DBT Path Module Syllabi
Mindfulness
The ability to take control of your mind instead of having your mind control you.
What is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)?
Learn DBT therapy skills in our entirely online DBT informed psychoeducational classes that focus on the lessons below.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Learn skills used to attend to relationships. Balance priorities versus demands.
Distress Tolerance
Helps you cope and survive during a crisis and tolerate short term or long term pain (physical or emotional).
Emotion Regulation
Learn how to manage your negative and overwhelming emotions while increasing your positive ones.
DBT Class Descriptions & Syllabus for Each Module
MINDFULNESS (Integrated into all modules)
Mindfulness
Mindfulness skills serve as the heart of every DBT module, and lay the groundwork for lasting transformation. In our Mindfulness segment, you’ll discover practical tools to help you anchor yourself in the present moment—even when emotions run high.
You’ll learn to:
- Notice thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations as they arise, without getting swept away by judgment or overwhelm.
- Gently shift your attention back to the here-and-now, instead of spiraling out on worries, regrets, or what-ifs.
- Tune in to “what is,” rather than “what should be,” with practices inspired by mindfulness leaders like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Tara Brach.
Techniques you’ll practice include:
- Observing: Training your attention to simply notice sights, sounds, physical sensations, or internal experiences.
- Describing: Putting words to your inner experience as a way of making sense of what’s happening.
- Participating: Fully engaging with the current moment, whether you’re brushing your teeth or having a difficult conversation.
- “What” and “How” Skills: Learning to observe, describe, and participate in each moment—and to do so non-judgmentally, focusing one-mindfully, and with effectiveness.
Mindfulness isn’t about stopping your thoughts or forcing calm. It’s about learning to respond, not react, building a more compassionate relationship with your mind. These tools become your internal compass, guiding you through moments of uncertainty or distress, and supporting every aspect of your healing journey.
This foundation sets the stage for exploring the next module: Interpersonal Effectiveness.
INTERPERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS
Interpersonal Effectiveness
This module can help with the following…
Your Boundaries are a Blur and You…
- have trouble setting boundaries
- feel triggered and rejected when others set boundaries with you
- 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 abandonment fears come up for you in relationships and you…
- see pretty much everything as a sign that someone’s going to leave or reject you
- dread any kind of disagreement with others because you don’t know how to handle it
You find criticism especially painful and you…
- typically interpret criticism (at work, school, home) as catastrophic
You know your early childhood relationships are affecting you now and…
- You want to learn to uncover the influence of your early childhood relationships with your caregivers on the relationships you have today. You’ll learn how to identify and understand your own attachment style and how to communicate effectively, build trust, and create strong and healthy relationships regardless of your style.
You have an Identity Crisis, causing you…
- 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
Geeking out on Science Lights You Up, and You Want to Learn…
- in easy-to-understand lessons, about things like “Mirror Neurons,” which are specialized brain cells that aid in understanding and relating to others, and how they affect your emotions
- how to unlock the secrets of your nervous system and discover how it shapes your relationships
- …and so much more
Sound like you? You’re in the right place!
Tentative Syllabus for IE (subject to change)
What You’ll Learn in the Interpersonal Effectiveness Course
Over 12 weeks, you’ll gently build a foundation of skills to help you navigate relationships with greater confidence, emotional clarity, and self-respect. Whether you’re working on boundary-setting, communication, or self-worth, each week will offer you tools you can begin using right away — even in the hardest moments.
Week 1: Orientation — Laying the Groundwork
Reconnect with your “why” and shift your focus toward healing relationships — whether that means building trust, asking for space, or no longer losing yourself in the process.
You don’t have to fix everything overnight. You just have to begin.
Week 2: Being Dialectical in Relationships
Black-or-white thinking like “They love me” vs. “They hate me” can hijack emotions and relationships. Learn to hold opposing truths, reduce reactivity, and open the door to deeper understanding.
Helpful for reducing emotional whiplash, resentment, and the exhausting need for constant reassurance.
Week 3: Communication Styles
Understand the difference between passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, and assertive styles — and begin expressing yourself with clarity and confidence.
Perfect if you’ve ever thought, “Why didn’t I just say what I needed to?”
Week 4: Asking for What You Need (DEAR MAN)
Learn a clear and empowering structure for asking for what you need without guilt, panic, or second-guessing yourself.
For people-pleasers, over-apologizers, and anyone afraid to rock the boat even when they’re drowning.
Week 5: Identity and Self-Awareness
Tune into your authentic values, needs, and preferences — not just those shaped by trauma or people-pleasing.
Especially helpful if you’ve felt like a chameleon or said, “I don’t even know who I am.”
Week 6: Self-Compassion Practice (Old Tapes + Cheerleading Statements)
Replace harsh self-talk with compassionate truth. Begin shifting from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What do I need right now?”
Supportive for anyone raised to feel ashamed of their sensitivity or emotional needs.
Week 7: Self-Respect & Assertiveness (FAST)
Speak up for yourself while maintaining dignity and staying true to your values.
Helps reduce post-conflict spirals and strengthens your ability to set clear expectations without guilt.
