Working in a DBT program requires strict adherence to the treatment model, which is why all clinicians are members of the consultation team. The idea is that nobody should have to work with this challenging population without peer supervision and support. I won’t get into the dialectical framework here, except to say that there are strategies that facilitate balance – the synthesis between opposites. Hegel wrote about how the dialectic between thesis and antithesis leads to synthesis. Similarly, wise mind is a synthesis of reasonable mind and emotion mind. A good DBT therapist has to think dialectically, and DBT is a highly strategic therapy.
My education in the model introduced me to the concept of parasuicidal behaviors: non-lethal self-destructive behaviors that are the result of the same impulses that lead to suicide attempts. These behaviors include the abuse of alcohol and/or illegal drugs, abuse of prescription drugs, self-mutilation, and other self-destructive acts. People who perceive themselves as living in Hell often have a profound ambivalence around the issue of living v. dying. If you define your life as “the problem,” then suicide can seem to be “the solution.” Many preventable suicides occur as a mood-specific behavior (i.e. nobody attempts suicide in a happy mood), because of such irrational formulations.
Being a therapist isn’t a one-way street. If I’ve helped some people to improve their lives, my own life has been enriched by working with quietly heroic people who have striven mightily to change themselves. This is true of people across the diagnostic spectrum; but I felt privileged to work in a DBT program, and to watch emotionally unbalanced people learn balance, and learn to build lives worth living. It’s some of the most difficult work I’ve ever done, intellectually, and some of the most rewarding. People diagnosed with BPD used to be regarded as untreatable by many in the mental health field. DBT is an empirically validated cognitive-behavioral therapy. That means there’s scientific evidence that it works.
Marsha Linehan has courageously revealed that DBT came from her own journey out of Hell. She started her career studying highly suicidal people, and coming up with survival tactics and strategies for emotionally volatile people who are trying to finds reasons to go on living. Another feature of BPD – or having “borderline traits” – is being extremely judgmental, both of self and others. That’s why an important component of DBT mindfulness training is learning to notice details in your here-and-now experience without making judgments. People with the BPD diagnosis tend to frequently attribute their emotions and behaviors to external things (relationships, circumstances), and the DBT program teaches skills that help clients to own their own choices, and learn to make better ones.
With DBT clients at high risk of suicide, the primary goal of treatment is to keep her alive until the benefits of the program start to rick in, and suicide risk diminishes. Sly humor is sometimes appropriate in individual therapy sessions, and I remember saying to a client, with a straight face, “One thing that’s clear from the research is that this therapy can’t work if you’re dead.” Suicide prevention is where some of the treatment agreement contingencies come in. With what I knew about mental health clients with the BPD diagnosis early in my career, I never could have imagined that someday I’d give one my home phone number in case of emergencies. But I did, and never regretted having done so.
People with the BPD diagnosis often have long histories of suicide attempts, and for putting crisis line workers in a difficult position, threatening suicide unless _____ happens. As a DBT therapist, I was available at home to my individual therapy clients on evenings and weekends – but I got to set my own boundaries. Mine were not before nine in the morning and not after nine in the evening, and my clients never once abused their contact privilege. DBT clients know that the processing of details (therapy on the phone) wouldn’t be tolerated, that the call would only last five-to-ten minutes, and that the focus would be on skills: What skills have you already tried? What skill has worked for you in this kind of situation before? What skill do you plan to try next? Just knowing that their therapist was available to them in times of crisis, if only for a brief consultation, was helpful in itself. They understood that if they attempted any “suicide blackmail” games, their therapist would call 911.
One built-in contingency was that the client could call her therapist at home only if she hadn’t already engaged in parasuicidal or suicidal behavior prior to calling. Once she had cut herself or taken an overdose, she lost her privilege of calling for help. This was a highly effective contingency. Another contingency had to do with the weekly individual therapy session. Most DBT clients value their limited time with their individual therapist, and often have specific issues they want to talk about in session. But individual therapy sessions generally begin with a review of the week’s diary cards. For the client to get to select the topic of discussion was contingent on not having engaged in suicidal or parasuicidal behaviors during the prior week. Any self-destructive incident would be the automatic focus of the therapy hour. In that instance the client knew that her therapist would engage with her in a detailed “behavior chain analysis” of thoughts, feelings and actions that led up to the self-harm. These therapeutic contingencies help clients to resist impulses to harm themselves. Impulse control is a learnable skill set for most people. It saves lives.
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