Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Ecock. Before we begin, I wanted to give you all a heads up on a training that's coming up this

April. I will be co-facilitating an experiential workshop called Psychedelic Practitioner

Immersives, Psychedelic Space Holding and Integration. This will be in Lyons, Colorado,

near Boulder, April 12th through the 16th, and I think this should be a really wonderful experience in training, so I'll put a link to the workshop details and registration in the show notes.

Today is the first in a two-part look at dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT.

This episode will focus on what DBT is and how it works.

Then in two weeks, we'll hear Daniel's story of how DBT helped him recover from a horrific

period of psychiatric suffering.

We might think of DBT as kind of a merger of cognitive behavioral therapy was Zen Buddhism.

DBT's founder, Marsha Linnehan, was institutionalized as an adolescent with what she later described as borderline personality disorder.

She survived her years of self-harm and suicidality, and eventually went on to combine her doctoral work

and psychology with her Zen meditation practice, and she created DBT.

DBT is probably best known for successfully treating self-harm and suicidality, particularly

in the context of complex PTSD and borderline personality disorders,

and primarily through building skills to cope with emotional dysregulation.

Today, I sit down with my colleague, Dr. Kelly Sondfeld, a psychologist and DBT expert here in

Northern Colorado. Kelly and I have collaborated together for years, and it was really wonderful

to create this episode with her. I learned a lot, and I know you well too.

Today I'm sitting here with Dr. Kelly Sondfeld. This is a real treat. As I mentioned a few

episodes ago, one of the unexpected joys of this podcast is that I get to sit down with some of my favorite

colleagues and learn from them.

And Kelly's been someone who I've collaborated with for years.

...