Learn Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills in Our Online DBT Classes
If you answered yes to any of the above, then you are in the right place.
Learn how to stop:
- Acting Impulsively
- Spiraling Emotionally
Learn how to cope with:
- fear of abandonment and rejection
- jealousy
- No commute
- No missing work or school
- Class is recorded each week so you can learn by your schedule
- Private vs. an in-person group
CONVENIENT ENTIRELY ONLINE DBT SKILLS CLASS
Our DBT-informed psychoeducational classes are a great way to learn, study, practice, and review skills and concepts from a variety of modalities in a supportive, non-judgmental, environment.
Group members from around the globe meet weekly for this 60-minute course that is recorded for your convenience.
When: Mondays from 4:00 – 5:00 pm Pacific*
*If you are unable to attend the live session, you will have access to the recording to review at your leisure during the week.
In between class sessions each week, instructors will provide additional materials, ranging from videos, articles, worksheets, and more to keep you engaged and practicing.
GROUP CHAT
Connect with Peers Around the Globe
Interact with peers around the globe who are studying the skills right alongside you in our virtual classroom. Chat is open for 30-minutes before class start time. Just type into the box and engage. It’s a great place to connect and remember that you are never alone! Participation in chat is optional.
PRIVATE STUDY HALL FORUM
You’ll also be invited to join our private Study Hall forum, exclusively for students, where we have weekly office hours threads for:
- Q&A Thread: Post your questions that come up with the material.
- Homework Thread: Post your assignment each week, discuss your skills use, and participate in opportunities for connection and discussion with your peers from around the world.
- Mid-Week Materials Supplemental study material to enhance your learning and skills practice.
- Weekend Self-Care Thread: Get support around planning for self-care and skills practice over the weekend.
OPTIONAL BONUSES
Enhance your understanding and practice of the skills
From time to time, we offer additional optional opportunities for students and graduates of the program to connect for activities such as DBT & Tea™, a question and answer discussion about DBT skills, Wise Mind Workshop™, which includes activities ranging from journaling to dancing/movement to embody, express, and experience the skills you’ll be learning, and Somatics with Serena™, a class that uses micromovements to help release trauma and stress patterns held in the body. Bonus offerings are subject to change.
YES! I’M READY TO LEARN THE SKILLS AND CHANGE MY LIFE!
Your teachers on this journey
Debbie DeMarco Bennett, B.Sc., MA in progress
Debbie is a well-known author on the topics of borderline traits and dialectical behavior therapy (written under the pen name Debbie Corso), DBT skills teacher, certified life coach, and researcher on the topic of ancestral/intergenerational trauma and healing. She helps emotionally sensitive people embrace and channel their intense emotions and sensitivity, learn effective boundaries and self-care, and release self-sabotaging patterns. Debbie completed Dr. Marsha Linehan’s course for DBT skills instructors through Behavioral Tech/The Linehan Institute.
She is a thriving emotionally sensitive person with extensive personal and professional experience with DBT Skills. She openly shares her personal journey of overcoming and no longer meeting the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder through the use of these skills, somatic practices, and nervous system recalibration techniques discussed in our courses.
Dr. Kathryn C. Holt, LCSW
Kathryn is a psychotherapist who accompanies people on the journey of reclaiming their hunger, desire, and permission to live fully in their bodies and lives. She utilizes a psycho-spiritual approach that integrates our whole person– body, mind, soul, and spirit– as a way of accessing our deepest wisdom and self-trust.
Kathryn studied DBT at Columbia University in New York City and worked with teens, adults, and families using DBT for several years prior to moving to Boulder, CO where she now lives and practices. She offers individual therapy, groups, retreats, and weekly movement classes with the intention of reconnecting people with their power, wisdom, and purpose.
“I’m learning the emotional literacy I wasn’t taught as a child. Knowing what you’re really feeling helps you cope and to move forward. This also helps me to self-validate!” ~ Sophie
THE BASICS
What We Will Cover
MINDFULNESS (Integrated into all modules)
Mindfulness skills are taught and integrated into all of the modules listed below rather than separately. They are an essential foundation of DBT.
INTERPERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Gain insight into your relationship roadblocks and move toward creating and sustaining meaningful, long-term relationships, including friendships, romantic/partnership relationships, family relationships, and connections in the workplace.
You’ll build a toolbox of proven interpersonal skills that have helped many people with BPD, empaths, and emotionally sensitive people with other emotion regulation issues finally have what they want most in life: relationships that matter. You will also learn tools for leaving those relationships that no longer serve you, sometimes referred to as “toxic” relationships.
Mindfulness skills are woven in throughout the curriculum while learning interpersonal effectiveness skills.
