It is now 6:00 am on a weekday morning somewhere in America or Europe. A ten-year-old child gets ready for school. In an hour and a half he will sit with twenty-five other youngsters learning math, history, spelling, and many other subjects. Teachers who go from class to class as though school was an assembly line will teach these subjects.
The goal of this system of education is to fashion productive workers.
On the other side of the world, perhaps in a Tibetan hamlet, another ten-year-old child is also getting ready for school. He too will sit with other children but instead of the assembly line style of education so popular among us Westerners, the children will study such subjects as “stilling the mind” or “celebrating the present”.
The goal of this system of education is to produce happy, fulfilled people.
It is no secret that Western culture is going through an incredibly difficult period. Despite the dizzying technological advances that have immeasurably made our lives easier and faster, emotional and spiritual agony abounds. Rates of depression and anxiety rise year after year. Despite the enormous amounts of money spent on prevention and interdiction, more and more of us are becoming dependent on drugs and alcohol to simply keep our heads above the water of this misery.
Some of us however strike out and try and find a better way.
One such person is Marsha Linehan of the University of Washington. In the early eighties Linehan, a behavioral psychologist, began to think outside the box. There were patients who despite receiving excellent care could not get better. In fact the more treatment that they received the more they needed to be hospitalized and the more they attempted suicide.
Eventually Linehan realized that these patients were lacking the basic skills that had otherwise been taken for granted. These skill included the ability to calm themselves, to tolerate distress and frustration, to manage their feelings, and to develop and maintain positive social relationships. What’s more is that they tended to think in ways that made effective problem solving all but impossible.
From these findings, dialectical behavioral therapy or DBT was developed. DBT is a skills-based system of education and psychotherapy. By teaching participants the skills that they are missing, DBT offers them the chance to live “a life worth living”.
The DBT protocol stipulates that success can be achieved through the mastery of four core skills groups:
1. Mindfulness
2. Emotional regulation
3. Interpersonal effectiveness
4. Distress tolerance
These skills are taught in group sessions through the use of reading, homework, and hands-on experimentation. In addition, participants in DBT also attend individual psychotherapy sessions as well as take medication that is prescribed by a psychiatrist.
In the years since completing the exhaustive training in DBT, Dr. Mark has seen the power of its methods. First as a DBT therapist, then as supervisor, and now as a DBT trainer, Dr. Mark has seen DBT restore hope and offer options where none existed before.
And it can work for you.
By the way, people often ask about the term ‘dialectical’ and its relevance to psychotherapy. The explanation however is straightforward. Dialectics refers to the philosophical study of extremes such as anger and peace and good and bad. Most of us have great difficulty with the idea that, in fact, every moment is a mixture of extremes. Instead of responding to situations as containing both good and bad, we respond in exaggerated ways as though the event was either ALL good or ALL bad. This tendency to exaggerate gets us into all sorts of trouble. By studying dialectics we are in a much better position to interact with reality as reality really is.
