DBT
Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Emotional Regulation, Relationships, and Coping Skills
At Healing Hearts Counseling, we understand that life can feel overwhelming when emotions are intense, relationships feel difficult, or stress feels hard to manage. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, often called DBT, is an evidence-based therapy approach that helps individuals build practical skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and healthier relationships.
DBT can be especially helpful for teens and adults who feel emotions deeply, struggle with impulsive reactions, experience conflict in relationships, or feel stuck in patterns of anxiety, depression, trauma responses, or self-criticism.
Our DBT-informed counseling services in Gilbert, Arizona are designed to help clients feel more grounded, capable, and connected as they learn new ways to navigate life’s challenges.
FAQs
Understanding Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Dialectical Behavior Therapy is a type of counseling that combines acceptance and change. This means DBT helps clients learn how to accept themselves and their experiences with compassion while also building the skills needed to make meaningful changes.
The word “dialectical” refers to holding two things that may feel opposite, but can both be true. For example:
You can be doing the best you can, and you can still learn new skills.
You can accept where you are, and you can work toward change.
You can feel strong emotions, and you can learn how to respond rather than react.
DBT is practical, structured, and skills-based. It gives clients tools they can use in everyday life, especially in moments when emotions, conflict, stress, or urges feel hard to manage.DBT Counseling for Teens, Adults, and Families
DBT can support people who struggle with emotional overwhelm, relationship stress, impulsive behaviors, or difficulty coping with distress. It may be especially helpful for individuals experiencing:
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Anxiety
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Depression
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Trauma responses
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PTSD or complex trauma
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Emotional dysregulation
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Intense mood swings
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Self-criticism or shame
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Difficulty managing anger
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Relationship conflict
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Fear of abandonment
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Impulsive behaviors
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Self-harm urges
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Suicidal thoughts
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Difficulty tolerating stress
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Low self-worth
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Boundary challenges
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Life transitions
DBT can be helpful for both teens and adults who want to better understand their emotions, reduce reactivity, improve communication, and feel more in control of their responses.
At Healing Hearts Counseling, we also recognize that many clients who benefit from DBT may have a history of trauma, attachment wounds, chronic stress, or nervous system dysregulation. Our therapists approach this work with compassion, safety, and respect for each client’s pace.-
Many people who seek DBT therapy have experienced trauma, chronic stress, attachment wounds, grief, or painful relationships. Trauma can impact how the nervous system responds to stress, how emotions are experienced, and how safe a person feels in relationships.
For some clients, emotions may feel too big. For others, emotions may feel shut down, numb, or difficult to access. DBT can help create stability and coping skills that support deeper healing work.
DBT may be used alongside other trauma-informed therapies such as:
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EMDR Therapy
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Somatic Therapy
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Sensorimotor-informed therapy
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Parts work
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Attachment-based therapy
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Play therapy for children and teens
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Family therapy
At Healing Hearts Counseling, we believe trauma healing should move at a pace that honors the nervous system. DBT skills can help clients develop the foundation needed to feel safer, more grounded, and more prepared for deeper trauma work when appropriate.
If you are looking for DBT therapy in Gilbert, AZ, or counseling for emotional regulation, anxiety, depression, trauma, or relationship challenges, Healing Hearts Counseling is here to help.
You do not have to keep feeling overwhelmed or stuck in the same patterns. With support, skills, and compassion, healing is possible.
Contact Healing Hearts Counseling today to schedule an appointment or learn more about DBT-informed therapy.
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EMDR Therapy
The brain and the body have an amazing capacity and propensity to heal itself. Just as when we get a splinter in our physical body and the body works at pushing the splinter to the surface trying to remove it, the brain works at trying to resolve unprocessed traumatic and adverse life events. This can show up as a “flashback” - involuntary recurrent memory where an individual can have a sudden, usually powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of a past experience. These flashbacks can be images, emotions or even body sensations. They can be triggered by something we’ve seen, heard, tasted, touched or smelled. It activates the memory network in the brain.
The brain is amazing! It is constantly pulling from what we already know and what we’ve already experienced, these are “chains of association” that our brain uses to make sense of new experiences and to store information. The problem is when we have “unprocessed” information or “stuck” experiences, it can feel like we are re-living these events mentally, emotionally or physically.
Sometimes adverse life circumstances can affect the brain and the body causing experiences to get “stuck.” We have to change our lens of how we understand trauma and begin to see the ways certain experiences where we do not feel safe, feel a lack of control or even defectiveness can affect our ability to process information, keeping us looping in unhealthy patterns of thought, behavior, emotions and relationship patterns.
How does EMDR therapy help?
Trauma treatments such as EMDR therapy help the brain and the body to move past these traumatic experiences so that the brain and the body are not still responding as if they are in danger now. It is useful and effective for clients across the life span with children through adulthood. EMDR allows normal healing to resume. The experience is still remembered but the flight, fight or freeze response is resolved.
EMDR therapy integrates elements of many traditional psychological therapies and models and is based off of the Adaptive Information Processing model. This is the inherent information processing system in the brain that gets blocked when traumatic or adverse events occur, causing these events to get locked in the brain. EMDR allows the trauma to be “re-digested” by the brain and the body, linking it to this adaptive information and allowing for healing.Healing from trauma can feel all but possible for those who have experienced the helplessness that traumatic events can cause, even years later. Healing is possible and we are excited to journey with you! EMDR is a validated, evidence-based approach.
For more information go to www.emdria.org or watch more Information about EMDR on YouTube
How do these experiences become stuck?
When we have negative experiences that tell us something about ourselves, we begin to believe it. In our “logical” brain we can know these things are not true, but it can feel impossible to “feel” that they are not true. These experiences can be issues of abuse, neglect, bullying, domestic violence, grief/loss, attachment wounds, PTSD, abandonment or other adverse life circumstances such as a car accident or health and medical issues.
Our brains have a natural process to work through and recover from difficult and traumatic events. When these experiences become stuck, the Adaptive Information Processing engine of the brain breaks down. Stress responses engage our flight, fight, freeze (submit) response and activate our central nervous system. When the distress from these events remain, this can cause upsetting images, thoughts, emotions and even sensations to remain stuck and can cause feelings of overwhelm resulting in the experience of being stuck in reactive patterns.
Our minds can trick us into feeling that we are still experiencing the negative experience, instead of it being something that happened in the past that we’ve moved through. This is something that can happen to anyone, where their increased levels of stress have interfered with their brains ability to process and fully integrate an experience. This interference impedes the natural linkage to other adaptive information we may have about ourselves and our ability to have access to new and positive experiences.
Find relief from trauma - begin EMDR therapy today.