DBT Skills Coaching
Heal, take control, unlock your potential.
Have you ever felt as if you were haunted?
Perhaps you've had the feeling there were other people living inside your head?
Or maybe you've felt like there's a civil war taking place inside your mind?
Hello and welcome.
Dissociation is one of the clever ways the mind protects us from feeling, and sometimes remembering, traumatic events. If we are raised in an environment where we feel chronically unsafe, our dissociative defence may be to block out either the memory of an event or block out the feelings associated with the events. If there is a lack of safety, attachment and attunement throughout our childhood, we may experience fragmentation where different aspects of our personality develop independently instead as part of a whole, cohesive personality.
We may be aware of these other parts of our personality as fully formed individuals with their own independent age and character, or they may be a vague internal presence we're aware of but can't fully sense or understand.
At some point during our lives, the mind and body decide it's time to begin the healing process and we become increasingly aware of these other parts of ourselves who may have been pushed to the side or silenced for years and want to be heard, understood and appreciated.
As we begin to heal, it's natural to feel overwhelming confusion at the way we were failed as children, not only by our families but by our community and social services. We may also feel as if time has been lost or mis-spent.
One thing I've learned during my own healing journey is that there is no time lost, the mind and body work in mysterious ways; memories and feelings are revealed to us and ready to be processed in their own time.
Healing is not a process that can be rushed and operates on its own timeline.
As your DBT skills coach it is my job to:
✔️Create a space where you feel safe, seen and heard;
✔️Assist you to identify and name your feelings;
✔️Begin, or continue, the process of helping you to feel, name, process, and flow with your feelings no matter how frozen you may feel;
✔️Help you to increase internal communication and encourage you to welcome parts of you that have been shut out, shamed or ignored;
✔️Identify internal systems, increase internal communication, and create rules that allow you to tune out chatter while you are working/studying/raising children;
✔️Validate your feelings and unique world view;
✔️Teach and encourage dialectical thinking in everyday life i.e. I love him AND I let him go, I hate my job AND I will be there on time tomorrow;
✔️Offer you skills and tools to learn to regulate your emotions;
✔️Help you identify and strengthen the positive, healthy relationships in your life and end unhealthy, toxic relationships;
✔️Teach you a direct communication style that helps you to get what you want while maintaining your values;
✔️Guide you to make sense of your experiences and your story in a way that supports and empowers you.
One of the wonderful things about DBT is that it offers a hands-on, practical system for managing everyday life while at the same time allowing a space to embrace who you are as an individual. While this may sound too simple to address complex trauma, there is an alchemy that occurs when we move into and embrace our feelings while taking action that aligns with our values.
Taking action means something different for everyone. Acknowledging how you feel and taking an appropriate action may mean simply taking a shower as your main task for the day then going back to bed. For others, it may mean taking the first step in pursuing a divorce, for another person it may mean starting a business. Wherever you are in your healing and self-actualising journey, DBT offers tools and skills.
Healing is a process that takes place in connection, communication and in a place of safety with another person. By providing a space where you can express yourself freely and openly while exploring the DBT skills that are best matched to your situation and stage of healing, my goal is to support and guide you as you move through the healing process and cultivate your unique gifts.
xxxx Kate
What is Dialectical Behaviour Therapy ?
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is a form of therapy focused on teaching communication and emotion regulation skills. It is designed to help people with complex or developmental trauma to manage intense emotions and impulsive responses.
An important aspect of DBT is that it's purpose is to honour our experiences, intensity and depth and give us the tools needed to harness our emotions and create the life we desire.
As a DBT Skills Coach, my role isn't to engage with the medical model of pathologising, diagnosing and labelling. Instead, my role is to listen, validate, support your healing process, and teach you tools and skills to achieve your objectives.
While DBT therapy is a fusion of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) (focusing on cognition, or thoughts), and Zen Buddhism (focusing on becoming a mindful observer of our experiences), the third, vital component in DBT is the practical aspect of learning to think and behave in a dialectical, skilful way.
Dialectical thinking helps us to move toward a balance of acceptance and change, which means validating how we feel as authentic and true to us as an individuals while accepting that we can feel one thing while taking the opposite action.
DBT has four main components:
Mindfulness
Being present in the moment and processing experiences as they happen. Mindfulness and presence are essential to increasing our intuition and and learning to trust gut instincts. The more present we are in the given moment, the greater our ability to access our inner compass, rely less on others for advice, and the the more grounded and confident we will feel.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Learn skills used to set boundaries, identify what actions serve us (as opposed to pleasing others), and learn to voice our needs and expectations in order to protect our own interests and get what we want.
