Brief Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to Reduce Emotional Dysregulation: A Single Case Study

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201125.014How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Borderline Personality Disorder, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Emotional Dysregulation

Abstract

Emotional dysregulation is a major characteristic of borderline personality disorder (BPD) reflecting the affective instability, extreme and uncontrolled anger, and chronic feelings of emptiness. Individuals who experience major emotional dysregulation problems often exhibit maladaptive behaviors, such as self-harm or suicidal behavior. Statistically, approximately 70% of people with BPD do self-harm due to emotional dysregulation. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is an effective intervention for reducing problems in regulating emotions. The primary focus of brief DBT is to teach clients how to actively regulate emotional responses. Therefore, this study aimed to examine whether the “Brief DBT” intervention can improve the ability of emotional regulation in order to reduce the self-harm behavior and suicidal ideation. This is a single case study and conducted to a 20-year-old female college student with self-harm problems to release her negative emotions and had high suicidal ideation. The intervention was conducted in six sessions, including the pre- and post-tests. The first session was conducted to introduce brief DBT interventions and made clients recognize their strengths and weaknesses. The second to fifth session were intervention sessions to identify negative thoughts and feelings that arise, accept negative feelings and thoughts, explore fun events and life goals to grow positive emotions, and explore ways available when feeling depressed. The sixth session was the termination session. Suicidal thought was measured using the scale of suicidal ideation, where a score of ≥6 was used as a cutoff threshold for the clinically significant suicidal ideation. Qualitative data were also collected through observation and interviews. These results show that comparing pre- and post-test scores in the suicide ideation score decreased by 13 points. Brief DBT can make clients reduce their emotional dysregulation. The client recognizes, accepts, and manages her emotion; therefore, she does not dominate with negative emotions. The clients also learn to increase her positive emotions by getting to know herself more. Furthermore, she also reported that her suicidal thoughts have diminished and did not commit self-harm.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ni Putu Mayda Anggarini Artana
AU  - Lifina Dewi Pohan
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/11/27
TI  - Brief Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to Reduce Emotional Dysregulation: A Single Case Study
BT  - Joint proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Intervention and Applied Psychology (ICIAP 2019) and the 4th Universitas Indonesia Psychology Symposium for Undergraduate Research (UIPSUR 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 169
EP  - 179
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201125.014
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201125.014
ID  - Artana2020
ER  -