Dialectical
Behavior
Therapy
(DBT)
And How You Can Use
It to Make Life Better
at Home, School, and
in the Workplace
by Dr. C. J. Blanco
Editor’s Note: Broadly speaking, a
dialectic is a tension between two
contradictory viewpoints, where
a greater truth emerges from
their interplay.1
As I write this, I’m sitting upstairs in my son’s
room. I hear my one son in his room listening
to a webinar, while my other son is watching
television downstairs. My husband’s voice
and the echoes of his Zoom meeting with colleagues
can be heard outside the closed doors
of our home office.
This is apparently the new ‘norm.’ What was
initially supposed to be ‘temporary’ has now
been our life for almost a year. My kids, who
once thought it was ‘fun,’ staying home and
having Mommy and Daddy supplement their
schoolwork, now find the at-home experience
dull, unexciting, even frustrating. I assure you
that my degree is not in teaching elementary
school-aged children, though I have far more
respect for teachers than I ever had before
(and it was already high to start with). To acknowledge
that I have only two and teachers
have upwards of 20 students per class is
truly amazing, awe-inspiring, and exhausting
(at least from my own perspective). What I
have learned from these past several months
is that families are truly resilient if we rely on
each other, provide each other some room and
flexibility, and allow both inter-personal and
intra-personal growth to occur.
As a psychologist, I am reminded that I
became a psychologist to help people. And,
surely, when I went to school, I had not considered
that part of helping others would
occur in the midst of a pandemic. This whole
experience has been new to all of us and
has created widespread panic, anxiety, angst,
even ‘numbness.’
Some patients have told me they have a tendency
to laugh at everything at this point,
writing it off as, “It’s 2020. What do you
expect?” We all cope differently though these
experiences and yet, with flexibility and kindness,
we can help one another. I remind my
students (who are in graduate school to
become psychotherapists) that, while they are
providing therapy to their patients, their patients
will remember them as helping to shape
their resilience in the process. While we may
be ‘small’ in scope, we are nonetheless powerful
in our impact.
I am reminded of a personal experience at
an emergency veterinary hospital. My poor
kitten, Rascal, was extremely ill with, what I
later learned, was diabetes. The doctors told
me that he would not likely make it through
the night but asked that I stay for a few
minutes as they attempted to revive him. As
I sat in the waiting room sobbing, a stranger
saw me. She gently asked if she could sit
with me and expressed that she, too, had been
through something similar. She put her arm
around me, a comfort, and told me that my
feelings of sadness and loss were perfectly appropriate.
With loss, there was (and is) also
love. While a pandemic is certainly not akin to
my personal experience, what stays with me is
the caring gestures of a stranger; I never even
learned her name. What I recall, in that dark
moment, was the care and connection that
helped me get through such a lonesome and
painful moment. In retrospect, I can see that
caring and connection were both occurring at
the same time as loss and pain.
I was asked to write this article to explain
how to understand that working with situations
of opposing feelings/thoughts can lead
to a better, third option. Right now, we are all
suffering with anxiety, loss, and grief. At the
same time, we all share a common reality (i.e.,
“We’re all in this together,” which can provide
some comfort when we use it). Without
a concrete end in sight, the greatest gift we can
give each other is hope and comfort.
Several years ago, I attended a week-long
course in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
(DBT), by Dr. Marsha Linehan.2 I have
1 Reidbord M.D., S. (September, 13, 2019) “Dialectics in Psychotherapy,” psychologytoday.com
2 Marsha M. Linehan (born May 5, 1943) is an American psychologist and author. She is the creator of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a type of psychotherapy that
combines behavioral science with Buddhist concepts, such as acceptance and mindfulness. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsha_M._Linehan.
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