Show Notes
How do we live with impossible dilemmas? How can someone stop self harming when it's the only way they know of coping? What is DBT and how did it help Louise? Dr Michaela Swales and Louise Brinton-Clark talk to Dr Lucy Maddox. This episode includes reference to self-harm. Podcast episode produced by Dr Lucy Maddox for BABCP Show Notes and Transcript If you're interested in finding out more about the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies, or about Dialectical Behaviour Therapy here are some resources... Websites babcp.com is the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies website and it links to the CBT register of accredited CBT therapists in the UK (or go straight to cbtregisteruk.com). BABCP also has a DBT special interest groups which members can join. https://www.sfdbt.org/ is the Society for DBT website which has a list of accredited DBT therapists in the UK https://www.behavioraltech.org/ has research articles and a good video on "What is DBT?" Books Heard, H. L., & Swales, M. A. (2016). Dialectical behaviour therapy: distinctive features. Routledge. Koerner, K. (2012). Doing dialectical behavior therapy: A practical guide. Guilford Press. Linehan, M. (2014). DBT Skills Training Manual. Guilford Publications. Linehan, M. M. (2014). DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets. Guilford Publications. Swales, M. A. (Ed.). (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. Oxford University Press. Transcript Louise: It is a life-saving treatment for some people.
I don't believe I would have graduated or got married or even, it sounds really daft, even have passed my driving test.
Lucy: This is Let's Talk About CBT and I'm Dr Lucy Maddox. This episode is all about a type of talking therapy called dialectical behaviour therapy or DBT. This is one of the family of cognitive behavioural therapies or CBT which was talked about in episode one. We talk a bit about self-harm today, so please take care of yourself, if you know that's a tricky subject for you.
To get away from the acronyms and try to understand what DBT is actually like I went to Bangor, in Wales, to meet with Dr Michaela Swales and Louise Brinton-Clark.
Louise: My name's Louise Brinton-Clark, I have been a member of a DBT group, dialectical behaviour therapy group, both as a service user and as a graduate facilitator.
Michaela: My name's Michaela Swales, I'm a clinical psychologist, I'm also the director of the British Isles DBT training team. So, as well as having delivered DBT for probably the best part of 20 years in my clinical practice, I've also spent the last 15 years or so training others to deliver DBT.
Lucy: Dialectical behaviour therapy is a bit of a mouthful, I asked Michaela to explain what it means.
Michaela: So, within the treatment, we do a lot to help people change things and we do a lot to help people accept things. And in a way, those two things acceptance and change, at least on the face of it, look like they're totally in contradiction. They're what's termed in a particular branch of philosophy – not that you need to know philosophy to do this treatment – a dialectic. They're two things that are in almost polar opposites to each other, but there's value in both of them.
And so constantly in the treatment we're always looking for both change-based ways to solve problems and acceptance-based ways to live your life. And being dialectical means looking at both of those things, and sometimes you have to do a mix of those things to really get things to work.
It is a behavioural treatment, so it focuses a lot on changing behaviours, both those things that other people can see that we do, but also those things that we experience internally. And as we know from lots of areas of life, changing our behaviour is hard, it takes a lot of hard work. And I think many of the people who come for this treatment have a lot of things in their life that they ar
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