DBT Essentials (Dialectical Behavior Therapy training).
DBT Essentials is a 3-day course from the Association for Psychological Therapies (APT); a leading provider of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) training in Canada. Attend this course as an individual in Toronto, study it online, or we can bring the training to your own organization and train a group of 6-15 people, wherever you are in Canada. You can use it simply as an introduction to DBT or as the first step to establishing a full DBT service.
It is the only DBT training that is APT-accredited and also gives you access to APT’s relevant downloadable resources for use post-course.
Executive Summary:
DBT brings together a series of skills and techniques which are powerful and well-chosen ones, for working with personality disorder and other areas. Many people want to familiarise themselves with these skills without necessarily becoming a DBT therapist exclusively, and this 3-day course is for you if you are one of those people as well as if you are thinking of taking the first step in becoming a DBT therapist or establishing a DBT service. As well as covering the ‘overall concept of DBT’, it covers its ‘essential elements’ such as how to set up skills development groups, the inter-relation between the groups and the 1:1 sessions, how to maximise generalistion of the skills learned into real life, how therapists gain support for themselves, how fidelity to the model is maintained, and more.
Who should attend this DBT course?
People who attend our DBT training normally fall into one of two categories:
1. Professionals who see patients in 1:1 treatment settings, have a significant degree of clinical skill, and wish to add DBT techniques to their repertoire.
2. 'Whole teams' (either in inpatient or community settings) seeking to develop a common approach to DBT and a full DBT Service.
The professional affiliations of people attending our DBT training include: mental health/psychiatric nurses, social workers, occupational therapists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, probation officers and others.
Their areas of work include: Adult Mental Health, Children and Adolescents, Older People, Substance Misuse, Forensic, Learning Disability, and Brain Injury.
The DBT Essentials course covers a great deal:
Validation.
- Definition of validation, and why it is important.
- Validation and its dialectical balance with problem solving and change strategies.
- Linehan's Biopsychosocial model of Borderline Personality Disorder, and how validation fits in with it.
- The implication of invalidating environments for a child, and for the adult.
- What constitutes an invalidating environment, including 'ideal' environments ... and a validating one, including how to create it.
- Exercises on creating validating responses to specific statements.
- Different ways of validating.
- Using validation in your own situation.
Metaphors.
- How metaphors work and why we should use them.
- 6 Examples of metaphors.
- 4 Metaphors you can use repeatedly, for common problem situations.
- General principles of metaphors, including visual metaphors.
- Metaphors exercise.
- A case example, to illustrate the use of validation and metaphor.
Relentless problem solving.
- The five stage problem solving strategy.
- Forms for clients (and you) to use with problem solving.
- Problem solving exercise.
- Personal experience of problem solving: exercise.
Contingency management.
- Video demonstration of differential reinforcement in a clinical setting.
- The nature of contingency management and how it interacts with the conscious or unconscious motivations of the client.
- Behavioral analysis, especially as a response to severe behavior such as parasuicidal behaviour.
- Chain analysis and solution analysis.
- Case example.
Emotion-regulation exercise, especially including the focus on biological elements such as: sleep, exercise, illnesses, circadian rhythm.
Interpersonal effectiveness exercise. To be effective interpersonally proves to be a key skill, and the research evidence is impressive on this. It is therefore one of the four skills taught in DBT, addressing frequent interpersonal issues.
Mindfulness.
- A definition and description of mindfulness and the best purposes it can fulfil.
- Kabat-Zinn's descriptions of mindfulness.
- Mindfulness and its role in balancing 'the emotional mind' with 'the reasonable mind' to achieve 'the wise mind'.
- The three 'What' skills of mindfulness.
- The three 'How' skills of mindfulness.
- Mental Health problems to which mindfulness can be applied.
- An on-going introspective exercise in mindfulness.
Distress tolerance.
- 'Distraction behaviours' that may be used to contradict and neutralise distress.
- 'Radical' distress tolerance: doing nothing. How to do nothing: the fact of this turning out to be an effective approach for many people, and the theory behind it.
Walking the Middle Path
- What this means, why it is important, and an overview of some of the exercises involved.
Other important therapist-skills in DBT.
