What are DBT skills?

Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) skills are a very effective way of helping people to manage difficult or overwhelming emotions. DBT was developed in the 1980s by Marsha Linehan and covers four areas:

• Distress tolerance – learning to cope better with painful events
• Emotional regulation – learning to manage difficult feelings, so that you can respond how you choose and avoid destructive behaviours
• Interpersonal effectiveness – tools to enable you to become more yourself, while building more fulfilling and respectful relationships
• Mindfulness – staying present and grounded, which helps you focus less on pain from the past or fears of the future

DBT skills are very helpful in making life more manageable if you have relationship issues or complex trauma. And useful in the context of many other mental health issues too. If they look like they apply to you, they probably will!

Work on your own or with a therapist

The ‘T’ in DBT is for ‘therapy’. DBT is intended for collaboration between you and you therapist. But you really can do a lot of the work yourself. This leaves more time in therapy to focus on the bits you find harder, or on other matters.

A great place to start, is the The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook. Just to be clear, I am not in any way sponsored by the publisher and have had no contact with them. I just happen to think this is one of the best books on the subject!

You can use this book fairly easily even without a therapist. You will need to devote regular time to it. But, hey, this is the rest of your life we’re talking about!

TIP: This book works through experiencing.
Start small.
Choose just one exercise from anywhere in the book that looks easy and relevant.

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook

Officially, this book has the longest title ever:

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Distress Tolerance. Second Edition, Revised. It’s by Matthew McKay, Jeffrey C. Wood and Jeffrey Brantley and published by: New Harbinger Publications (2019).

It is useful to check out the publisher’s link to the book. This link is priced in US dollars. Of course, please shop around and maybe find a supplier in your own country if (like me) you aren’t in the USA. But the reason I am including this link is that the page includes all of the worksheets in the book as free downloads.

Blank worksheets (free)

If you go to the publisher’s link, it has a button called “Download Free Tools” which you can use if you’re happy to set up a free account. (The publisher may send you marketing offers afterwards, but this is professional and not to spammy in my experience.) From there, it is easy to download for free all the exercises you find in the book.

The advantage is that you can re-print your chosen exercises and scribble all over them, as many times as you like. And keeping old exercises is a great way to see what is changing for you over time. You can see where are making progress. And also what you are finding harder to change – which might be something to take to therapy.

You could of course download the exercises without buying the book. But you will be somewhat disadvantaged because the book explains what you are trying to achieve and how to use the exercises.

DBT skills are here to stay

Therapies change and develop over the years. Maybe DBT will too. But DBT skills are central to good mental health and are here to stay. Here is a chance to make your life feel easier!