LIDO Wellness Center offers unsurpassed DBT therapy in Newport Beach with a dedicated and experienced team of therapists. Our DBT program equips patients with mindfulness, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and other essential skills, necessary for a satisfying and fulfilling life.

What Is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)?

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a modified form of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). It aims to teach recovering addicts and mental health disorder patients learn essential techniques and methods to live in the moment and healthy ways to cope with stress. It also helps regulate emotions and improve interpersonal relationships.

DBT is a highly effective therapy in treating borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, it can also help treat other mental health conditions. Dialectical behavioral therapy helps individuals achieve emotional regulation, overcome self-destructive behaviors, and heal from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

As one of the top-rated trauma treatment facilities, we offer DBT in group and 1-on-1 settings. Group setting helps teach behavioral skills, while individual therapy with a trained professional allows you to learn skills best suited for your challenges and mental health situation. DBT is an essential part of our PTSD treatment in Orange County.

Benefits of DBT

During a DBT session, your therapist will work with you to resolve the contradiction between self-acceptance and change and help you adopt positive changes. A part of this process involves offering validation, which can help you become more cooperative and experience less distress at the idea of change. Each DBT setting will have its structure and goals. Here are some of the benefits you may derive from dialectical behavioral therapy:

1. Acceptance and change – DBT can help you learn strategies to accept and tolerate your emotions, your experiences, and life’s circumstances. You will also develop specific skills that may help you make positive behavioral changes and improve your interactions with others.

2. Behavioral – Dialectical behavioral therapy can help you to analyze problems, overcome destructive behavior patterns, and adopt healthy lifestyle changes.

3. Cognitive – You will be more ready to accept positive thoughts and beliefs and overcome ineffective and disturbing ones.

DBT can also help you learn effective communication and how to be a team player. Our PTSD treatment program also helps patients learn new skills, enhance their capabilities, recognize their strengths and attributes, and develop them to lead successful lives.

What Conditions Improve With DBT?

While psychologists developed dialectical behavioral therapy to address bipolar disorder in patients, it is highly effective in treating several other mental health issues alongside BPD. As one of the top trauma and PTSD treatment centers, we use BPD to treat the following psychological disorders:

1. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
2. Bipolar disorder
3. Borderline personality disorder (BPD)
4. Eating disorders (such as anorexia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and bulimia nervosa)
5. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
6. Major depressive disorder (including treatment-resistant major depression and chronic depression)
7. Non-suicidal self-injury
8. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
9. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
10. Substance use disorder
11. Suicidal behavior

Call 949-541-8466 to learn more about our DBT therapy in Newport Beach. LIDO Wellness Center uses innovative and proven therapies to address and treat mental disorders. Our PTSD and trauma treatment can equip you with essential skills for lasting mental wellness. Get in touch with us today to learn how DBT may help you heal from your mental disorder.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic approach utilized to help individuals move past traumatic events. 

Whether the trauma is a little “t” or big “T” event, traumatic occurrences have the potential to reorganize the nervous system into a constant state of hyperarousal (panic attacks) or hypoarousal (numbed out, disassociated). 

Most of the time, the mind-body-brain routinely manages new information and experiences without issue. However, when something out of the ordinary occurs, and the event is too overwhelming, such as a car accident or being subjected to chronic adverse experiences like childhood abuse/neglect, our adaptive information processing system (AIP) can become overloaded. These types of events can result in disturbing experiences remaining frozen in the brain or remaining “unprocessed.” 

Overactive Anxieties

The nervous system becomes hypervigilant, on edge, and overly sensitive to external stimuli. Sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell become powerful triggers that warn the nervous system of danger. Even in the most benign environments, the body can feel unsafe and out of control. The mind will also create a story about the events, often a negative belief (I am responsible, unlovable, unworthy, unsafe). Individuals with unprocessed trauma can appear detached, numbed-out, zoned-out, or struggle with panic attacks, nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive memories/thoughts/images, and become irritable or easily agitated. 

These symptoms of PTSD are frightening and can become debilitating to an individual if untreated. Without the proper treatment and coping skills, a person will implement any strategy for some relief often turning to alcohol, drugs, over-exercising, over-eating, and isolating behaviors to name a few. These strategies often create more issues and even more traumatization. 

How EMDR Can Help

EMDR posits that the brain has a natural adaptive information processing system (AIP) that under normal circumstances works seamlessly. However, when overwhelming experiences occur, the information from the trauma (images, sounds, feeling states, emotions, and cognition) is not allowed to process or integrate from the Limbic system (home of the fear response) to the prefrontal cortex (home of higher thinking/executive functioning).

The eye movements or bilateral stimulation (audio or tactile can be used) assist the brain in reprocessing and integrating the memory. Full integration of the memory from the Limbic system to the prefrontal cortex moves the memory from implicit memory to explicit memory storage. The integration of the memory allows the individual to begin feeling less overwhelmed by external stimuli (sound, smell, taste, touch, sight) and internal stimuli (memories, thoughts, emotions, feeling states) that trigger the fear response (fight or flight). 

What to Expect With EMDR

A typical session of EMDR lasts between 60-90 minutes with the individual fully awake and in control of the process. The clinician collaborates with the individual to identify target memories, level of disturbance, and validity of negative core beliefs. Bilateral stimulation (eye movements, audio or tactile) are implemented for 20-30 seconds. Once the bilateral stimulation has ended, the client reports any images, emotions, body sensations, and cognitions. The memory is considered integrated and reprocessed when the client reports a SUD (subjective unit of disturbance) of  0-1/10, a VOC (validity of cognition) of 7/7 for positive belief, and a clear body scan (no activation in the body). 

Although the memories are not forgotten, the experience of remembering no longer has the power to create PTSD symptoms. The flashbacks, intrusive images, hypervigilance, disassociation, and negative core beliefs begin to subside. More importantly, the individual can engage in life once again without fear of suffering from a PTSD symptom.

In addition to PTSD therapy, EMDR has been successful in treating the following:

Anxiety, depression, stress & trauma, phobias, sleep problems, complicated grief, addictions, pain relief, phantom limb pain, self-esteem, and performance anxiety. 

Further information on the phases of EMDR can be found on www.emdr.org and www.emdr-europe.org  and in the book “Getting Past Your Past” by Francine Shapiro. 

by Janie Montiel, AMFT

Primary Therapist