Contextually-Focused Dialectical Behavior Therapy (C-DBT) is a comprehensive treatment approach for persons who struggle due to their efforts to cope with a fundamental sense that they do not matter or belong. Rather than conceptualizing their distress as a result of an underlying disorder, C-DBT suggests that most persons’ behaviors are understandable reactions to invalidating, if not dehumanizing environments, which often occur on multiple levels (i.e. family, community, or culture). Thus, rather than seeing emotional dysregulation as the primary problem, it is understood as arising from efforts to cope with the desire to be recognized.
The aim of the fellowship is to familiarize participants with the various components of C-DBT, emphasizing function, process, and exposure rather than protocols, facts, and skills. Participants will learn to develop an interactional style of being with clients that empowers them to develop freedom from over-learned automatic responses established in their past. In doing so, we create opportunities for them to exercise the freedom to organize their behavior in relation to a future they desire.
Class sessions will be a combination of didactic lectures, group discussions, experiential exercises, and case consultation. To maintain an interactive and experiential nature of each class, cohort size is limited to 30 participants.