Orlando Therapist: Understanding Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
Orlando Therapist: Understanding Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
Written by: Lauran Hahn, LMHC
Do you feel constantly overwhelmed by your emotions? Even though you give your best, you find it nearly impossible to control how you feel or react. You feel stuck in fear, worry, and stress, weighed down by painful memories you can't shake off. At times, anxiety feels all-consuming. Racing thoughts that come out of nowhere leave your heart pounding and your chest tightening, and create a sense of impending doom. Your moods change often and rapidly.
Or perhaps trauma has left you feeling disconnected from yourself and others. You feel trapped in survival mode, even long after the danger has passed. All in all, it feels like your emotions control you rather than the other way around. You might find yourself reacting in ways you don't understand, whether by shutting down, lashing out, or desperately seeking reassurance, only to feel ashamed afterward. Even though you ache to connect, relationships feel either fragile or too intense.
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) was developed for people who experience their emotions overly intensely. At Mindful Living Counseling in Orlando, we work with individuals who feel overwhelmed by trauma, anxiety, and intense emotions. As Orlando therapists, we integrate DBT-informed practices to help clients feel more in control, connected, and capable of facing life's challenges.
The Origins and Framework of DBT
Dialectical behavior therapy is a skills-based, structured talk therapy that helps you regulate emotions, build distress tolerance, and improve relationships while learning how to stay grounded in the present moment. Like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), DBT helps you change unhelpful ways of thinking and behaving. However, dialectical behavior therapy also focuses on helping you accept who you are.
DBT was initially developed by psychologist Dr. Marsha Linehan in the late 1980s to help individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Over time, DBT proved to be incredibly effective for other challenges, too, including:
Trauma and PTSD
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Self-harm and suicidal thoughts
Emotion dysregulation
What makes DBT unique is its balance between acceptance and change. DBT puts emphasis on dialectics, the idea that two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time. What does this mean in practice? It means that you learn how to validate your current experience (without judgment) while also working toward new ways of coping, responding, and relating to others. For example, you can feel afraid and still take a step toward healing. You can feel overwhelmed by your emotions and still be doing your best. You can love someone and feel hurt by them.
DBT doesn't ask you to pretend everything is fine. Instead, it offers practical tools to help you accept what is while gently working toward what could be.
An Orlando Therapist Helps You Understand Four Core Skill Areas of DBT
DBT is practical and structured. It focuses on real-life tools that help you manage tough emotions, improve communication, and respond to stress in healthier ways. Instead of just talking about your problems, DBT teaches you how to actively cope with them.
Dialectical behavior therapy is organized around four core skill areas:
Mindfulness
Emotion regulation
Distress tolerance
Interpersonal effectiveness
Mindfulness
Mindfulness practice is at the heart of DBT, teaching you to stay present and aware when your thoughts become unproductive or overwhelming. This practice of staying present and aware of the moment helps you observe your thoughts, feelings, and sensations without getting swept away by them. This helps interrupt the spiral of worry and restore calm.
Emotion Regulation
This means having a better understanding of your emotions. You become more aware of your feelings, better at naming your emotions, and have more control over them. Emotion regulation teaches you to navigate intense feelings without feeling out of control.
Distress Tolerance
Distress tolerance involves understanding and managing your emotions in those moments when life feels unbearable without reaching for harmful behaviors.
Distress tolerance skills are designed for those moments when life feels unbearable. Whether you're coping with flashbacks, intense mood swings, panic, overwhelming anger, or emotional pain, these tools help you feel empowered to ride the waves of your emotions instead of letting them swamp you.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Trauma or anxiety can deeply affect your relationships. While you know your relationship is supposed to feel like a safe space, being emotionally close to someone is also when you feel most vulnerable. And that kind of exposure can feel unbearable. You want to let your guard down. But the moment you start to lower your defenses, it's like the past floods back in—memories, sensations, emotions—all rising to the surface at once. It can feel too risky, too overwhelming. So instead of opening up, you shut down. And then comes emotional disconnection, causing you to feel guilty, ashamed, or that you're somehow failing both your loved one and yourself.
Interpersonal effectiveness helps you set boundaries, be vulnerable, and ask for what you need while maintaining respect for yourself and others.
Together, these four areas form the foundation of DBT. Each is designed to address specific challenges that show up when emotions run high. The goal isn't to eliminate emotions but to learn how to work with them rather than feeling ruled by them.
Why DBT Is So Helpful for Trauma Survivors
If you've experienced trauma, you know how your inner world can feel chaotic. How difficult it can be to feel safe in your body, with other people (even those you love and feel close to), or even in your own thoughts. You might be constantly on high alert, easily triggered by everyday situations. Trauma changes how we experience emotions and relationships. It can leave you feeling unstable, misunderstood, or like you're always either too much or not enough. DBT offers a clear, step-by-step path to emotional stability and inner safety, helping trauma survivors heal and feel grounded.
One of DBT's core strengths is its focus on structure and predictability, which can be incredibly comforting when you feel unsafe and confused. Dialectical behavior therapy at Mindful Living Counseling in Orlando helps you:
Understand and manage intense emotions without letting them overwhelm you.
Ground yourself when you're feeling triggered so that you react with resilience and confidence.
Handle your distress without avoiding what upsets you, hurting yourself, or having emotional meltdowns.
Improve your ability to trust others and connect safely in relationships.
Dialectics teaches us that we don't have to choose between extremes. You can hold space for the complexity of your experience—and that's where real healing begins.
