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DBT – Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Would you like to learn, or have your teenager learn, to problem solve or realistically accept situations that cause unpleasant emotions? Would you like your family or you to learn to solve problems by walking a middle path? If so, then Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is for you.
DBT is a mental health therapy that is grounded in years of research showing it is highly effective. DBT teaches people specific skills to change feelings, thoughts, and actions. DBT teaches people to accept, and even radically accept, issues in their life they cannot change. DBT asserts people are doing their best at any given moment. People can always do better. DBT teaches skills to remain mindful of feelings and thoughts, manage emotions, tolerate distress without drama, act effectively to solve interpersonal problems and walk a middle path. Learning and practicing these skills will move a person out of misery and shame, and help them improve their lives and be happy.
DBT is a mental health therapy teaching people to manage the intensity of their emotions. The skills sets taught in DBT are mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness and to walk a middle path.
- Mindfulness – Being aware of what you are paying attention to and having the ability to nonjudgmentally observe, describe, and fully participate in your own life.
- Emotional Regulation – Helps you manage impulsivity and reactivity.
- Distress Tolerance – Helps people to tolerate and cope with distress.
- Interpersonal Effectiveness – Gives you the confidence and tools to manage most situations.
DBT Tri Cities offers both individual therapy and group classes for teens and adults in the Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland Washington areas. Please contact me today to get started on your path to creating a life worth living.
DBT uses strategies to target three areas of growth:
- Learning to make healthy and positive changes to feel empowered.
- Learning to accept and grow from life circumstances that are not within your control to alter or change.
- Learning to assess yourself, others, and your world by walking the middle path, as opposed to one rigid position. This approach fosters collaboration and validation. When people walk the middle path when making decisions, all parties feel listened to and they are more likely to compromise.
DBT was created in 1993 by Dr. Marsha Linehan, Professor, and psychologist at the University of Washington. DBT has undergone the rigor of multiple studies. This research has conclusively shown DBT is a very effective treatment approach to help people of all ages, people with a variety of mental health struggles and has undergone this same rigor to show effectiveness for people from varying cultures and ethnicities.
Please call or email today to talk about how DBT, or a DBT skills group, can make your life worth living. I will be doing DBT skill building classes for adults, and teens and their caregivers.
Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy
Every person is different. This means your needs in a counseling setting are unique to you. Dr. Myer understands this. She provides each client or couple with an assessment of their needs and goals. This information allows her to assist each person to create a research-based plan to help someone meet those unique needs and goals. This plan may include cognitive and/or behavioral therapy, DBT, Journals Therapy, Imago Therapy, or a combination of these.
Cognitive Therapy examines the way you think. The basis of Cognitive Therapy is events we experience in our lives automatically trigger thoughts. These are thoughts about ourselves, other people, and the world in general. These thoughts are formed from our past learning, our temperament, and the ways we have created memories of how we fit with others and the world.
The automatic thoughts then trigger feelings. This thought and feeling connection literally becomes our mental maps, or guide, to how we think and behave. Sometimes these maps help us. Other times these maps literally make us stuck.
If you want to move forward in your life, you must first effectively change your mind maps. Cognitive Therapy will help you discover what has been holding you back. In other words discover the reasons why you may overeat, stay overly stressed or angry, or why you may feel anxious and depressed.
Once you know what is holding you back, you can take a different road. Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy provides specific and research-based techniques to help you walk the path you want to walk.
Dr. Myer has had extensive training in Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies. She uses research-based and effective techniques to help people facilitate life changes.
Connect with each other like never before.
The premise of Imago Therapy is to build lasting connections between couples and family members. This is done through understanding that a person’s adult personality is formed through a series of adaptations they made to live in relationships they had as a child. As adults, we carry those adaptations with us as we try and relate to ourselves, others, and the worlds. The goal of Imago Therapy is to teach someone to respond with what is needed in a situation, rather than react from a place we used to adapt to our childhood.
Dr. Myer is currently undergoing training and supervision to become an Imago Relationship Counselor. Imago therapy is considered to be one of the very few highly effective forms of couples and relationship counseling. This therapy employs techniques to increase communication, love, and connection between couples. The techniques are based on research.
Imago Therapy provides structure for a couple to reduce what feels vague and chaotic in their relationship. This is done by teaching people what makes them react, what is behind their partner’s statements and actions, and specific tools to foster communication, appreciation, and reduce and repair conflict.
Imago therapy was developed 25 years ago by Dr. Harville Hendrix and his wife, Dr. Helen Lakelly-Hunt. They initially designed this therapy to save their own relationship. From there, they further created a therapy that has been shown to work. Two of their books are Getting The Love You Want and Keeping The Love You Find.
Below is a link that goes into more detail on Imago Therapy.
