DBT: Practical Life Skills Reinforced through Music Therapy (10 CMTEs)

You may have heard about DBT skills such as Wise Mind, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, or interpersonal effectiveness. But knowing the skills is one thing. Knowing how to teach and reinforce them through music therapy is another.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based treatment approach that teaches practical skills for managing emotions, coping with difficult situations, improving relationships, and creating meaningful behavioral change. As DBT has expanded across treatment settings and populations, music therapists are increasingly encountering clients who are learning and using these skills.

DBT Practical Life Skills helps you make the connection between DBT and your music therapy practice.

You’ll explore the four major DBT skills areas of Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness while learning music therapy interventions that can help clients experience, practice, remember, and reinforce those skills.

Through practical examples and intervention ideas, you’ll discover how music can make abstract concepts more experiential and accessible while supporting the work clients may already be doing within DBT-informed treatment.

You’ll leave with a stronger understanding of DBT skills and, most importantly, practical music-based interventions and ideas you can begin adapting for your own clients right away.

In this class, you will learn:

The foundations of DBT and the four major DBT skills areas: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness.
How DBT skills can address common challenges involving emotions, coping, behavior, and relationships.
How music therapy can be used to teach, experience, anchor, and reinforce DBT skills.
Practical music therapy interventions connected to specific DBT concepts and skills.
Ways to make DBT skills more experiential and accessible through music and creative processes.
How to adapt DBT-informed music therapy ideas for use with your own clients and clinical settings.
Practical interventions and resources you can begin incorporating into your music therapy practice.

If you’ve been interested in DBT but wondering what it could actually look like in a music therapy session, this course gives you a practical place to begin.

Learning Objectives

1.Participants will be able to define the 4 modules of DBT and name a skill in each module.

2.Participants will be able to list a music therapy intervention for teaching or reinforcing one skill in each of the 4 DBT skills modules.

3.Participants will be able to identify at least 1 population DBT can be used with.

4.Participants will be able to name 1 way they can integrate music therapy with DBT skills in their professional setting.

Prequisite:

Review the skills in Marsha Linehan’s book: Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder. or the new book DBT Skills Training Manual. DBT is used with a multitude of populations, not just borderlines. Either of these texts are a must read because it offers an underlying basis for therapists to be familiar with the DBT Skills.

Presenters:

This is a self study class with Deborah Spiegel MT-BC and Lindsey Landeck MT-BC. Deborah Spiegel is a DBT informed Music Therapist who was first introduced to DBT in 2001. After spending almost 12 years working as the music therapist and a DBT skills group leader in a DBT program at the Colorado Mental Health Institute, she created a how to book for therapists and training programs for music therapists to learn how to integrate DBT into their practice. She is author of the book Creative DBT Activities Using Music: Interventions for Enhancing Engagement and Effectiveness in Therapy (Jessica Kingsley 2020) and CEO of the Spiegel Academy.

Lindsey Landeck is a music therapist currently working in a psych hospital in Michigan, serving as co-therapist with her psychologist in their DBT skills groups. LIndsey’s psychologist has noticed that the patients seem to pay attention more and retain more when music therapy is integrated into the skills groups. They are involved in a research project to validate this!

CBMT Domain areas:

IID3 Collaborate with other professionals and/or family, caregivers, and personal network to design interdisciplinary

treatment programs.

IID10 Design experiences to generalize goals and objectives across settings, people, subjects, behaviors, or time.

IIIA2a-z Provide individualized music therapy experiences to address client’s

IIIA3a,c and 4ac Recognize how the following theoretical frameworks inform music therapy practice and Utilize the

following music therapy approaches to inform: behavioral cognitive

DBT: Practical Life Skills Reinforced Through Music Therapy is approved by the Certification Board for Music Therapists (CBMT) for 10 CMTEsContinuing Music Therapy Education credits. The Spiegel Academy, CBMT Approved Provider #P-106, maintains responsibility for program quality and adherence to CBMT policies

Class Description