Many of our anxiety therapy and trauma therapy clients at Mindful Living Counseling in Orlando are trauma survivors. We often see them begin to reclaim their sense of agency through DBT-informed therapy. The process is not always easy, but it is profoundly transformative. With the right support, it's possible to move from a place of emotional survival to one of grounded, intentional living.
An Anxiety Therapist in Orlando Explains How DBT Supports People with Anxiety
Anxiety doesn't just show up in your mind—it takes over your whole system. Does your chest tighten when you walk into a crowded room? Perhaps you find it impossible to sleep because your thoughts are spinning out of control late at night. You know there is no real danger, and you want to relax, but your body feels stuck in the same alert mode, like it's always bracing for something bad to happen.
You might find yourself asking, "What is wrong with me? Why do I feel like I'm always on the verge of falling apart, even when I know I'm okay?" The truth is, nothing is wrong with you, and you're not alone. Anyone who has experienced anxiety has felt this way at some point. It's because anxiety doesn't just live in your mind—it shows up in your body, in your relationships, and in the way you move through the world. It can keep you locked in patterns of overthinking, people-pleasing, perfectionism, or avoidance.
Let me explain this a bit more clearly. Anxiety is your nervous system's way of trying to protect you, even when there's no real danger. Our DBT therapists at Mindful Living Counseling offer concrete tools to help calm that internal alarm system, so you can move through the day with more steadiness and less fear.
DBT meets anxiety with a practical, compassionate approach. Instead of simply telling you to "calm down" or "let it go," you learn how to recognize the early signs of anxiety, both obvious (such as the racing thoughts) and those subtle signals your mind and body send (such as zoning out in a meeting or sudden heaviness in your body). And you begin to respond in ways that are grounding instead of reactive.
By practicing skills regularly, you strengthen your ability to pause, reflect, and choose how you want to respond, rather than feeling like your anxiety is in control. Your anxiety therapist will guide you through the four modules, helping you develop tools you can practice in real life to help with anxiety:
Mindfulness
The practice of being present here and now helps you avoid ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. Your therapist might lead you through a guided meditation to help you become aware of your thoughts, ground yourself in the present moment, or visualize a peaceful scene. These meditations can reduce anxiety by calming your nervous system, shifting your focus away from worries, and helping you walk away from a situation that triggers anxiety instead of pushing through to the point of overwhelm.
Distress Tolerance
You build skills to cope with emotional surges—to ride the wave of anxiety—until it starts to fade, without reacting impulsively or avoiding feelings when they become overwhelming. These small but intentional changes help you build resilience and confidence in managing challenging moments rather than avoiding them.
Emotion Regulation
DBT helps you understand your triggers and learn how to change how you respond. You might notice that, while many of your symptoms did not change or disappear, you now manage them much better. Instead of feeling swamped by anxiety, you feel more in control.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Through this DBT module, you develop tools to communicate clearly, set boundaries, and reduce the social stress that often fuels anxiety. Over time, you're not just reducing anxiety symptoms but building a stronger, more flexible response to life's stressors.
What a DBT-Informed Section Looks Like
Expect not just to talk about what's hard during your DBT-informed therapy session. Instead, you'll learn and practice real skills to handle it. Your therapist will help you track symptoms to spot patterns, then work together to apply DBT tools at the moment. It's an active, collaborative process that helps you build confidence and emotional balance, one step at a time.
DBT at Mindful Living Counseling in Orlando
At Mindful Living Counseling in Orlando, we guide clients through this process of acceptance and change at a pace that feels safe and comfortable. Our therapists weave DBT skills into therapy for anxiety, trauma, and emotional overwhelm. While we don't offer full DBT programs, our integrative approach draws from DBT principles alongside other powerful therapies like IFS, EMDR, and somatic work. This allows us to tailor treatment to your unique needs while we help you build the tools for lasting change.
Is DBT the Right Fit for You?
DBT can offer relief if you react with more intensity than you'd like and struggle to express your feelings calmly during conflict, avoid situations that provoke intense emotions, or shut down emotionally to protect yourself. It can be a great fit for people who find it difficult to set boundaries or feel stuck in cycles of overwhelm or fear of abandonment in relationships. We'll help you decide whether DBT is right for you or whether another approach from our integrative toolbox might be better.
Ready to Start With an Orlando Therapist?
DBT can help you build the skills to feel more grounded, connected, and in control—even when life feels intense. If you're ready to explore this kind of support, contact us today to learn how we can help you.
Fill out our New Client Consultation form here.
Once you complete the form, you’ll be invited to schedule a 15-minute phone consultation with one of our Orlando therapists.
Get ready to start healing!
Additional Orlando Therapist Resources
Orlando Therapist: Understanding Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Orlando Anxiety Therapist Shares: How to Handle Life's Curveballs
Orlando Therapist: 5 Things Your Therapist Wants You to Know
Orlando Therapist: Understanding Therapy Jargon
An Anxiety Therapist Shares Everything You Need to Know About Anxiety
Other Therapy Services Offered at Mindful Living Counseling in Orlando
At Mindful Living Counseling, we offer a variety of therapy services to address diverse needs! Our options include EMDR therapy, Trauma Therapy, Teen Therapy, Couples Therapy, Eating Disorder Therapy, and toxic relationship therapy. Additionally, we provide guided meditations.
Orlando Therapist Lauran Hahn
Lauran Hahn, LMHC, owns Mindful Living Counseling located in Orlando. She focuses on assisting clients in managing anxiety and trauma through her EMDR Intensives. Lauran holds certifications as a Sensorimotor Psychotherapist and an EMDR Therapist, and she is also recognized as an EMDRIA Approved Consultant. Her objective is to help people feel calm and develop stronger bonds in their relationships.