This module can help with the following…
Your Boundaries are a Blur and You…
- get very triggered when others violate yours
- aren’t sure how to set healthy ones and get them respected
- get told you’re pushing other people’s boundaries, and it sometimes costs you the relationship.
- are an empath and take on other people’s emotions
You Have an Identity Crisis, Causing You To…
- shapeshift like a chameleon around others and feel inauthentic
- feel exhausted trying to be everything to everyone so they’ll accept you
- desperately long to know and honor who YOU really are
Emotions are Impacting Your Relationships (and life!) and YOU…
- see pretty much everything is a sign that someone’s going to leave or reject you
- get super triggered by disagreements with others
- interpret criticism (at work, school, home) as catastrophic
Geeking out on Science Lights You Up, and You Want to Learn…
- in easy to understand lessons, about things like “Mirror Neurons” and how they affect your emotions.
- how your nervous system affects and is affected by your relationships
- what attachment styles are and how to understand and relate to your partner if his or hers is different
DISTRESS TOLERANCE
Distress Tolerance
Let’s face it — you can be a little bit impulsive. Your emotions come on intensely, and it can be difficult to then sit with the distress of upsets, (such as a conflict with a loved one or an issue at work), so you end up turning to habits that you know don’t serve you in the long run. You’ve experienced the consequences of this time and time again. And you want to change this. Yesterday.
Emotionally Sensitive people often (quite understandably!) turn to impulsive behaviors when the emotional pain feels too hard to bear – because it works (in the short term).
It makes sense that you’d repeat these unhealthy behaviors (like substance use, quitting a job or other commitment, lashing out, and self-harm) because acting on them provides a sense of desperately needed relief in the immediate.
But what you’re noticing is this behavior doesn’t take into account the whole picture. The consequences. The damage to your relationships, career, health, and reputation.
Distress tolerance is about learning to tolerate those really difficult, intensely emotional moments in ways that will honor both your short-term need to feel better and your longer-term goals for building a life worth living.
Learning and practicing DBT skills can help you get there.
Recognize and better understand your impulsive behaviors and have a proven toolbox of strategies and skills that can help reduce them significantly. We’ll go through effective strategies step-by-step.
Mindfulness skills are woven in throughout the curriculum while learning distress tolerance skills.
This module can help with the following…
Your Emotions Get So Overwhelming They’re Unbearable and…
- upsets quickly escalate to feeling like a crisis
- even small amounts of stress feel overwhelming
- you worry each time that the intense episode will last forever
Stressful Situations over which you have no control:
- leave you feeling powerless
- cause you to want to “check out,” or you actually do dissociate
You Often Feel Triggered and…
- find yourself avoiding, numbing, denying, or suppressing the trigger and emotions
- you try to make yourself feel better but often end up feeling worse
EMOTION REGULATION
Emotion Regulation
You’re a passionate person with strong emotions and impulses. You may have even been called an “empath” because your emotions are so intense, especially when you hear about other people or animals hurting or being mistreated or upsetting news stories.
You don’t want to lose this super compassionate part of who you are *and* you see the value in learning to channel your emotional intensity so it doesn’t overpower you. You want to be of service to the world AND feel healthy, in control, and balanced so that you and your relationships and goals don’t suffer.
Learn the essential roles that emotions play in your life and skills for learning to regulate your emotional intensity. You’ll have a proven step-by-step system that can assist you with no longer being at the mercy of your intense emotions.
Mindfulness skills are woven in throughout the curriculum while learning emotion regulation skills.
You’ll start this module after Distress Tolerance.
This module can help with the following…
You Often Act Out on Emotion and…
- it’s challenging sometimes to pinpoint what led to you acting on an impulse, urge, or in response to an intense emotion
- your emotional reactions seem more intense than those of other people
- you sometimes think your emotional intensity is out of proportion to the trigger but don’t know what to do about it
Your self-care is either non-existant or needs some work, because you’re
- not taking care of yourself physically
- you’re not getting enough sleep (or sleeping too much)
- caffeine, nicotine, or other substances are impacting your mood
You find yourself getting emotionally dysregulated
- when you have thoughts about what other people feel or what you think may be their intentions
- when you have critical, judgmental thoughts about yourself, others, or life situation
- when you feel stuck when it comes to problem solving stressful issues that come up
The order of the modules for students starting in May of 2022 is as follows: Interpersonal Effectiveness (IE), Distress Tolerance (DT), and Emotion Regulation (ER),
Rather than offering Mindfulness standalone, we integrate that module each week into IE, DT, and ER.
YES! I’M READY TO LEARN THE SKILLS AND CHANGE MY LIFE!
