Clinical Grand Round 3 - Refining Emotion Regulation When You Need It: advanced Emotion Regulation Skills for Employment and Self-sufficiency Using DBT Next Steps

After completing Standard DBT, many clients remain in need of advanced skills to find and maintain stable sources of employment and self-sufficiency; this workshop will equip providers with advanced DBT skills to meet this need for their clients. In this interactive experiential workshop, participants will learn innovative emotion regulation strategies to help clients who completed Standard DBT succeed in social, work/school, and self-management contexts. Panelists will introduce participants to the skills series of DBT Next Steps, based off of DBT-ACES (Comtois, Carmel, & Linehan, 2021), a novel, evidence-based second-stage treatment for graduates of Standard DBT who need skills for finding and maintaining employment and becoming more self-sufficient. The primary goal of the DBT Next Steps group skills curriculum is for advanced DBT clients to learn enough of the basics of behaviorism, problem solving, acceptance, and validation to largely become their own therapist - at least as it relates to general emotional stability.

The purpose of this workshop is to give clinicians concrete emotion regulation interventions to help clients effectively reach life-worth-living goals related to employability and self-sufficiency. Panelists will introduce participants to a range of expanded strategies to help clients effectively assess what’s working and what’s not while identifying the contexts where dysregulation is most likely to occur. Clinicians will learn additional skills to focus on identifying irritants and managing irritability. Finally, cognitive restructuring strategies and expanded progressive muscle relaxation procedures to reduce anxiety will be introduced.