Learn Dialectical Behaviour Therapy skills to increase your own skill set & to teach your clients ways to cope with emotional crisis without making things worse, engage effectively in interpersonal relationships & understand the balance between accepting and changing emotions.  

This course is for you if:


  • You are a helping professional who wants to learn DBT skills to use them in your own life. 
  • You want more discrete and concrete skills that you can teach clients so they have more resources in between sessions.
  • You are curious about how cognitive, behavioural and manualized approaches can be taught in compassionate and non-pathologizing ways. 
  • You're interested in supporting neurodivergent and neuroqueer clients with practical skills.
  • You want to be in a space that affirms non-normative identities and doesn't see queerness / sex work / kink / non-monogamy as inherently distressing or problematic. But that acknowledges that living with marginalized, criminalised and othered identities contributes to distress and poor mental health outcomes. 
  • You want to know more about the balance between affirming the impact of oppression and supporting people to develop the skills to have a life that they experience as worth living within their social world. 

We will meet once a month to talk through a new topic. The monthly lesson will include a workbook to take you through the skill, and sometimes a video, MP3s or other resources to help you learn. We will have a live class for 90 minutes each month, and you can ask questions or leave reflections in the slack community. 
Therapists and other helping professionals have already benefited from this course: 
“I really enjoyed taking this course professionally and personally - Sophia creates a fantastic and thoughtful space with plenty of space for reflection and learning.  I strongly recommend the courses to therapists wishing to integrate DBT into their work and anyone who is curious about learning DBT skills in an approachable, flexible, and neuroqueer affirming way.”
Vicky

This is what we will be covering!



May - Welcome! (repeated 10th June)

We will talk about the ground-rules, introduction to bio/psycho/social theory and the role of validation in DBT skills & how DBT skills can help clients have more resources to engage in deeper work.

June – Mindful moments

This month we will get into the way DBT understands mindfulness - and it really is at the foundation of all the other skills. We will not be talking meditation, but about very short mindful breaks and how to do tiny everyday mindful practices.  We will talk about the myriad ways to bring mindfulness into daily life, like washing your hands/face, showering, locking doors or turning off the cooker.  

July – Wise Mind and the Middle Path

Once upon a time Wise Mind was my least favourite of the DBT skills. It had me rolling my eyes a little and just finding it hard to connect with. Now I've been working with it for 5 years I feel really differently. It is one of the most useful skills for me and it helps me to feel more self trust and self respect. That is because it helps to balance logic and emotion, and to move way from good/bad and right/wrong judgements towards doing what's effective. The Middle Path builds on the concept of Wise Mind to help us to apply it across our lives. 

August – Understanding our emotions

There is great research which tells us that giving people language and concepts that explain how emotions work is very effective in helping people to name their internal experience and regulate their emotions. Some people come to us with this language already, and others don't. This class will talk through the DBT model for emotions, and provide some emotion definitions and ways of talking through emotions with clients. We will talk about exercises for helping people explore how they feel emotions. 

September – Check the facts

This session is all about moving from awareness of emotion towards changing emotion. Many of you will have encountered the CBT thought diary, this is a different way of doing a similar thing. I think it is a more compassionate approach that recognises that we are all expert in our own life and experience and that our emotions are valid. It is at the core of DBT's emotion regulation skills, and a precursor to other skills to change or accept emotions. I often spend a lot of times working with clients with this skill because it can be transformative. 

October – Opposite action and problem solving

This session is all about how to effectively change and move through emotions. Opposite action is about finding ways to act in opposition to your emotion while feeling it (rather than trying to suppress it). We talk about body language, ways of speaking and behaving in relation to a range of different emotions. Problem solving is just what it sounds like, a way of finding practical solutions for the problems at hand – once you’ve worked out what problem it is that you have to solve. It teaches a process for coming to solutions and creating actionable steps to put them into practice.

November – Surviving a crisis without making things worse

Crisis survival skills are all about getting through moments of emotional crisis without making things worse. DBT has a bunch of skills for doing this, and we are going to fly through them. These are simple techniques that you can teach clients to manage intense emotions. They won't change the situation, they won't help to process any emotion, but they will help folks to get to the point where they can do those things. Think of these skills as first aid, they are the ones we use to stop the bleeding or to help people manage moments of emotional overwhelm. 

December – Building mastery and Pleasant events

Creating more resilience and meaning in life is an important part of DBT. This session is all about identifying values and finding ways of incorporating them into life in big and small ways. Pleasant events are an important part of creating a life worth living, and maintaining mental health. We will also touch on the importance of learning, and reflecting on learning. When we build mastery by learning something new and recognising our progress it also builds our self esteem and often our sense of meaning in life. 


January - Radical acceptance and turning the mind

This is all about working out the things in life that need accepting in order to build a life worth living. It is finding ways to accept uncomfortable and even hellish realities as they are. This isn't about approval, just acknowledging what is. These skills are usually taught after some crisis survival skills, to help people who are fighting against the reality of their current situation. Often accepting the reality is needed before folks are able to move towards change. 


February– Cope Ahead, an alternative to rumination

Rumination is very correlated with poor mental health outcomes, so this month we are working on alternatives to ruminating. We will spend a lot of time on the cope ahead skill, and also revisit some of the crisis survival skills we talked about last year.

March – Interpersonal myths & priorities

This session is all about what gets in the way of interpersonal effectiveness, including some common myths that people experience as 'truth'. We will also work through my favourite interpersonal effectiveness skill, which is all about working out what you want from an interpersonal interaction. This helps folks to focus on what matters to them, and is a step towards acting skillfully to achieve that. 

April – Asking for what you want

This session is about skills to move towards interpersonal priorities. We will reflect on making requests and having interactions in which the relationship or our self respect is more important than reaching our initial objective. These tools offer clients ways to reflect on their own priorities and move effectively towards them. For some clients it may mean asking more assertively for things or saying 'no' more often. For others it might mean having more space for validation or sharing uncomfortable truths. 

May - how to deal with pushback
Even when we have an objective in mind and know what we want to achieve in an interpersonal situation, it can be really hard to deal with resistance or pushback. We will be talking through some skills to address pushback and talking about how and when they can be used. 

Addressing financial barriers: If you are BIPOC, you can join the course with a 75% discount using the code globalmajority75. I also welcome trainees and those still in full-time education, you are welcome to a 50% discount using the code trainee50. You are welcome to contact me ​at [email protected] ​if finances represent a barrier to you being able to attend and we will work something out. 

Join us! £50/$60 per month

  • Live classes on the third Tuesday of the month at 3 pm UK and Irish time. (10 am Eastern)
  • Handouts to use for yourself and to give to clients.
  • Skills you can use in your own life and teach clients.

Sign up now!

Clients have found these skills really useful. They say things like:
“I have found ways to cope and been encouraged to use them as and when I’m up for it, long term. I feel like I can work with my traits that I used to think of as negative/ want to avoid.”
Jade
* By queer relationships, I do not mean only same sex relationships. If someone in the relationship is queer then I understand the relationship itself to be queer too. Bisexual and pansexual people are welcome to join the course and their closest people are also welcome irrespective of their queerness so long as they are willing to join a group that centers quirky queers and cultural renegades.