dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) in New York
for the person who feels things intensely and is ready for that to stop running their life.
you're here because
You feel things deeply and always have.
The highs are real and the lows are real and when something hits, it hits hard. Sometimes harder than it seems to hit other people, faster than you can get ahead of it, in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t experience it the same way.
You’ve probably developed strategies like ways of managing the intensity, containing it, keeping it from showing too much. Some of those strategies work. Some of them have their own costs. And in the moments where the emotion comes faster than the strategy, things can go sideways in ways you’re tired of. DBT is built for this. Not to make you feel less but to give you more room inside the feeling, and more choice about what you do with it.
WHAT IT IS
dialectical behavior therapy in new york city
Dialectical behavior therapy was originally developed for people experiencing intense emotional dysregulation, the kind that felt life-threatening, that led to impulsive decisions, that made relationships volatile and exhausting. Over time, it became clear that the skills DBT teaches are useful for a much broader range of people such as anyone whose emotional intensity creates problems in their relationships, their work, or their sense of themselves.
The “dialectical” in DBT refers to the core tension the approach holds: the simultaneous truth of acceptance and change. You are doing the best you can with what you have and you can do better. Both are true at the same time. DBT doesn’t ask you to choose between them.
In practice, DBT is organized around four skill areas:
Mindfulness is the foundation of everything else. Learning to observe your experience without immediately reacting to it. Creating space between the feeling and the response.
Distress tolerance is for surviving the moments of intense emotion without making them worse. Not fixing the feeling, but getting through it without doing something you’ll regret.
Emotion regulation is for understanding how emotions work, what’s driving them, and how to influence them before they reach the point of overwhelm.
Interpersonal effectiveness is for navigating relationships with clarity and intention rather than being driven by the emotional state of the moment.
what it helps
what DBT works well for
DBT is most useful when emotional intensity is creating real problems in relationships, in work, in the quality of daily internal experience.
For relationship anxiety, DBT skills are often the most immediately practical part of the work. The flooding that happens during conflict, the impulsive responses that happen when something feels threatening, the aftermath of a dysregulated moment are exactly what DBT distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness skills address. The ability to stay with yourself in the hard relational moments, rather than either shutting down or escalating, is something that can be built.
For perfectionism and self-worth, DBT’s emotion regulation skills help with the specific emotional intensity that follows mistakes or perceived failures such as the shame spiral, the self-critical flooding, the inability to move on from something that didn’t go well. Building the capacity to feel the discomfort of imperfection without it taking over is some of the most practical work on this page.
For people-pleasing and boundaries, DBT’s interpersonal effectiveness skills are directly applicable because it teaches you how to ask for what you need, how to say no without the relationship collapsing, how to navigate conflict without either capitulating or escalating. These are learnable skills, not personality traits.
For family estrangement, DBT distress tolerance helps with the waves of grief, anger, and guilt that estrangement brings such as the moments where the feeling is so intense that it’s hard to think clearly about what you actually want. Getting through those moments without acting from the most dysregulated place is often what makes the longer work possible.
For existential dread and meaning, DBT’s mindfulness and distress tolerance skills help build the capacity to sit with the discomfort of not-knowing and to tolerate the uncertainty of a period of genuine transition without immediately reaching for something to fill the space.
who it helps
DBT through an intersectional lens
DBT is a skills-based approach, and skills are most useful when they’re understood in context. I don’t teach DBT skills as generic techniques to be applied uniformly. I work with each person to understand which skills are most relevant to their specific patterns, and what the cultural and relational context is that shapes how those patterns developed.
- For first-generation and immigrant clients, emotional intensity often developed in specific contexts such as the stress of navigating between cultures, the particular grief of displacement, the intergenerational transmission of unprocessed trauma. DBT skills are most useful when they’re understood as tools for managing what that context produced, not as corrections to a deficiency.
- For Asian American clients, there’s often a particular relationship with emotional expression because in many family systems, intense emotion was suppressed, managed, or treated as a liability. DBT’s emphasis on validation, which is the idea that emotions make sense given the context they developed in, is often a significant reframe for clients who learned early that their emotional experience was too much or not acceptable.
- For queer clients, emotional intensity is frequently connected to years of suppressing, hiding, or managing feelings that weren’t safe to express. The body holds what was suppressed, and it often surfaces later as intensity, as volatility, as a nervous system that’s been on alert for a long time. DBT skills help regulate a system that had good reasons to stay activated.
DBT works best alongside other approaches that address the deeper roots of the patterns the skills are managing. I typically pair it with attachment-based therapy to understand where the emotional patterns came from, cognitive behavioral therapy to work with the thought patterns that maintain them, relational therapy to practice new responses in the context of our relationship, and mindfulness-based approaches which are foundational to DBT itself and worth developing as a practice beyond the skill set.
meet your mindfulness therapist in nyc
hi, i'm kristie
a licensed therapist, supervisor, and consultant based in New York.
I know what it is to feel things at full volume and to have spent years building strategies to manage that. DBT skills are some of the most practical tools I offer, not because feeling less is the goal, but because having more room inside the feeling changes what’s possible.
WHAT CHANGES
what shifts when DBT in NYC is working
The changes in DBT work tend to feel like gaining access to yourself in moments where you previously lost yourself.
The flooding becomes more manageable. It doesn’t become absent, but it does become shorter. The wave still comes, but you start to be able to ride it rather than be taken under by it. You know it will pass because you’ve built the experience of it passing.
The gap between the feeling and the response grows. Even slightly. Even inconsistently at first. But the gap is where choice lives, and once it exists, it becomes something you can build.
Relationships start to feel safer and not because the other people have changed but because you trust yourself more in the hard moments. You know that if something gets activated, you have options besides shutting down or blowing up.
The shame that follows the dysregulated moments starts to quiet. Not because you never have them anymore, but because you understand them better, such as what triggered them, what they were about, what you can do differently next time. Th
fees
investment
Different challenges require different levels of support. Whether you’re exploring therapy for the first time, looking for ongoing support, or seeking focused guidance around a specific issue, there are multiple ways we can work together.
Therapy Session (45 Mins): Ongoing therapy designed to help you navigate challenges, understand patterns, strengthen relationships, and create meaningful change over time.
Therapy Intensive (90 Mins): An extended session that allows us to explore a specific issue in greater depth, helping you gain clarity and make progress without feeling rushed.
VIP Sprint (3 Hrs): A highly focused, deep-dive experience designed for people facing a significant challenge, transition, or decision. Together, we’ll identify what’s keeping you stuck, uncover underlying patterns, and create a clear path forward.
Session
$375
45 minutes
Intensive
$750
90 minutes
vip sprint
$1500
180 minutes
New here or not sure what you need?
I offer a free 15 min chat to talk through what you’re looking for and figure out whether this is a good fit.
