The Don't Let Your Emotions Run Your Life: How Dialectical Behavior Therapy Can Put You in Control

You can teach 4 year olds to count. You can teach an old dog to fetch. At 45 I thought there was no help for me. I just couldn't change. But this book helped me to learn the skills I needed to get along with myself my family and society. It is dry reading but keep at it and you will find a new person within you.

This is an amazing workbook. The first time I looked through it, I thought is was over-simplified and would not be of much use to me. But I was wrong. It teaches readers how to understand where their emotions come from, how to identify emotions that seem to come out of nowhere, and how to control how we react to those overwhelming emotions. It's indispensible for anyone who has Borderline Personality Disorder and truly wants to get better. It's also great for anyone who has difficult controling extreme emotional feelings. The workbook format makes this very easy to read. The exercises are very helpful and informative. Heck, some of them are even fun!

I've found this to be a very user-friendly, readable workbook. Interesting,informative and normalizing w/o unnecessary jargon or psychobabble. I'm going through it with a client who's learning what it means to be "borderline". The DBT principles are beautifully woven in. It is a great introduction to her of what a DBT group could offer her and a very helpful adjunct to our individual therapy, especially now while a DBT group is not an option for her.

I am finding this workbook to be an excellent hands-on experience for my patients who feel overwhelmed by their emotions. It opens with a concisely written strategic guide to understanding the role emotions play in behavior and moves on to some step-by-step tactical exercises. This book helps the patient and therapist have a common ground in discussing where the "rubber meets the road" in the role that emotions play in both mood and personality disorders. It saves many an hour fumbling around in therapy and trying to develop effective homework interventions.

DBT is a wonderful treatment for many people who become emotionally overwhelmed and try to ease their agony by doing things that just make life worse in the long run (like exploding or cutting themselves or getting smashed or ending an important relationship abruptly). This workbook makes many of Marsha Linehan's approaches (that have been proven useful in fancy research studies)understandable and useful to people who do not have a PHD in psychology.How cool is that?!