Family Support DBT Program

If you have a person with extreme emotion dysregulation in your family, YOU are on the frontlines.

You may find yourself constantly bombarded with anger outbursts you can’t identify the cause or origin of. You watch your loved one spiral day after day and anytime you offer a fix, they seem to spiral faster and further. You may fear coming home, not knowing which version of your loved one you are going to find there. While your loved one’s therapist or doctor gets to “set boundaries” and take breaks, you are never off duty. You need respite, validation, and answers.

St Louis DBT provides family programming to ANY family (all definitions and structures of families) who are hoping to grow and heal wounded relationships, learn how to understand one another, manage conflict and communicate effectively.

No matter how you are involved in your loved one’s treatment, research demonstrates that getting peer support for yourself, learning about the disorder(s), understanding the origins of problem behavior, and learning new ways to cope and support your loved one can improve outcomes, reduce relapse, and increase medication and treatment compliance.

Riding Out the Storm:

An Educational and Supportive Group for the Loved Ones of People with Borderline Personality Disorder

Current Class is now Full.

Be the first to hear about our next offering of this course by completing this short interst form. We will then be in touch as soon as we schedule the next class.

All Meetings are virtual via secure Zoom Platform, Mondays, 6:30-8:30PM CST

Cost Of Course

  • $25 registration fee to reserve your spot and process your registration.

  • Participants are enrolling in an 8 week course and payment will be collected even if a session is not attended. We offer a 5% discount when the course is paid in full up front.

  • $75/session for the first person, $570 when paid up front

  • $25/session to add a second adult family member, $760 for 2 people when paid up front

Families and loved ones of people in treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) often need support themselves.

Many have been blamed for their loved one’s diagnosis and do not feel that there is a safe and non-judgmental place to go for that support. At St. Louis DBT, we believe that families are the most effective tool for positive change. We believe families are intelligent, competent, compassionate, and capable of effecting major changes that could transform not only the identified patient, but also the dynamics of the family for generations to come.

You may be exhausted, angry, scared, hopeless, and overwhelmed. Don’t sit in this alone. There is power in numbers and there is empowerment in knowledge.

Understanding BPD and its origins is critical to living with it. Learning the skills your loved one with BPD is (or could be) learning in therapy is incredibly valuable in order to coach and support them in creating behavioral change. Incorporating new ways of validating their experience will lead to improved relationships and living conditions. In this group, we strive to help families and friends of people with BPD better understand the disorder and empower them to support their loved ones in helpful ways.

Our 8 week class is here to empower you through education and research surrounding BPD and how to best support your loved one who may be struggling with BPD, depression, and many other mental health diagnoses.

What will I learn from this class?

Knowledge is power. When we understand our loved ones and why they do what they do or say what they say, we have the power to respond in a way that is helpful rather than harmful. Participants in this class will learn more about the following:

  • Understand Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): Where it comes from and how BPD brains work differently.

  • Emotion Dysregulation: What it means and why it matters.

  • Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): How it helps in treating BPD.

  • Mindfulness: Exploring its role in impulse control, emotion regulation, and problem-solving.

  • Using Acceptance Skills, including validation to de-escalate volatile emotions and reactions.

  • Navigating Intense Emotions: Recognizing, responding, and de-escalating.

  • Positive Change Strategies: Reinforcement, punishment, extinction, and teaching effective coping mechanisms.

  • Shaping New Behaviors: Use behaviorism to change negative patterns

  • DBT Skills that assist people with BPD in the areas of Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Distress Tolerance.

  • Crisis Intervention: Responding to intense emotional states and finding support during difficult times.


Your Loved One does not need to be in treatment for you to enroll in this program.

Family Therapy

Family therapy builds on your strengths as a family unit. Every family has strengths, and it can be difficult to find them when you’re experiencing distress. You will work with your therapist on rediscovering those strengths, harnessing their power, and working together as a whole to find:

  • Understanding of the role of emotion in relationships

  • Validation of yourself and your family members

  • Strategies to increase wanted and decrease unwanted behaviors through reinforcement and validation

  • Acceptance of self and others

  • How to express what you mean clearly and effectively

  • Listen mindfully and with empathy

  • Understanding your loved one’s capabilities and how to coach them to use new skills to regulate emotions


Family consultation

STLDBT offers consultation for family members. If you have an adult child who depends on you for everything, a teen with behavior problems or a partner with Borderline Personality Disorder, CLICK HERE to schedule a free 15 minute phone consultation.

Our Family Therapy Philosophies

Strengths oriented: 

The therapist helps the family to identify their strengths and build on them so they can feel better about themselves and their family relationships.  In part, the therapist does this by modeling validation. Validation is the key to knowing that we are understood and we are understanding others.

cognitively- and behaviorally-focused:

The therapist will help you discover how your thoughts and emotions affect your behavior and how to make different choices in your relationships. Our thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions create our worldview, which can sometimes be a difficult place for our loved ones to live. Through family therapy, you can alter your thoughts and behaviors to be congruent with your desire to have healthy relationships.

homework:

We know you have busy lives and even taking the time for therapy can be a real stretch. We also know that families who work on skills outside of session are more likely to see change and benefit from therapy. That is why you will have the largest say over your homework. We tailor your homework to suit your needs by ensuring it is focused on your goals and relatively easy to implement in your current day-to-day lifestyle. Change happens in steps, so your homework will be those steps; not too little, not too big.

THERAPEUTIC neutrality:

In family therapy, the therapist maintains neutrality.  This does not mean the therapist does not call attention to patterns of behavior in one family member or the other when it is beneficial to the relationship.  So there will be times when a family member might feel discomfort at the individual attention but over the course of a session or many sessions the attention balances out and it will become evident that the therapist’s goal is supporting the shared goals of the family.