Posted by Estella on August 4, 2006, at 0:09:48
In reply to Re: DID therapy and DBT » Estella, posted by kerria on August 3, 2006, at 23:21:10
DBT involves contracting for one year. Your therapist committs to work with you for one year, and you committ to working with your therapist for one year.
There are two components to DBT. Firstly, there is individual therapy (1X per week). Your therapist also tells you about what kind of phone contact etc is okay. The other component is skills training group. It is usually run as a group therapy, yeah. I have heard that it can be an individual thing instead, however. Usually... With a different therapist than your individual therapist, but sometimes the skills trainer is your individual therapist as well. Skills training is weekly as well.
The idea is that skills training is about learning skills in mindfulness (which has to do with distress tolerance and participating effectively and kind of about... fostering a peaceful optimistic and centred view to life). Mindfulness meditation skills are also sometimes taught to people with chronic pain conditions. Then there are skills on distress tolerance. On how to deal with / cope with distressing emotions. Then there is a section on emotion regulation. Those skills are around identifying factors that impact on your emotional state (sleep, menstration etc). Then there are skills on interpersonal effectiveness. That is around teaching you good ways to communicate your needs to others and strategies so that you are better able to get your needs met.
Your individual therapist tries to help you implement the skills in your daily life (which requires practice practice practice).
So it is about improving your functioning primarily. Once you feel more stable (typically one year though sometimes longer) then one is in a better place to be able to do some of the work around trauma and communication with alters and the like. Trouble is that without the skills... If a therapist pushes hard on those aspects then it can be too destabilising. You need to be good at implementing the skills in order to be able to cope with that other work.
> Some parts are less functional than others.
Yeah. I know I vary a lot in how well I can function too. Sometimes I function just fine. Othertimes I don't function so well :-( One notion is that how well you can function can have a whole heap to do with what kind of mood you are in. You can kind of think of parts as different moods. You are more capable when you are in some moods, and less capable when you are in others. Skills that one part has don't generalise so well so that the other parts can access them. That is where DBT tries to get you practicing the skills... Practiciing the skills... So you are more likely to be able to use the skills when you really need them. So that other parts are able to use the skills when they really need them.
I'm sorry you are sick at the moment :-( When I'm sick I feel really very vulnerable and sad and stuff :-(
I think that you could indeed to DBT without working on communication between parts. In fact... Working on communication between parts requires skills on interpersonal communication. And often... You have to learn how to be kind to yourself before you can be kind to your parts. And your parts... They need to learn the same. So DBT could be a terrific thing for all of you and in a way... It doesn't matter which part goes along because the idea is for... All the parts to learn and practice the skills.
The skills are about helping you all feel better. Helping you all feel heard. Helping you all learn better ways of getting your needs met.
Communication... Things changed for me when I started using my interpersonal effectiveness skills with my parts. As parts got better at expressing themselves too. I had parts and I thought they hated me and wanted to kill me. Turns out... They were scared and they were trying to do what they thought was best.
Anyway... I hope you have a better session with your t tomorrow.
poster:Estella
thread:672077
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060721/msgs/673501.html