Services

I offer comprehensive, adherent  Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) services for adolescents, young adults and families struggling with intense emotions, impulsivity and harmful behaviors, often including self harm and suicide attempts. DBT teaches clients and their families the skills necessary to regulate emotions, avoid self-destructive behaviors and patterns and improve interpersonal and family relationships. The overall goal of DBT is to help clients build a life worth living.  

An intake assessment will be completed with each individual interested in receiving DBT services.

DBT Individual Therapy
Clients meet once a week for individual sessions. The focus is on helping clients get control over the behaviors that are creating problems in their lives. With a dual focus on accepting clients exactly where they are  The focus of these sessions is to help clients further apply skills taught in group to their real life. In addition to the skills, a variety of other DBT tools are used to help clients discover problematic or ineffective patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Multi-Family Adolescent DBT Skills Group
In Multi-Family DBT Groups, clients and parents/caregivers attend group together. Groups typically have five families which allows for  a broad range of examples and input and  a yet remain small enough to be comfortable and interactive.   The skills group is run much like a class or seminar vs. group or family therapy.  The unique family format  allows teens and parents to learn together, develop a common language for working through difficulties and benefit from the experience of other families in the group.  There are groups for adolescents age 13 – 18 yrs old with a range of issues including a, emotion dysregulation, impulsive behaviors, self-injurious behaviors and a history of relationship and interpersonal difficulties. Clients are coached on ways to talk about their difficulties without being explicit and detailed about behaviors that maybe triggering to others.  Groups are co-lead by other intensively-trained DBT therapists.

The class teaches practical skills in the following five areas:

• Mindfulness
• Distress Tolerance
• Interpersonal Effectiveness
• Emotion Regulation
• Walking the Middle Path

I offer Multi-Family, Teen, and Young Adult DBT Skills Groups in two locations – San Jose, Ca and Palo Alto, Ca.  New families may join the group every five weeks at the beginning of a module, space permitting.   There are typically five families in the group

Palo Alto, Ca
Tuesdays
7 – 8:30 pm

San Jose, CA
Thursdays
7 – 8:30 pm

Adolescent DBT Skills Group
For those situations where it’s not possible or productive for teens to attend with a parent, I offer teen only groups with a parallel parent component.  Please contact me for me details on this type of group. 

Mondays   5:00pm in Palo Alto 
Thursdays 4:00pm in San Jose 

Telephone Coaching
When learning something new, it's helpful to have real-time help.  Clients are asked to call for skills coaching when they are in an emotional crisis and want some help using skills vs.engaging in harmful behaviors or behavior that will make the situation worse.

Consultation Team
Ongoing consultation and a team approach is a core component of adherent, effect DBT. I meet regularly with intensively-trained DBT consultation teams.

Close Collaboration with Other Health Professionals
As a DBT therapist, I collaborate very closely with other health care professionals to coordinate care.   This is a very active collaboration (vs. the occasional check in). DBT clients work incredibly hard to improve, and they need and deserve a team of caring professionals working just as hard on their behalf. 

DBT-Informed Family Therapy and Couples Therapy

Therapy is tailored to your relationship or family’s specific needs. Common areas of intervention include reducing patterns of harmful conflict and polarization, as well as strengthening relationship-enhancing behaviors such as accurate expression and validation.