7
LICENSED CLINICIANS
60 min
SESSIONS
$150
SELF-PAY RATE
Free
15-MINUTE CALL
When Feelings Go From Zero to Everything
Some nervous systems run hotter than others. The feeling hits faster, climbs higher, and takes longer to come down, and in that window things get said, sent, thrown or swallowed that cost the rest of the week.
People who live this way are usually not short on insight. They know, ten minutes later, exactly what happened. What they are short on is a set of skills for the ten minutes themselves, and a way of relating to emotion that is neither obeying it nor going to war with it.
DBT was built precisely for this. The dialectic in the name is its core move: you are doing the best you can, and you can learn to do better. Both are true at once.
How DBT Works
DBT teaches four families of skills. Mindfulness: noticing what is happening while it is happening, instead of finding out afterward. Distress tolerance: surviving the spike without making it worse. Emotion regulation: understanding what feeds the fire and turning the temperature down over time. Interpersonal effectiveness: asking, refusing and repairing without burning the bridge.
The skills are concrete enough to write on a card, and they are practiced, not just discussed. That is the point: in the hot moment you do not rise to your insight, you fall to your training.
DBT has strong evidence for intense emotion, self-destructive urges and the relationship chaos that trails both. We teach it individually and in a skills group, including one for teenagers.
What DBT Helps With
DBT earns its keep wherever emotion outruns the tools.
Intense mood swings. Feelings that hit fast and high, and the wreckage of acting on them.
Self-destructive urges. Concrete skills for the worst ten minutes, and a plan that does not rely on willpower alone.
Anxiety & overwhelm. Riding out panic and dread without fleeing the life around it.
Depression. Behavioral skills for moving when nothing in you wants to move.
Addiction. Urge-surfing, distress tolerance and the repair skills recovery keeps demanding.
Teen emotional storms. A skills group and individual work built for adolescents at full volume.
What DBT Actually Looks Like
Expect structure. You will learn a specific skill, practice it, and track where you used it and what happened. Diary cards sound clinical and quickly become the most honest mirror in the building.
Expect the dialectic in the room, too: your therapist will take your pain completely seriously and still hold the expectation that skills get used. Validation without change abandons you; change without validation insults you. DBT insists on both.
Skills stack. The person white-knuckling week two is often the person coaching a friend through a crisis by month six.
Common Questions About DBT
Dialectical Behavior Therapy: a skills-based, evidence-backed approach for intense emotion, built on mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness.
No. It was developed there and its skills help anyone whose emotions run hotter and faster than their tools.
CBT works mostly with what you think; DBT works mostly with what you do when feeling overwhelms thinking. Many people benefit from both.
The group is where skills get learned fastest, but individual DBT work stands on its own. We will recommend honestly.
Questions About Our Services
Yes. We accept Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, DMBA, EMI, PEHP, Select Health, UMR, United Healthcare and University of Utah plans, and TRICARE is coming soon. Participation varies by clinician, so we check your plan before your first session.
Our self-pay rate is $150 for a 60 minute session, the same for every therapist on the team.
That is what the free 15 minute call is for. Tell us what has been going on and we will tell you who fits, which approach we would start with, and when that person can see you.