What is DBT?
Getting Started
Current Clients
Location
Making a Referral
Resources
About US

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Center of San Diego

Services


Adult DBT program

We are one of the few clinics in Southern California offering full standard DBT with all of its necessary components. Weekly individual sessions focus on helping you understand and solve your problems and improve your coping, and phone calls help you apply skills to specific challenges that occur between sessions. DBT skills training sessions occur once per week in a structured group format, focused on helping you learn effective ways to manage your emotions, behaviors, and relationships. DBT is a team-based approach and therapists meet on a regular basis to provide therapist-to-therapist consultation to ensure that DBT therapists continue to provide the most effective treatment to even their most challenging clients. Click here for full description of DBT.


Stress & Anxiety Treatment Program

We offer cognitive-behavioral treatments (CBT) for anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and agoraphobia. We offer scientifically-validated CBT treatments and biofeedback-assisted emotion regulation training.


Biofeedback-assisted Emotion Regulation Training

We offer a 10-session emotion regulation training focused on resonant frequency slow abdominal breathing. During the first session we find your optimal breathing pace, known as your resonant frequency. Breathing slowly at the resonant frequency is effective at improving emotion regulation by activating the parasympathetic nervous system (opposite to the "fight or flight" response) and increasing physiological harmony. Optimal slow breathing results in lowered blood pressure and heart rate and a general sense of peace and well-being. Breathing at the resonant frequency has a much greater benefit than breathing at a rate even slightly slower or faster. The next several sessions focus on coaching you to maintain your optimal breathing pace, breathing smoothly from the abdomen, with minimal prompting. Heart rate variability biofeedback is utilized to provide personalized feedback about how exactly to breathe to maximize the emotion regulation response in your body. With each breath, you see on a computer screen the heart rate changes that occur with each breath, and learn to repeat your most effective breaths. In the final sessions, you practice slow breathing self-regulation in the presence of emotion triggers. Click here for full description.


Adolescent DBT program

We are the only clinic in Southern California offering full standard DBT with all of its necessary components for adolescents with muliple emotional disorders and severe problem behaviors. We accept adolescents as young as age 13. We offer individual DBT, group skills training, and biofeedback-assisted emotion regulation training.