sessions and watched them show up the following week having done exactly none of it, you already know that between-session homework strategies are where a lot of good treatment plans quietly fall apart. The intervention was sound. The client just didn't do it. And in my experience, that's almost never a motivation problem — it's a design problem. I used to take non-completion personally, or worse, quietly assume the client wasn't "ready for change." Then I started... Read more...
Emotion Regulation Skills for Complex, High-Reactivity Clients
Every caseload has a handful of clients who blow past your standard emotion regulation worksheets. You hand them the feelings wheel, the STOP skill, the basic grounding script — and it bounces right off. These are the clients with histories of complex trauma, borderline traits, or years of dissociating from their own internal states. Emotion regulation for these clients isn't a worksheet problem. It's a sequencing problem. I learned this the hard way about six years into practice, with a client I'll call M. She was sharp, insightful, could talk... Read more...
Anxiety Treatment Tools That Actually Work in a Busy Private Practice
Anxiety treatment tools are the bread and butter of most private practice caseloads. If your schedule looks anything like mine, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, and health anxiety make up a solid chunk of your active clients in any given month. After twelve years running my own practice, I've narrowed down to a handful of tools I actually reach for session after session — not the exhaustive list you get handed in grad school, but what survives contact with real clients on a Tuesday afternoon. Start With the Body, Not the... Read more...
Somatic Therapy Techniques for Trauma Treatment in Private Practice
Somatic therapy techniques have become one of the most requested additions to my continuing education list over the past few years, and for good reason. I had a client — I'll call her Renee — who spent eight months in weekly sessions with me talking clearly and insightfully about her childhood, her triggers, her patterns. She could narrate her trauma like a case study. And she still flinched every time a door slammed. Cognitive insight wasn't touching her nervous system. That's when I finally leaned into somatic work, and it's... Read more...
Gottman Method Couples Therapy: Where to Start With a New Couple
Gottman Method couples therapy gets recommended constantly in training programs, but a lot of therapists coming out of grad school aren't sure where to actually start with a new couple sitting on their couch. The research base is enormous, the assessment battery can feel like homework, and the temptation is to jump straight to communication skills before you understand what you're actually looking at. After years of running couples work in my practice, I've settled into a rhythm that keeps the theory useful without drowning the first few sessions in... Read more...
Teen Therapy Strategies That Actually Get Adolescents to Open Up
Teen therapy strategies that work in a real session look nothing like the rapport-building exercises you learn in grad school. If you've sat across from a 15-year-old who answers every question with "I don't know" or "fine," you already know the textbook approach falls apart fast. After 12 years in private practice, most of them spent working with adolescents and their families, I've had to relearn how to do this work more times than I can count. Here's what actually moves the needle. Ditch the direct question, at least at... Read more...
EMDR Therapy for Trauma: How It Works and How to Use It in Practice
If you're on the fence about adding EMDR therapy to your practice, I get it. I was too. Eight years ago I sat through my Part 1 training thinking the bilateral stimulation piece sounded a little too neat for how messy trauma actually is in the room. Then I ran my first full protocol with a client I'll call M. — a nurse with a needle phobia so severe it was threatening her license — and watched her SUDS score drop from an 8 to a 1 in a single... Read more...
Trauma-Informed Therapy: 5 Principles That Actually Change How You Practice
Trauma-informed therapy gets thrown around so often in continuing ed circles that it's started to lose its teeth. Everyone says they practice it. Fewer therapists can tell you what actually changes in the room when you do it well. After twelve years running a private practice built almost entirely on trauma and PTSD referrals, I can tell you it's not a modality — it's a stance. And it shows up in the small decisions, not the big ones. Here are the five principles I come back to with every trauma... Read more...
CBT Techniques for Anxiety: The Tools That Actually Work in Practice
If you work with anxious clients, you already know the hard part isn't explaining what anxiety is — it's giving people something they can actually do with their hands and their thoughts when the alarm bells start ringing. After twelve years in private practice, I've come to rely on a small set of CBT techniques for anxiety that hold up in the room, week after week, across diagnoses and personalities. These aren't the flashy interventions you see in workshops. They're the workhorses. Here's how I use them and where I... Read more...
The 4 DBT Skills Every Therapist Should Have in Their Toolkit
DBT's four core skill modules — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness — and what actually matters when you're using them with real clients in private practice. Read more...
What is Dialectical Behavior Therapy? - Thrive Today
What is Dialectical Behavior Therapy?
Unlocking Your Potential: A Journey into Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) with Our Exclusive Mega Bundle Introduction: Embark on a transformative journey as we explore the empowering world of Dialectical Behavior... Read more...
Dialectical Behavior Therapy - DBT Mega Bundle - Thrive Today
Unlock DBT Transformation!
Discover the life-changing benefits of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) in our latest post. Learn how DBT enhances emotional regulation, interpersonal skills, and self-awareness. Ready to unlock your potential? Explore our... Read more...