DBT Skills Groups for your Team, School, or Organization.

If people in your school, workplace, or team struggle to build the life (or career, or relationships, etc.) they want, a DBT skills group may be able to help. Justin Goddard, MA, RP and Cynthia Kipp, RSSW, MEd are pleased to offer DBT Skills Groups to your organization for just this reason.

A DBT skills group is a component of dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) that focuses on learning and practicing skills to help participants stay effective in building the lives they want. Each week, group members get opportunities to learn and practice a new skill (or skills) to help do any of the following:

• Increase awareness of the present moment

• Judge self and others less

• Increase acceptance of reality just as it is

• Get through crisis situations without making things worse

• Decrease the intensity of strong negative (i.e., unpleasant) emotions

• Improve resilience and the frequency of positive (i.e., pleasant) emotions

• Ask for wants and needs more effectively

• Hold boundaries with greater ease

• Move away from an aggressive, passive-aggressive, or passive communication style to a more assertive one

Ultimately, skills group is a place to gain more freedom and choice in terms of how participants experience and respond to the world around them and the people in it.

Three virtual DBT Skills modules are available, described below.

Mindfulness + Distress Tolerance (8 weeks)

Many of us—particularly those with more sensitive nervous systems—sometimes respond to our emotional pain in ways that create further problems down the road. We may lash out at the people we most care about. We may go on an impulsive spending spree. We may text an ex partner who we know deep down is bad for us. In short, we end up hurting ourselves in the long run. In this module we increase our awareness of our impulses and urges, while practicing skills to tolerate our sometimes overwhelming emotions and urges in ways that don’t make things worse.

Mindfulness + Emotion Regulation (9 weeks)

Even if we can manage to decrease our reactivity to life’s painful moments, we’re sometimes left with intense emotions roiling inside. Big shame, big sadness, big anger, and big fear can all impede our enjoyment of life. In this module, we learn why we experience emotions in the first place, and learn skills to increase our awareness and acceptance of our emotions, build resilience against painful ones, and learn skills to reduce our emotional ups and downs.

Mindfulness + Interpersonal Effectiveness (8 weeks)

Many of us find ourselves often being misunderstood by others, or struggling with knowing and maintaining our boundaries with others. This module can help. In this module we’ll build awareness of our objectives when we call, text, or meet with someone, and learn skills to pursue those objectives in ways that build and maintain both our relationships with others and our sense of self-respect. Taking this module will also give us multiple opportunities to practice moving from an indirect or hostile communication style to a more assertive one.

What Does a DBT Skills Group Look Like?

Check out the clips below to experience different facets of what it’s like to be in a DBT Skills Group with Justin and Cynthia.