Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

The goal in DBT is to assist and empower our patient's to gain control over their emotional responses, thoughts, and behaviors, ultimately helping them lead happier and more fulfilling lives. Our therapists are deeply committed to DBT principles and work with clients to explore their personal histories, identify emotions, and practice mindfulness to better understand their experiences. The aim is to equip individuals with skills to handle their emotions skillfully rather than simply aiming to feel better. All members of The BTC are experts in DBT who attend ongoing training in order to provide the most effective high quality care for our patients. 


DBT is not just about following a strict protocol; it's about providing validation and support while fostering growth and learning. Therapists work to understand the roots of clients' emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to help them validate their experiences and learn to validate themselves. This emphasis on validation sets DBT apart from other therapies.


While DBT is widely recognized as the gold standard for treating Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), suicide and self harm, it has also been proven effective for various other conditions including depression, anxiety, substance abuse, OCD, PTSD, and eating disorders. Our team is experts in these fields and have dedicated themselves to providing the highest standard of therapy. The treatment is evidence based which means it has been rigorously studied to show that there are positive outcomes.  DBT, and Marsha Linehan, has set the standard for science and research within the mental health field.

To review core research and research updates on DBT, please visit: https://behavioraltech.org/resources/faqs/dialectical-behavior-therapy-dbt/

For more information about DBT for adolescents, please check out our blog.

The BTC offers one of the few comprehensive, adherent DBT programs in Northern, NJ.

What you can expect from our comprehensive DBT program:

Our staff has gone through intensive DBT training, and has been trained by Behavioral Tech (Marsha Linehan’s training company) in both foundational and advanced trainings.

A comprehensive program, such as the one we have at BTC, integrates the following:

  1. Individual therapy: Meet with your individual therapist once a week in order to work on decreasing target behaviors and to increase effective behaviors and skills.

  2. Skills group: Meets once per week for 75-90 minutes. Here you will learn new skills in the four modules of DBT: interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and mindfulness. Each skills group consists of a mindfulness practice, homework review, and skills training through lecture and discussion. For more information about group sessions, visit our FAQ section.

  3. Skills coaching: Outside of your individual and group therapy, you are able to call your therapist or skills group leader for consultation and support. The primary goal of skills coaching is to help you generalize newly-learned skills in your everyday life.

  4. Consultation team: Our therapists participate in a weekly consultation team to ensure we are all providing effective and compassionate to the best of our capabilities. Our DBT treatment team helps keep each therapist working within a dialectical framework. The team's role is to "help the therapist think clearly about how to conceptualize the patient, the relationship, and behavioral change in DBT theoretical terms, and how to apply the treatment skillfully." (Linehan, 1993, p. 428).

  5. Ancillary care: We will reach out to your school therapists, psychiatrists and other providers in order to work as a collaborative team.

What are DBT skills?

DBT skills are taught within four modules:

  • Mindfulness - focused on staying in the present moment, increasing our ability to experience wanted emotions and pleasant events, and to practice acceptance, while decreasing suffering, which is often due to ruminating about the past and worrying about the future.

  • Distress Tolerance - skills for how to get through a crisis situation, or an intense emotional experience, without making things worse. In this module, we will focus on learning how to cope with strong emotions without acting on crisis urges. We will also explore radical acceptance and how addressing reality and practicing willingness decreases suffering.

  • Emotion Regulation - includes emotion psychoeducation and training, how to regulate and change unwanted emotions through cognitive and behavioral methods, how to decrease vulnerabilities that make us more susceptible to unwanted emotions, how to identify our personal values and priorities and avoid avoiding, and how to work toward long-term goals to build the lives we want to lead.

  • Interpersonal effectiveness/Middle Path - includes skills to decrease conflict in relationships, maintain healthy relationships and boundaries, effectively ask for what we want or need from others, and maintain our self-respect in relationships. Additionally, we work to understand other perspectives through dialectical thinking, we learn how to validate others to strengthen relationships, and we learn how to validate ourselves to increase self-compassion.

What is family skills group?

DBT Skills groups for adolescents includes parental involvement, and each teen in treatment is expected to attend group with their parent each week. This is a great way for parents to be involved in their child’s treatment and to model learning and personal growth as a normative and healthy behavior. We find that having parents come with their child not only increases their own child's commitment to therapy but also improves their relationship. We also provide and encourage family sessions in addition to individual and group treatment.