Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: A Key Part of My Practice

Navigating Life with Balance and Mastery

Overview of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a robust psychotherapy modality designed to instill essential skills like mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. Initially developed to address borderline personality disorder, DBT has proven effective for a variety of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, and self-harm tendencies.

What Is DBT?

DBT is a cognitive-behavioral approach that incorporates the dialectical philosophy of balance and integration. It focuses on harmonizing acceptance with change, enhancing the capacity to be present, tolerate distress, manage emotions, and build positive interpersonal connections.

How DBT Works in My Practice

  1. Skills Training for Comprehensive Development:
    • Mindfulness: Developing awareness and acceptance of the present moment.
    • Distress Tolerance: Building resilience to handle emotional pain.
    • Emotion Regulation: Acquiring tools to manage and modify emotional experiences.
    • Interpersonal Effectiveness: Enhancing assertiveness, communication, and conflict resolution skills.
  2. Individual Therapy Tailored to You:
    • Focused sessions address your unique challenges and objectives, integrating DBT skills into everyday life.
  3. One Consistent Therapist, Start to Finish:
    • You work directly with me through the whole process — no rotating providers, no handoffs. The person teaching you the skills is the same person who knows your history.

Integrating DBT with The Six Pillars of Making a Life That Works

My approach to DBT is enriched with my Six Pillars framework, ensuring the therapy contributes to both short-term well-being and long-term personal growth. This integration includes:

  • Contacting the Present Moment (Be Here Now): Cultivating a strong connection to the present.
  • Defusion (Watch Your Thinking): Learning to detach from unhelpful thoughts and beliefs.
  • Acceptance (Open Up): Embracing all emotions for holistic healing.
  • Self-as-Context (Balancing Self-Identity): Recognizing the enduring Self beyond immediate experiences.
  • Values (Know What Matters): Aligning therapy with your core values for informed life choices.
  • Committed Action (Do What It Takes): Encouraging actions that resonate with your values and contribute to meaningful change.

Begin Your Journey with DBT

Each session is designed to provide immediate support while fostering lasting personal change. If you’re ready to build a more balanced relationship with your emotions and the people in your life, reach out today to get started.

What people often get wrong about DBT

Starting with the idea that it’s only for one diagnosis.

A smiling Colt Gordon with curly hair and a beard is wearing a white shirt, standing in front of a colorful landscape background and a bookshelf.

The Misconception

Acceptance and change contradict each other — pick one.

The Reality

That tension is the dialectic DBT is named for: you can fully accept yourself as you are *and* be fully committed to change, in the same breath. It sounds like a contradiction; it's actually the engine. Acceptance without change is resignation; change without acceptance is self-war. Both together is the method.

The Misconception

DBT is only for borderline personality disorder.

The Reality

DBT was born treating BPD, but its skills — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness — turn out to be the missing curriculum for anyone whose emotions run hot, whose relationships run stormy, or whose family never taught the basics. The toolkit outgrew its origin story decades ago.

The Misconception

DBT is rigid — all rules and acronyms.

The Reality

The acronyms are just handles for skills, and the structure is scaffolding, not cage. In my practice DBT flexes around your actual life: we pull the skill the situation calls for, practice it against your real relationships, and skip the parts you don't need. The method serves the person, never the reverse.

The Misconception

Distress tolerance just means toughing it out.

The Reality

Toughing it out is what you've been doing — clenching until the wave passes or you break. Distress tolerance is skilled: specific techniques for surviving a crisis without making it worse, riding the surge instead of white-knuckling it. Endurance wears you down; skills carry you through.

The Misconception

Interpersonal effectiveness means learning to win arguments.

The Reality

It's learning to ask for what you need, say no without collapsing or exploding, and keep both the relationship and your self-respect in the process. Winning arguments is what the old pattern chased. This is about ending the pattern where someone has to lose.

The Misconception

Real DBT requires joining a group program.

The Reality

Full-fidelity DBT programs include groups, and for some situations — active self-harm, severe crisis cycles — that structure is the right call, and I'll say so. What I offer is DBT-informed individual therapy: the same skills curriculum, taught one-on-one, woven with ACT. For most people building emotional skills, that's the right dose.

The Misconception

Regulating emotions means suppressing them.

The Reality

Suppression is holding the beach ball underwater — exhausting, and it launches eventually. Regulation is understanding what the emotion is doing, reducing your vulnerability to the spikes, and choosing your response to it. The emotion still happens. It just stops happening *to* you.

The Misconception

The mindfulness in DBT means long meditation sessions.

The Reality

DBT mindfulness is practical, not monastic — noticing what's happening in you and around you, right now, without judgment, often in bursts of seconds. It's the skill that buys you the gap between trigger and response. No cushion, no incense, no hour of silence required.

The Misconception

These skills are just common sense I should already have.

The Reality

They're common sense the way reading is — obvious once taught, invisible if nobody taught you. Most emotional skill is learned young, from families who either had it or didn't. If yours didn't, nothing is wrong with you; you were handed an incomplete manual. DBT is the missing chapters.

The Misconception

Using coping skills is just faking calm.

The Reality

Skills aren't performance; they're steering. Choosing a skill mid-surge is the opposite of fake — it's the most honest moment in the sequence: "this is big, and I'm handling it." Reacting on autopilot isn't authenticity. It's just the old programming running unopposed.

    Honest answers about DBT

    Including one most providers won’t volunteer: what I offer is DBT-informed individual therapy, not a full program, and I’ll tell you if you need the full version. Everything else, ask in a free 15-minute consultation.

    Let's Talk

    Set up a 15-minute free consultation.
    The hardest part is reaching out — so we keep it small. Fifteen minutes, no paperwork, no pressure. If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so and point you to someone who is. Either way, you leave with a next step.
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