Distress Tolerance
Helps us cope and survive during a crisis, learn skills, and slowly create a vast internal container for our emotions allowing us to feel our feelings in all their intensity without feeling unsafe, overwhelmed, out of control, numb or paralysed.
Emotion Regulation
Learn to feel and flow with our emotions to decrease the extreme highs and lows, or numbness, and increase our capacity to work with our emotions instead of feeling debilitated or compelled to operate in survival mode.
What is Dissociation?
Dissociation is a way for the mind to tune out or switch off when stressed or overwhelmed. For the purpose of this website, I'm referring to dissociation and dissociative disorders as a response to ongoing, complex developmental trauma where the nervous system activates the dorsal vagal shut down or 'freeze' response.
For some people, a dissociative response may result in amnesia or memory problems, in others it may manifest as depersonalisation, derealisation, or personality fragmentation. The fragmentation we experience as a dissociative response may be apparent in memories or feelings that have been dissociated out of our conscious memory or may be fully formed alters or parts who have formed as a result of ongoing trauma during childhood.
Dissociation is our mind's way of trying shield us from the full emotional impact of trauma. As such, we may visually remember a traumatic event but the images may have no feelings, sights, sounds, or smells attached. The memory exists as a visual sequence in our mind but is 'dead' in terms of it having any emotional or sensory elements. Alternatively, we may remember the taste or sounds of a traumatic event but we are unable to picture what happened, as if the event happened in the dark and we can't turn the lights on.
Some people experience dissociation as an out of body experience or alienation from the body or surroundings, such as in depersonalisation or derealisation. Others experience gaps in time or switch between different parts of themselves as a dissociative response; while for some people a dissociative response may be a feeling of being lost in space or floating outside time. If you have distinct alters or parts, you may have 'co-consciousness' where different parts are in communication and are able to recognise when parts are fronting or engaging with the outside world.
No matter where you are on the dissociative spectrum, or where you are on your healing journey, there are many tools and skills that can be used to increase your ability to stay present, feel safe, ground yourself, and improve internal and external communication.
How can DBT help with Dissociation?
Although DBT was originally thought to be most helpful for people with 'outward' trauma responses such as lashing out and self-harm, it is increasingly used as a therapy approach for people whose trauma response type is 'freeze' as opposed to fight or flight.
The freeze response is linked to the parasympathetic nervous system, shut-down, and dissociation. Dissociation occurs on a spectrum from everyday 'zoning out' to dissociative disorders.
In the more severe cases of a dissociative trauma response, the personality fragments into different parts as a protective, and practical, measure to ensure the whole body doesn't fall into a state of collapse, and allows for life to continue for the protected 'normal parts' of the personality that don't hold any trauma.
If our response is to freeze when under perceived threat, we may do things such as cower, fall quiet, feel like we are evaporating into the person posing the threat, or try and tap into the energy of people around us in an attempt to psychologically fuse with another as a means of protection. Another dissociative response is to isolate, hide from the world and find safety in taking no action.
In more extreme freeze states, we may switch into another personality part, experience depersonalisation or derealisation, feel as if we are being lifted out of the body and floating outside, or we may experience amnesia where there is no memory of the event.
While these responses are legitimate, intelligent ways our body responds to protect us and create a feeling of safety, they may also be a barrier preventing us from creating safety in other ways such as economic security, social connections, and the opportunity to discern actions that are best aligned with what we want to achieve.
Some of the ways DBT can help you:
✔️ Teach you direct external, communication skills to help you express your needs in a way that helps you get what you want.
✔️Enable positive, supportive internal communication skills to build a conversation amongst your fragmented parts.
✔️Give you tools to tolerate distress and navigate suicidal ideation and impulses.
✔️Slowly create and grow a container for your emotions to ease the distress of more vulnerable, traumatised parts.
✔️Teach you self-care and grounding skills to help you find a home in your body.
✔️Encourage you to self-validate and validate your internal parts to increase internal collaboration.
✔️Help you access your internal world and create a feeling of safety internally.
✔️Teach you self-parenting skills to self-soothe and create internal safety.
✔️Encourage activities such as journaling and creating audio or video diaries to get to know yourself better and discover the kinds of activities you enjoy.