What are DBT skills?
Concrete, learnable skills for intense emotion and difficult moments — woven into therapy where they fit.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy was built around a simple recognition: some people feel things faster, harder, and longer — and willpower is not a skill. DBT answers with actual skills, organized into four areas.
Mindfulness: noticing what is happening inside and around you without immediately reacting. Distress tolerance: getting through crisis moments without making them worse. Emotion regulation: understanding, naming, and shifting emotional states. Interpersonal effectiveness: asking, refusing, and holding boundaries while keeping self-respect and relationships intact.
I offer DBT skills as part of individual therapy rather than as a full DBT program — practical tools brought in where your particular life needs them.
How it works
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Learn the skill
Each skill is concrete and teachable — not advice, but a specific thing to do.
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Practise it where it is needed
Skills are rehearsed against your real situations, not hypothetical ones.
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Make it automatic
With repetition, the skill becomes what you reach for before the old reaction does.
DBT skills can help with
- Emotional intensity
- Impulsive reactions under stress
- Conflict and boundary difficulties
- Crisis moments
- Urges that follow strong emotion
DBT skills show up in my work wherever emotion outpaces coping — including in eating disorder treatment, where urges and emotional intensity are so often intertwined.