Build Resilience For a Balanced Life
The benefits of dbt for Adults
Benefits of dbt for Adults
For adults, life often brings a different set of challenges: work stress, relationship strains, parenting responsibilities, or unresolved trauma from earlier years. DBT offers adults a robust framework to enhance emotional resilience, improve life satisfaction, and achieve a sense of balance and well-being.
Distress Tolerance Skills
A primary benefit is Enhanced Distress Tolerance, which enables adults to manage chronic stress without experiencing burnout. In high-pressure careers or demanding family roles, skills like radical acceptance allow individuals to let go of unchangeable aspects (e.g., a difficult coworker) and focus energy on productive actions.
Emotional Regulation
Emotion Regulation is transformative for adults dealing with mood disorders or relational patterns rooted in past experiences. By identifying emotional triggers and using opposite action, adults can break cycles of avoidance or overreaction, leading to more stable moods and better decision-making.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Interpersonal Effectiveness shines in adult contexts, such as negotiating at work,
resolving marital conflicts, or parenting teens. Adults learn to express their needs
without resorting to aggression or passivity, resulting in deeper connections and a
reduction in feelings of isolation.
DBT-Thrive for adults
Our DBT-THRIVE programme at Glenbrook Practice is an 8-week skills-based course for adults.
Combining DBT with Life Navigation Skills to address real-world applications like career transitions and stress management.
Held in Cape Town’s Southern Suburbs, with an online version coming soon.
Evidence from randomised controlled trials, including those in the American Journal of Psychiatry, demonstrates DBT’s effectiveness in reducing symptoms of BPD, depression, and PTSD in adults, with lasting improvements in quality of life.
DBT also supports adults in building mindfulness into daily routines, promoting work-life balance and preventing relapse in mental health conditions. Ultimately, it fosters a dialectical mindset: accepting life’s imperfections while striving for growth, which leads to greater fulfilment.