Skills Training

Enhancing your capabilities to change

Skills training is held once a week and will be the mode of treatment where you will learn your DBT skills.  These skills are taught in five modules:

  1. Core Mindfulness
    • These skills help people participate in the present moment with awareness and without judgment of themselves or others.
  2. Distress Tolerance
    • These skills help increase tolerance for unwanted situations and prevents people from engaging in behaviors that make their crises worse.
  3. Interpersonal Effectiveness
    • These skills help you with being more effective in getting your objectives met with others, improve relationships and maintain your self respect in social situations.
  4. Emotion Regulation 
    • These skills help you decrease emotional vulnerabilities while at the same time increase pleasurable emotions.
  5. Middle Path
    • These skills help with developing more of a balanced way of seeing the world and decrease all-or-nothing thinking and behavior.

Skills training is traditionally done in a group format.  Groups are typically 6-8 people with two facilitators (skills trainers).  The group lasts approximately two hours.  It typically takes 6 months to go through one round of skills training. People go through this cycle twice for a total of one year.  While in skills training group, you can expect to have weekly homework assignments to help with generalizing the skills being taught and review them in group the following week.  Your skills trainers and fellow group members will provide you with feedback to help strengthen and reinforce your skill use.