Skills-Based Therapy
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) in Colorado.
A skills-based therapy for emotions that feel too big to hold. We use DBT in individual and group sessions at The Redpoint Center, alongside the rest of your treatment plan.
What dialectical behavior therapy is.
Dialectical behavior therapy is an evidence-based approach to treating addiction and the mental health conditions that so often sit alongside it. Its starting point is emotion. Some people feel things at a volume that makes ordinary coping useless, and the usual advice to calm down or think it through never reaches them. DBT was built for exactly that.
It grew out of cognitive behavioral therapy. Cleveland Clinic describes DBT as based on CBT but specially adapted for people who experience emotions very intensely, developed in the 1970s by the psychologist Marsha Linehan, first for people living with borderline personality disorder and chronic suicidality. The name carries the method. Dialectical means combining opposite ideas, and the two DBT holds together are accepting your life as it actually is and working to change it. Neither one alone does the job.
At The Redpoint Center we use DBT as one of several evidence-based therapies in a plan built around you, never as a program of its own. It is also unusually adaptable. The same four skills get taught to someone white-knuckling early sobriety and to someone whose relationships keep detonating, and the work looks different in each case.
- Skills you practice, not just insight
- Taught in individual and group sessions
- Acceptance and change held together
- Used across our outpatient levels of care
What we use DBT for.
DBT began as a treatment for borderline personality disorder and proved useful well beyond it. These are the areas we put it to work, on its own and alongside other therapies.
Borderline personality disorder
The condition DBT was built for, and where its evidence base runs deepest.
Self-harm and suicidal thinking
The behaviors DBT was first designed to reduce, approached with skills rather than willpower.
Acceptance and Change
The four skills DBT teaches.
Two of them are for accepting a moment you cannot change yet. Two are for changing what you can. DBT teaches all four, because most people arrive needing both halves.
Acceptance
Mindfulness
Living in the present moment, so you can see the connection between a thought and what you do next. Breathing and grounding techniques buy you the seconds it takes to decide rather than react.
Acceptance
Distress Tolerance
Stress and crisis do not stop arriving because you are in recovery. These are the skills for getting through a hard hour without making it worse: distraction, self-soothing, riding it out.
Change
Emotion Regulation
Naming sadness, anger, or anxiety accurately, then having a plan for it. DBT never asks you to dismiss a difficult emotion. It asks you to acknowledge it and give it somewhere to go.
Change
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Asking for what you need, saying no, and keeping your self-respect while you do it. Building the relationships worth keeping, and challenging the ones that are not.
In Practice
What the work changes.
There is no single way to run DBT. We integrate it into your treatment and your daily life rather than teaching it as a self-contained course: in individual sessions, in group work, and usually in some of both. Underneath the skills, five things are being asked of the work.
Acceptance and change. Seeing your circumstances for what they are, naming the stress, anxiety, or depression in them honestly, and only then making a plan. You cannot change a situation you are still arguing with.
Behavioral change. Identifying the self-destructive habits and replacing them, one at a time, with something that does the same job without the cost.
Cognitive change. Thought patterns damage a person as thoroughly as behavior does. The work is learning to catch an unhealthy belief and decide whether it is actually true.
Collaborative skills. Group exercises and social practice, because communication is a skill and skills need repetition.
A supportive mindset. Recognizing strengths in other people and in yourself, which is harder and more useful than it sounds.
This matters most when substance use and a mental health condition arrive together. The National Institute of Mental Health describes integrated care as combining mental health and substance use treatment so patients can receive more convenient, coordinated care in one place, and that is how we treat dual diagnosis: one plan, not two. Research on DBT adapted for substance use has found reduced substance use in randomized trials among people with borderline personality disorder. We deliver DBT inside our PHP, IOP, and outpatient programs.
Where DBT helps most, and where it may not.
A therapy that works for many people does not work for every person in every moment. Here is how we think about the fit.
Your emotions arrive faster than your judgment
If the feeling is at full volume before you have decided anything, DBT is aimed squarely at that gap.
You have talked it through and it did not hold
Insight is not the same as a skill. DBT gives you something to do at 2am, not only something to understand.
Related Care
Treatment for a specific substance or condition.
DBT is one of the therapies we use across these. Each page covers how we treat it, at what level of care, and what to expect.
Questions about DBT.
What is dialectical behavior therapy?
What are the four DBT skills?
What does DBT treat?
How is DBT different from CBT?
Is DBT done one-on-one or in a group?
How long does DBT take?
The skills are the method. The care around them is the point.
DBT works because it sits inside a plan built for your situation, taught by clinicians trained in it across our Colorado offices. Tell us what is going on and we will help you find the right place to start.