Week 6 - DBT Flashcards
What are the key concepts of DBT?
-Borderline personality disorder
-Biosocial theory
-Emotional dysregulation and Emotional regulation
-Dialectical philosophy
-Behaviorism
-Zen Buddhism and Mindfulness
What are the seven basic assumptions of DBT?
- People are doing the best they can
- People want to improve
- Although people are doing the best they can, if they are suffering, they need to try harder and be even more motivated to change
- People may not have caused all of their own problems, but they have to solve them anyway
- New behavior has to be learned in all relevant contexts
- All behaviors (actions, thoughts, emotions) are caused
- Figuring out and changing the causes of behavior is a more effective way to change than judging and blaming.
What is DBT’s understanding of the person largely based on?
The biosocial model of personality formation, credited mostly to Theodore Millon.
What does the biosocial model of personality formation suggest?
Children are born with specific constitutional factors related to their physical ability, intellect, drive, energy and temperament.
A child’s emotional world can be impcated by how these factors are sharped through childhood experiences.
Childhood experiences that create a negative or invalidating environment can impact constitutional factors in a manner that lends the child and developing adult toward emotional volatility and dysregulation and associated behaviors, and it puts them at risk of developing BPD ore related mental disorders.
DBT is considered a type of BLANK therapy.
Third wave of cognitive-behavioral therapy.
DBT and other third wave approaches view personality formation as what?
A complex interaction between behavior, biology, and context (environment), and focus on a wide range of techniques to assist clients in accepting and changing their ways of being in the world.
True or False: DBT does not solely focus on changing specific behaviors as did first-wave cognitive-behavioral therapy.
True.
What do DBT and related third-wave approaches tend to emphasize?
Mindfulness, emotions, acceptance, relationships, values, goals, and meta-cognition along with a number of traditional behavioral techniques and modified cognitive techniques when working with clients.
How is DBT different than traditional cognitive therapy (second-wave CBT)?
DBT focuses on adopting an increasingly flexible and relativistic view of the world, so the person is not embedded in rigid ways of thinking, which tend to exasperate problems.
Recognizing that change is slow and difficult but possible for most clients, DBT suggests the importance of what?
Radically accepting clients and encouraging them to accept themselves.
Borrows skills from person-centered therapy such as building a strong therapeutic alliance through listening.
Also, other techniques borrowed from existential therapy and gestalt therapy are used to encourage clients to examine what is important in their lives and help them see the polarities in themselves.
What are the symptoms of BPD?
-Frantic efforts to avoid imagined abandonment
-Instability in interpersonal relationships
-Identity disturbance
-Impulsivity
-Suicidal behaviors
-Emotional instability
-Chronic feelings of emptiness
-Inappropriate or intense anger
-Stress-related paranoid ideation or dissociation
Linehan suggested that a BLANK environment from important caregivers can result in heightened emotional responses in some children, difficulty in regulating one’s emotional responses, and a slow rate of returning to normality—symptoms typical of individuals with BPD or related disorders.
Invalidating
Individuals with BPD and related disorders struggle with BLANK, which is the difficulty or inability to moderate one’s emotional experiences
Emotional dysregulation
What is another term for cognitive distortions?
Stuck thoughts.
Individuals who have difficulty regulating their emotions do what?
-Are run by their emotions
-Have difficulty processing information and cues from others
-Demonstrate impulsive behaviors
-Have difficulty processing information and cues form others
-Have difficulty making decisions
-Have behaviors that are dictated by cognitive distortions (all or nothing thinking, overgeneralizing, etc.)
True or False: DBT was originally used solely for people with BPD, but was expanded and used with a wider class of individuals seeking counseling.
True
What does dialectical philosophy suggest?
That reality is interrelated and connected, made of opposing force, and always changing.
Reality is grounded in polarities that are always in tension, within the client, within the counselor, and between the client and counselor.
In contrast with other forms of cognitive-behavioral treatments that focus on changing symptoms, Linehan suggested what?
A dialectical framework should be the foundational philosophy that grounds the change process.
What is the overarching dialectic of DBT?
Acceptance vs change.
Example: clients who experience themselves as failures need to envision their successes.
Helping clients accept their current state of being, while also helping them recognize the possibilities of change, is the hallmark of the work of DBT.
What are three common dialectical dilemmas of people with BPD due to emotional dysregulation?
-Active passivity vs. apparent competence
-Emotional vulnerability vs. self-invalidation
-Unrelenting crisis vs. inhibited grieving
The first 3 are biologically based, in which the person is underregulated or emotionally out of control and the second three (after the vs.) are socially based, in which the person is overregulated or attempts to control one’s emotions.
Neither are good.
What is active passivity?
When a person allows and even encourages others to determine their fate rather than taking an action oneself.
What is apparent competence?
The feigning of ability to the point that other people do not know, and cannot read, stressful situations a person may be going through.
What is inhibited grieving?
A state in which they avoid or negate their emotions.