- Telephone support and other ways of helping patients apply the skills they learn ‘in the classroom’ to their real lives.
- Chaining: how to analyse the chain of events that led up to ‘an incident’, highlight the points at which the patient could behave differently the next time something similar occurs, and optimise the chances of them doing so.
- How to order competing priorities: deciding which of several severe problems to tackle first.
- Life-threatening behaviours, therapy-threatening behaviours, and behaviours that interfere with the quality of life.
- The patient-therapist agreement - our role in it.
- Assumptions we can make about the patient - and those we can't.
What the DBT Essentials course will do for you:
- You will have the feeling of knowing what DBT is all about, and understanding it.
- You will be able to create validating environments - environments that make people feel good.
- You will be able to validate other people - to have them feel as though you are on the same wavelength as they are.
- You will be able to quickly have people 'see things differently'.
- You will be able to (help people to) solve problems.
- You will be able to respond to people who have just done very severe behaviours in a way which is caring yet does not reinforce the severe behaviour.
- You will be able to (help people to) bring some sense of order and predictability to emotions.
- You will have the chance to begin practising mindfulness.
- You will be able to (help others to) tolerate distress much better. Not to allow distress to get into a 'vicious spiral'.
- You will be able to order competing priorities amongst several 'top priorities'.
- If you want to set up a fully fledged DBT service, you will have taken the first step and be able to see the path ahead.
What you receive as a result of attending APT's DBT training:
All delegates are registered at APT as having attended the course, and receive a certificate to acknowledge their attendance, registration, and APT-Accreditation at the appropriate level. As a bona fide APT event, this course automatically has accreditation from The Association for Psychological Therapies. This accreditation is given weight by the fact of over 100,000 professionals having attended APT training.
Upon completion of the 3-day course, delegates will receive Level 1 APT Accreditation in DBT.
Booking this training is easy.
Option 1: Bring the course to your organization
We bring this 3-day course to your own organization for a fixed fee of $6,595 (plus tutor travel and accommodation expenses) and up to 15 people can attend.
Book this course for us to bring to you
Option 2: Attend this 3-day course as an individual
Dates available:
24-26 March 2020 (3-days)
Venue: Novotel Toronto Centre Hotel, 45 The Esplanade, Toronto, ON M5E 1W2 Canada.
$790 CAD
22-24 June 2020 (3-days)
Downtown Toronto (venue TBC).
$790 CAD
The fee covers: tuition, workbook, lunch and refreshments each day, registration on the APT database, and certificate of accreditation/attendance.
Book to attend this course in Toronto
Option 3: Study the course online
Suitable for individuals or groups of professionals or whole departments / organizations. This course is available to study online - this is a great opportunity to obtain APT-quality input and develop your professional knowledge at a time that is convenient to you and your organization.
Option 4: 'Train the Trainer'
If you or a colleague are a senior professional (e.g. consultant psychologist) and have a talent for communication and teaching, then you are welcome to apply to become an APT-accredited tutor. You could then tutor the course - or your chosen modules from it - in your own organization, under license.
This is not only a highly appropriate use of senior professionals, but it also saves your organization the tutor-component of the fee (around 50%) each time you run it or your chosen modules.
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DBT Courses and Resources
Running DBT Skills-Development Groups ❯
APT's Accreditation of DBT Practitioners ❯
Feedback Ratings.
We continuously monitor the quality of our training by obtaining feedback on the two key scales of relevance and presentation from every course delegate. Below are the average ratings for the last ten runnings of this course.
Average Presentation rating: 97%
Average Relevance rating: 97%
*These statistics were last updated in April 2017
Written Feedback.
APT prides itself on the feedback we receive about our courses. Below are just some of the great comments the DBT Essentials course has received.
"I rarely get anything out of the training that I attend. I can honestly say this course has been an epiphany. I think this is essential training for anybody working in a mental health setting."
"The DBT Essentials course delivered to my team over the three days was exceptional. The pace was well judged, the material presented was relevant and detailed and the style of the workshops was lively and collaborative. My team all remarked on how quickly the time went and how interesting and relevant the exercises were. The three days provided us with an enjoyable shared experience which was great for team morale as well as offering valuable skills."