DBT Skills Group For Teens
DBT helps teens learn to manage the intensity of their emotions. Many teens have no idea how to cope with feeling hurt, angry, frustrated, sad, powerless, or out of control. Many teens cannot put words to these experiences. When teens do not know how to manage their emotions, they struggle to manage their thinking and their actions. The result is depression, anxiety, self-harming, eating disorders, drug and alcohol overuse, etc. DBT offers a positive path. In the skills group teens will learn to be able to:
- Become mindful and stop acting mindless and feeling empty.
- Emotion Regulation.
- Tolerating times of distress and surviving situations seen as a crisis.
- Be effective during times when they need to ask for what they want and to say no. They also learn how to gracefully accept “no”
- To walk a middle path. DBT helps teens and their families unite differing points of view, think in a less all-or-none manner, and generate stabilizing, rather than extreme, solutions to solving their problems.
DBT Skills Group For Adults
(This group is set to start sometime in September 2018. The group will meet on Wednesday evenings from 5-6:30 pm.)
DBT Tri Cities will be offering a skills building class for an adult. The skill sets fall under the domains of mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness. As these skill sets are put into practice, participants will be able to do the following:
- You will be able to recognize and problem solve the causes for your actions, thoughts, and emotions. This helps move someone out of blaming and judging and move them toward changing and accepting.
- You will be able to make changes within you if you are not able to immediately change your environment. These steps you take will help you tolerate the distress you are in, accept the reality in the moment, and reinterpret the powerlessness you feel.
- You will learn to tap into your own wisdom. You will understand how to move from being mindless to mindful.
- You will understand the reasons you have trouble controlling your feelings and actions. This was caused by being a sensitive person who lived, or is living, in an invalidating environment. The two combine and form a transactional relationship. The result is this sensitive person becomes more sensitive to invalidation, and then has a harder time calming themselves down. This leads to self-invalidation.
- You will be able to become mindful of how the transactional relationship affects you now. You will be able to observe the triggers the invalidating environment is setting off within you, describe exactly how you are being triggered, and observe and describe the internal cascade that ensues. As this process slows down you will participate fully in the moment without creating a tornado of emotions, or withdrawing into a shell. The issues in the environment are not taken personally. Instead the environment is slowed down. The cascade within you is slowed down or stopped. When you are able to be mindful in this way, you will notice the factors you are responsible for, the factors someone is responsible for, and accept what is not in your control.
- You will learn skills to quiet the intensity of the emotions you feel. You will be able to apply what you have learned to your interpersonal relationships.
- You will come to understand you do not need to be right, perfect, to defer to someone, win, put someone down, control someone, or to compromise yourself. What is necessary for those circumstances is to be effective.
When you learn to be effective you will feel effective. As you learn to feel effective you will become aware that most circumstances offer us a middle path to make changes or accept reality.
What does Attention Deficit look like?
Every person has attention deficits. however, for some people, these deficits cause them to lose focus, to be forgetful, and struggle to monitor their day to day life. These people often feel very bored and restless. This boredom, restlessness, and inattention can also lead to anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. Further, the signs of an attention deficit look different in children, adolescents, and adults, as well as men and women.
An ADHD Coach is trained in specific techniques to help people diagnosed with ADHD/ADD work on strategies for logistical issues that get in their way. This includes assessing strengths and weaknesses and setting up a game plan to help overcome areas that are inconsistent or seem shaky. These usually involve tasks for:
- Planning
- Organizing
- Self -monitoring
- Time monitoring and management
- Setting and meeting goals
- Maintaining focus on what is necessary
- Overcoming boredom
- Taking initiative
- Remembering
- Getting and staying motivated
Dr. Myer has been working with an animal assist therapist since 1996. Currently, her animal assist partner and general employee of the month is Klaus the German Shepherd. Klaus is an 8yo German Shepherd and is an Animal-Assist Therapy (AAT) dog. He is gentle, very laid back, and kind, and adds a calming presence to the counseling session, especially with children. He has been my co-therapist since he was 4 months old. He not only is a counselor, but also for two years, he was my partner in the “Paws to Read” program at Blueridge Elementary School in Walla Walla, and at the Walla Walla Public Library.
Follow the link below to understand more about how just the act of petty a dog activates the sensory-motor reflex center in the human brain. Activation of this center will calm someone down (literally). As well the act of petting a dog will help to create slow and deep breathing for a person and lower blood pressure. I also work with children to train Klaus. This helps them understand structure, discipline, that training/consequences done correctly can be done in a positive and safe way. It also helps children build a “voice” and helps them understand assertiveness. Further, Klaus loves children who have been diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. He is extra loving and attentive to these children. Then these children will look to Klaus to be their “calming home base” which means if they even start to dysregulate, they learn to go sit near Klaus and pet him. This will provide them safety, calm them right down, and teach them they can feel in control of their otherwise sense of self-dysregulation.