Professional DBT Training and Supervision

Do you see clients who both desperately want to change, but also seem to reject your efforts to help?

A Dialectical Behaviour Therapy – DBT approach puts these very contradictions at the heart of the way we understand and work with clients.

Marsha Linehan proposes the use of DBT as “A way out of hell.” The goal is to help clients establish a life worth living.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy focuses on the difficulty a group of clients have in balancing the contradictions between a thinking/planning part of the mind and a feeling/acting part.

DBT offers an integrated understanding of what can be problematic when a person does not have an inside way to regulate the intensity and meaning of feelings. There is an overwhelming pressure to then regulate feelings outside the self, by acting in intense ways that give a temporary relief to the inside pressure of intolerable pain.

The DBT for Practitioners courses offer a training to think about the challenges of working with clients demonstrating these unstable modes of functioning, with mood swings, impulsive behaviour and self-harm.

So now you have completed the Introduction to DBT for Practitioners
You know your Rational Mind from your Emotional Mind, and understand that the Wise Mind is not a static achievement but an ability to move between states of mind…

We will explore what emotions are really for if they seem to create so many difficulties.

We can help clients become more familiar with emotion based language, and to distinguish a primary emotion from a secondary emotion.

We will explore the confusing arena of helping clients to get what they want in relationships while saying no to what they don’t.

Dr Ella Brent will explore the origins of mentalisation, what it is and why it is so important. An impairment in the capacity to mentalise is a key feature underlying the clinical picture associated with Personality Disorders.

It is important to know not only the quality of a person’s mental representations, but how mental representations come about. In order to understand the development of disturbances in mentalisation it is necessary to look at the origins of mentalisation in normal development. More than ever we know about the importance of attachment security in the establishment of mentalisation. What has been less frequently illustrated is the very mechanism of the transfer of mentalisation capacities between the infant and adult carer’s minds, which will be presented in this workshop.

This model offers a framework within which to understand what can go wrong within attachment relationships and the impact on mentalising capacity, and how this can also identify areas of focus for intervention and treatment.

The presented model draws heavily from the work of Bowlby’s Attachment Theory, Bion’s model of the Containment (in contrast to Winnicot’s concept of Holding), and Bateman and Fonagy’s work in developing Mentalisation Based Treatments (MBT). This developmental backdrop will be linked to presenting problems in clinical work.