Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT): DBT Emotion Regulation

Dialectical behavior therapy equips clients with mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness skills to manage painful emotions, improve relationships, and DBT originated to treat borderline personality disorder.

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.

Use mindful 'I' statements and present-focused skills to do what's effective, staying mindful, avoiding judgments, and choosing actions that reach your goal even when emotions run high.

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.

Master objective effectiveness by reinforcing requests with clear consequences, highlighting positive outcomes for all, while staying mindful, confident, and genuine to negotiate win-win solutions.

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.

Develop questioning skills to uncover clients' thoughts, needs, and problems, using seven open-question words to guide thinking, gain commitment, and promote action while avoiding defensive why questions.

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.

Explore the table of irrational beliefs to examine and reframe toxic thinking, dispute irrational ideas rationally, and foster emotion regulation, self-respect, and personal growth.

Explore secondary irrational beliefs in DBT emotion regulation, including awfulizing, pain catastrophizing, frustration tolerance, and depreciation, and their links to anger, procrastination, anxiety, and depression.

Identify automatic thoughts and seven patterns of problematic thinking—jumping to conclusions, exaggerating or minimizing, disregarding important aspects, oversimplifying, overgeneralizing, mind reading, and emotional reasoning—that fuel toxic, self-defeating behavior.

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 the psychological aspect of stress, highlighting how imagined threats trigger the same stress response as real danger, and the health impact of chronic stress.

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.

Learn how internal locus of control shapes responsibility, autonomy, health, and success by believing in personal control and influencing outcomes, and assess yourself through reflective questions.

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.

Replace negative thoughts by labeling them and letting them go, then ground in the present with mindful attention. Use 4-7-8 breathing to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression over 30 days.

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.

Discover how to regulate your state of mind in DBT by shifting thoughts and physiology to access resourceful states, using vivid recall and breathing or posture changes.

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.

Discover nine steps to observe emotions without judgment, including breath focus, naming feelings, noticing sensations, watching emotions as waves, releasing judgments, and finishing with mindful breathing.

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.

Master the six-step method to recognize emotions, slow the emotional surge, and examine past events to identify triggers, primary and secondary feelings, urges, and long-term consequences for healthier decisions.

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.

Explore how self-talk supports emotion regulation in DBT, highlighting negative self-talk, coping self-talk, and how to capture positive internal dialogue to reduce stress and 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.

Practice slow, deep breathing during flashbacks, remind yourself you are safe, comfort yourself, and use grounding techniques like counting objects or colors while keeping a diary to spot triggers.

Explore how emotions and behaviors are tightly linked in dbt emotion regulation, showing how overwhelming feelings trigger self-destructive actions and how rewards reinforce these patterns, illustrated by Carrie’s story.

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.

Engage in regular exercise to keep your body healthy and heart strong, aiming for 30 minutes of moderate activity five days a week, including walking, swimming, biking, or weight training.

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.