Week 8: Boundaries That Stick (and Don’t Feel Mean)
Learn to create boundaries that are kind, clear, and sustainable — even with people you care deeply about.
A must if you tend to say yes when you want to say no or feel drained by overextending yourself.
Week 9: Getting Into and Keeping Relationships (GIVE) + Ending Toxic Ones
Develop skills for warm, mindful connection — and tools for walking away from relationships that are no longer healthy.
Supportive for anyone who longs for closeness but feels lost or overwhelmed in unhealthy dynamics.
Week 10: Attachment Theory
Explore anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles, and begin recognizing how they influence your thoughts, reactions, and fears in relationships.
Often brings big “aha” moments about why you cling, shut down, or feel you’re “too much.”
Week 11: Biosocial Theory + Validation (for You & Others)
Learn how emotional sensitivity develops, reduce shame, and build your capacity to validate yourself and others authentically.
A powerful week for those who’ve felt misunderstood or struggled to support loved ones without fixing them.
Week 12: Self-Care Isn’t Selfish
Redefine self-care as a foundational skill for healthy relationships. Learn how to protect your energy, honor your needs, and invest in your well-being without guilt.
Because healthy relationships start with how you treat yourself.
This course can change how you show up in every relationship:
With your partner. With your parents. With friends, coworkers, and classmates.
And most importantly? With yourself.
You’ll build a toolbox of proven DBT-based interpersonal skills that have helped emotionally sensitive people create boundaries, communicate more clearly, and move toward relationships that feel safe, mutual, and real.
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.
💬 Ready to feel more confident, connected, and respected in your relationships?
[Learn more and enroll here].
Mindfulness skills are woven throughout the curriculum while learning interpersonal effectiveness skills.
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
Tentative Syllabus for Distress Tolerance (subject to change)
In this module, you’ll learn how to survive emotional storms without making things worse. If you often feel hijacked by intense emotions or find yourself reaching for self-destructive coping strategies, this module will teach you proven DBT tools for riding out the moment and returning to stability.
These skills aren’t about pretending things are okay. They’re about getting through crisis moments with as much dignity, self-respect, and grounding as possible.
Week 1: Orientation & Wise Mind
Begin learning the cornerstone concept of DBT: how to access your “Wise Mind” — the part of you that holds both emotion and logic in balance.
Ideal if you often feel torn between reacting impulsively and shutting down completely.
Week 2: Radical Acceptance
Learn the powerful (and often misunderstood) skill of radically accepting reality as it is — not as approval, but as a way to reduce suffering and move forward.
Helpful when you feel stuck in the past, replaying what “should” have happened.
Week 3: Skillful Distracting vs. Avoidance (Wise Mind ACCEPTS)
Explore how to distract from overwhelming emotions in a healthy, mindful way — instead of numbing out or pushing emotions down.
Great for moments when you’re spiraling or trying not to reach for unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Week 4: Fostering a Witness Mind (Observe, Describe, Participate)
Practice observing your thoughts and emotions without judgment. Learn to step back and describe what’s happening inside you rather than becoming overwhelmed by it.
Supportive for those who feel swallowed by emotion or react before they even realize what’s happening.
Week 5: Describing (cont’d) & Self-Soothing Your Nervous System
Deepen your observing and describing practice while learning how to physically soothe your nervous system with sensory-based calming strategies.
Helpful for panic, agitation, or emotional overload.
Week 6: IMPROVE the Moment
Build a toolbox of healthy coping tools to make painful moments even 10% more bearable — including imagery, meaning, prayer, and more.
Great for getting through grief, loneliness, or long emotional waves.
Week 7: Pros & Cons, DBT Style
Learn a structured way to weigh the short- and long-term consequences of acting on urges — and how to strengthen your commitment to skillful action.
Empowering if you often feel like your impulses override your values.
Week 8: Urge Surfing (plus Neuroscience Nugget)
Understand the science of how urges rise, peak, and fall — and practice “surfing” them rather than giving in or resisting with tension.
A game-changer for addictive patterns, anger outbursts, or self-sabotaging behavior.
Week 9: Changing Your Mood Through Chemistry (TIP & Half-Smile)
Use temperature, intense exercise, and breath to bring your body out of emotional flooding. Learn the Half-Smile technique to help shift mindset without toxic positivity.
Perfect for moments of meltdown, panic, or dissociation.
Week 10: Coping Thoughts & Strategies
Practice identifying unhelpful thoughts and replace them with compassionate, effective coping statements that help ground and redirect you.
Especially useful if your inner voice is often critical, catastrophic, or hopeless.
Week 11: Alternate Rebellion and Bridge Burning, DBT Style
Alternate Rebellion gives you a way to honor the urge to rebel without wrecking something you care about. Bridge Burning is about ending patterns, not relationships, by choosing a different response in moments of crisis.
Especially useful if you need a way to rebel that doesn’t wreck anything, and fewer straight paths from urge to action.
