The use of Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills in a clinical sample

Authors:

Emanuela Roder, Mauro Cavarra, Nicolò Gaj, Raffaele Visintini, Cesare Maffei

Published in:

Third ESSPD International Congress on Borderline Personality Disorder and Allied Disorders

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a severe disorder marked by a pervasive pattern of instability in affect, self-image, interpersonal relationships, and goal-directed behavior (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT; Linehan, 1993) is an evidence-based treatment for BPD, founded on the assumption that deficits in self-regulation strategies contribute to the misery of patients’ life. Therefore, DBT program is about promoting a reality-oriented and dialectic thinking by teaching and coaching adaptive behavioral skills, grouped into four modules: mindfulness (stay in the present effectively and without judgment), emotion regulation (identification and management of emotional states), distress tolerance (cope with overwhelming emotions and unchangeable events), and interpersonal effectiveness (balance self-respect and relationship importance). The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Ways of Coping Checklist (DBT-WCCL; Neacsiu et al., 2010) was developed to measure coping strategies from Linehan’s perspective. It was developed adding items specific for DBT skills to the Revised Ways of Coping Checklist (RWCCL; Vitaliano et al., 1985) and it was composed by three subscales: the DBT Skills Subscale, assessing DBT skills, the Dysfunctional Coping Subscale I, a general dysfunctional coping factor, and the Dysfunctional Coping Subscale II, the tendency to blaming others; the last two subscales were summarized in the Dysfunctional Coping Subscale. The psychometric properties of the test were satisfactory in the validation study.