Approach · DBT Skills
DBT Skills
Dialectical Behavior Therapy grew out of work with people whose emotions moved faster and harder than most therapy models accounted for. Its skills are practical, concrete and learnable, which is why they show up here as one part of individual sessions.
Four Areas
The Four Skill Sets
Distress tolerance skills are for the moment a crisis is already happening and cannot be solved in the next five minutes: ways to get through intense feeling without making the situation worse, from simple grounding techniques to more specific tools for cooling an overheated nervous system quickly.
Emotion regulation skills work on a longer timeline: understanding what a given emotion is actually telling you, reducing vulnerability to emotional spikes through basics like sleep and eating, and building experiences that counteract a persistently low or reactive mood over weeks rather than minutes.
Interpersonal effectiveness skills give language for asking for something, saying no, or holding a boundary without either collapsing the relationship or abandoning your own need: genuinely difficult in families and partnerships with a long history of one person going along to keep the peace.
Mindfulness skills, the foundation underneath the other three, are about noticing what is happening internally before reacting to it: often the difference between a feeling passing through and a feeling running the rest of your day.
Between Sessions
Practice Outside the Room
Skills like these are only useful if they are practiced somewhere other than the therapy room, which is where they are hardest to remember in the moment they are needed. A typical rhythm involves identifying one specific skill relevant to what came up that week, trying it in a real situation before the next appointment, and reviewing honestly what worked and what did not. Nothing here depends on getting it right the first time; the point is repetition until a skill becomes available under pressure rather than only in hindsight.
This tends to be especially useful for teens, whose feelings often arrive faster than the words to describe them, and for anyone whose emotional reactions consistently outpace their ability to think clearly in the moment. Having two or three concrete things to reach for changes what a hard hour actually looks like.
What This Is Not
Not a Full DBT Program
It is worth being direct about what this is not. A comprehensive DBT program typically includes weekly individual sessions, a separate weekly skills group, and between-session phone coaching from the therapist, run as a coordinated whole. That full model is not offered here. What is offered is DBT-informed skills work folded into individual therapy sessions: a meaningful and often sufficient amount of structure for many people, but a different thing from a formal DBT program.
If your situation genuinely calls for the full program (recurring crises that need real-time phone coaching, or a level of structure a weekly individual session cannot provide), that is worth naming early, and Athena will help you find a program built for it rather than stretching individual sessions to cover something they are not designed to cover.
This is skills work drawn on inside individual therapy, not a certified or comprehensive DBT program with a skills group and phone coaching. Athena is not a prescriber and does not treat substance abuse, grief, or OCD.
Common Questions
DBT Skills Questions
- Is this a full DBT program?
- No. This is skills work drawn on inside individual therapy, not a comprehensive DBT program with a weekly skills group and between-session phone coaching. If that level of program is what you need, Athena will help you find one.
- Is Athena DBT-certified?
- No formal DBT certification is claimed here. She draws on DBT skills as one part of individual therapy.
- Is DBT skills work only for teens?
- No, though it is often especially useful for teens whose feelings arrive faster than words. Adults working on distress tolerance or communication use these skills too.
- How do skills get practiced between sessions?
- You will usually leave with something specific to try before the next appointment (a distress tolerance technique, a way of stating a need) and the next session reviews how it went.
Start With the Contact Form
Skills work is folded into individual sessions and shaped around what you are actually facing.