Week 12: STOP Skill + Module Recap
Pull together all your tools with STOP — a grounding skill that helps you pause, check in with your Wise Mind, and respond intentionally. We’ll celebrate progress and reflect on your growth.
The ultimate skill for getting through the moment without making it worse.
Throughout this module, you’ll build a life-saving toolkit that helps you face emotional intensity with steadiness, clarity, and resilience.
💭 Ready to stop reacting and start responding? Learn how to ground yourself in crisis moments, skillfully.
[Learn more and enroll here]
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 throughout the curriculum while learning emotion regulation skills.
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-existent 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
Tentative Syllabus for Emotion Regulation (subject to change)
This module is designed to help you better understand your emotional world and develop the skills to respond to feelings with awareness, clarity, and intention. If you often feel overwhelmed, reactive, or unsure how to manage big emotions, this course will support you in becoming more skillful, self-aware, and resilient.
You’ll learn to change your relationship with emotions — not by suppressing them, but by understanding them and building the capacity to respond, not react.
Week 1: Emotion Regulation Orientation
Get a clear overview of the course and how emotion regulation connects to the broader DBT skillset. Begin exploring what it means to build a life worth living while feeling things deeply.
Helpful if you’re unsure what “emotion regulation” really looks like in practice.
Week 2: Why Mindfulness & Feelings Model
Learn how mindfulness helps you observe emotions without becoming consumed by them, and explore the Feelings Model to see how thoughts, sensations, and interpretations interact.
Especially supportive if your emotions often feel confusing or overwhelming.
Week 3: Checking the Facts, Identifying Triggers, & Noticing Emotions
Practice separating emotion from interpretation, learn to identify emotional triggers, and become more skilled at noticing emotional cues before they take over.
Great for reducing spirals and pausing before reacting.
Week 4: Being Effective, Common Challenges, & EmoReg Worksheet 4A
Learn what it means to be effective (not just “right”) and navigate common obstacles to regulating your emotions with compassion and self-awareness.
Useful if you find yourself repeating patterns you wish you could change.
Week 5: Doing Mind vs. Being Mind & PLEASE Skills
Explore the difference between “doing” and “being” modes, and learn to take care of your body and brain with the PLEASE skills (treating Physical illness, balanced Eating, avoiding mood-Altering substances, balanced Sleep, and regular Exercise).
Foundational for reducing vulnerability to emotional dysregulation.
Week 6: Non-Judgmental Stance for Reducing Emotional Intensity
Learn how harsh self-judgment keeps emotional pain stuck and begin practicing a more neutral, compassionate inner voice.
A key skill if your inner critic runs the show.
Week 7: ABC Skills
Build skills for increasing positive emotions by Accumulating positive experiences, Building mastery, and Coping ahead for difficult situations.
Great for building emotional resilience instead of just bracing for the next wave.
Week 8: Problem Solving, DBT Style
Learn how to solve real-life problems that feed emotional distress, step-by-step, with DBT’s structured approach.
Helps break the cycle of ruminating without taking action.
Week 9: Limbic System, Anxiety Self-Care, & Holistic Model
Understand the brain’s role in emotional reactivity, and explore tools that care for the nervous system from a whole-person perspective.
Validating and empowering for anyone who feels “hijacked” by anxiety or big emotions.
Week 10: Opposite to Emotion Action
Learn the core DBT strategy for changing painful emotions by gently acting opposite to what the emotion urges you to do.
Transformational when you’re stuck in fear, shame, or anger.
Week 11: More Opposite Action & Behavior Chain Analysis
Deepen your practice of Opposite Action and explore how to track behavior patterns and emotional build-up with DBT’s Behavior Chain tool.
Increases self-awareness and shows you where you can interrupt harmful cycles.
Week 12: THINK & Module Recap Questions
Practice the THINK skill (considering if something is True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, and Kind) and reflect on your growth throughout the module.
A beautiful wrap-up to support long-term change and emotional strength.
By the end of this course, you’ll have a clearer understanding of your emotional patterns and a practical, proven toolkit for responding to emotions in ways that align with your values and needs.
💭 Ready to respond with intention instead of reacting from overwhelm? Learn how to work with your emotions instead of against them.
[Learn more and enroll here]
The order of the modules for students starting in June 2026 is as follows: Distress Tolerance (DT) for 12 weeks, Emotion Regulation (EmoReg) for 12 weeks, and Interpersonal Effectiveness (IE) for 12 weeks. Additionally, rather than offering Mindfulness standalone, we integrate that module each week into all of the other modules. You will go through the DBT therapy skills developed by DBT’s creator, Dr. Marsha Linehan.
Our online DBT skills class is focused on Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills and provides a set of emotional coping skills that can help emotionally sensitive people, including those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) or traits, PTSD, anxiety, and more, manage intense emotional responses.
DBT therapy is a fusion of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) (focusing on cognition, or thoughts), and Zen Buddhism (focusing on becoming a mindful observer of one’s experiences.)
DBT helps with moving toward a balance of acceptance and change and helps guide you in finding the middle ground when experiencing black or white (all-or-nothing) thinking.
Yes! I’m ready to learn the skills and change my life.
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