The part of DBT that outlasts any particular worksheet is the dialectic itself — the insistence that two things which look like they cancel each other out can both be entirely true. You are doing the best you can with what you have, and you need to build something more. Your reaction makes complete sense given your history, and it isn’t serving you now. Most of us were trained hard to pick a side. Picking a side is often the thing keeping people stuck.
Which is exactly where this meets the work with physical symptoms. Anyone living with chronic pain, or bladder and pelvic pain, or fatigue that no test accounts for, has been handed a forced choice: either this is real — structural, physical, in the tissue — or it’s psychological, which in practice gets heard as imaginary, or as somehow your fault. People fight to stay on the ‘real’ side of that line, and they are right to, because the other side is so routinely used to dismiss them.
The dialectic dissolves the choice. The pain is completely real, and it is produced by a nervous system that has learned to produce it. Not real ‘but’. Real and. There is nothing imaginary about pain the brain generates — it hurts exactly as much, because the machinery is the same machinery. Holding both halves at once is often what makes a symptom workable, where either half alone is a dead end: structural-only leaves you booking another scan, psychological-only leaves you carrying the blame for it.
What this actually is: DBT-informed individual psychotherapy, and DBT skills worked into individual sessions — emotion regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, mindfulness. Advanced DBT training through CAMH, with early clinical grounding in a fully comprehensive DBT programme working with people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
What it isn’t: comprehensive DBT. That’s a specific programme — individual therapy plus a weekly skills group, phone coaching between sessions, and a therapist consultation team — and it isn’t what’s offered here. There’s no certification through the DBT-Linehan Board of Certification either. If comprehensive DBT is what you need, it’s worth naming that in a consultation; a good referral is a better outcome than a poor fit.
Sessions: 25, 50, 80, or 110 minutes — in person in Newmarket, or virtually anywhere in Ontario. Fees and direct billing are on the fees page.
Psychotherapy works alongside medical care, not instead of it. How it goes depends on the person and what’s actually going on.