Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT): DBT Emotion Regulation

Empower people to manage intense emotions, mood swings, anxiety, and impulsive behaviors with DBT skills. Designed for borderline personality disorder, DBT supports recovery from eating disorders, depression, and addiction.

Develop skills with a growth mindset by identifying needed knowledge, steps, and behavioral changes. Assess effort, readiness, emotional patterns, and existing competencies to establish habits that support your goals.

Develop wise mind by balancing emotional mind and rational mind to make healthy decisions through mindfulness.

Develop emotion regulation skills through relaxation strategies that ease stress, anxiety and depression with calm breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and supportive practices like music, mindfulness, yoga, and massage.

Identify cognitive distortions and learn cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to challenge automatic thoughts and irrational beliefs that distort reality, harm mental health, and contribute to addiction.

Explore exposure therapy techniques in DBT to help clients confront feared situations, collect data that challenges erroneous beliefs, and progressively test beliefs from easy to hardest.

Discover how obstacles arise from psychology and mindset and learn steps to overcome them, including defining the goal, setting deadlines, expanding options, and seeking help to stay on track.

Describe the current situation and what you want, stay factual. Express your feelings and opinions, then assert yourself by asking for what you want and saying no.

Motivational interviewing guides clients through engaging, evoking, and planning to change, using open-ended questions, affirmations, reflective listening, and summarizing to elicit change talk, autonomy, and commitment.

Discover that intrusive thoughts may occur frequently and distress you, yet are only thoughts, not red flags; gain power by not identifying with them and viewing them as guesses.

Ground yourself in the present moment, return to your task, acknowledge intrusive thoughts, observe without engagement, and use mindfulness techniques and 4-7-8 exercise to let them pass.

Learn to manage overwhelming emotions like anger and sadness by pausing at signs of loss of control, practicing deep breathing, and monitoring body cues to reduce intensity over time.

Stop repetitive negative thinking and rumination as soon as it starts by taking deep breaths, grounding yourself, and reminding yourself you are here; redirect into a creative or physical activity.

Use a 10-question negative automatic thoughts questionnaire to evaluate extremity, gather evidence, and shift toward balanced thinking for healthier feelings and behaviors, culminating in a new healthy thought.

Use Socratic questioning to challenge irrational thoughts through a worksheet that records thoughts, supporting and contradicting evidence, interpretations, and likelihood, and guides you to gray areas and worst-case judgments.

Cultivate a positive self-image by embracing self-respect, shedding negative self-talk, replacing self-criticism with encouragement, bending toward forgiveness, empathy, and avoiding constant comparison to others.

Evaluate automatic thoughts through situational analysis, belief strength, and emotional intensity, then decide when to focus or defer. Use guided questioning to avoid invalidating clients and foster adaptive responses.

Identify how limiting beliefs keep you in your comfort zone. Uncover root causes—from personal beliefs and fear to social pressures and family influences—and replace them with constructive messages.

Identify and challenge your limiting beliefs, distinguish belief from fact, explore consequences, adopt a new constructive belief, and visualize results to boost progress toward your goals.

Identify and transform childhood limiting beliefs into empowering ones through awareness and questioning, especially around money, fear, and life challenges, to support emotion regulation in dbt.

Identify and challenge irrational beliefs—the negative or overly optimistic messages about life events such as loss or change—to shift emotions from unhealthy to healthy and support goals.

Develop emotional awareness by identifying how you feel and the bodily sensations you notice, trace where the emotion begins, and note signs in yourself and others to manage triggers.

Explore how in vivo exposure disconfirms appraisals and extinguishes conditioned emotional responses by gradually confronting external situations and bodily sensations, including interoceptive exposure, while removing safety signals and behaviors.

Explore how anxiety hijacks perception, overestimates threats, and underestimates coping, then apply mindfulness to distance from the monkey mind and treat anxiety as a false alarm and continue toward goals.

Identify panic disorder as sudden, out-of-the-blue panic attacks with multiple symptoms, followed by anticipatory anxiety; apply relaxation training, abdominal breathing, and progressive muscle relaxation to reduce symptoms.

Learn radical acceptance as a distress tolerance skill that prevents pain from turning into suffering by acknowledging reality, focusing on what you can control, and following 10 practical steps.

Examine locus of control, the belief in whether actions influence outcomes, distinguish internal from external control, and how this belief shapes motivation and responses to life events.

Identify how external locus of control leads to blaming others, feeling powerless, and relying on luck, harming relationships and business prospects; internal locus relates to work performance and career satisfaction.

This lecture explains how cultivating an internal locus of control helps clients take responsibility, work harder, reduce anxiety and depression, and move from external blame toward healthier, goal-oriented behavior.

Identify primary emotions in distress to prevent secondary emotions from taking over, then apply emotion regulation skills to cope with these feelings in a healthier way.

Practice mindful awareness of emotions through slow breathing, observing bodily sensations, and transforming judgments into calming visuals, then ride emotions like waves and finish with a three-minute mindful breathing cycle.

Explore the nine emotion regulation skills in DBT, including recognizing emotions, reducing physical and cognitive vulnerability, being mindful of emotions without judgment, exposure, opposite action, and problem solving.

Label your emotions aloud to recognize them and deflate distress, using 'I feel' statements for emotions, and notice pleasant feelings to build inner optimism and reduce anxiety.

Reframe negative experiences to reduce stress and improve mental health by identifying emotions, revisiting memories, and extracting lessons and positive outcomes for future growth.

Learn how a behavior analysis worksheet links problematic emotions to precipitating events, thoughts, and secondary events, then use A B C problem solving—alternatives, best ideas, and commitment—to plan changes.

Learn how emotions trigger food choices and how to regulate eating to cope with mood, avoid overindulgence, and reduce risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Explore how emotions shape thoughts and behaviors, creating a cycle of distress and self-criticism, and learn healthy coping thoughts and behaviors to overcome barriers and foster balanced emotions.

Confront your fear of public performance with the ten-step exposure ladder, progressing from imagining and mirroring to solo and group speaking, feedback, and growing your audience.