Dbt Skills System
Heike Fallago
The Skills System is a user-friendly set of emotion regulation skills, designed to help people of various ages and abilities, manage emotions. It helps us be aware of our current moment, think through the situation, and take goal-directed actions that align with our values.
In therapeutic settings, the Skills System offers practitioners and their clients a tangible skills-set that is accessible to people with diverse mental health and learning profiles. It is a therapeutic tool that can be used in conjunction with comprehensive treatments such as DBT, Motivational Interviewing, Positive Behavior Supports, and Trauma-Informed therapies.
E-Learning: The Skills System Course 1, Skills Basics, teaches the nine core skills and System Tools of the Skills System. Course 2, Skills Coaching Strategies, helps staff and others learn how to provide skills coaching for the people they work or live with. Both courses have short, fun videos, practice exercises, and many visual aids to make learning engaging. Each course takes approximately 2.5 hours to complete. Click below to learn more.
Skills System Text: The Skills System textbook (2016) contains a detailed 12-week group for clinicians who want to run skills groups for vulnerable learners, as well as, 150 downloadable and printable Skills System handouts. The handouts can be used in conjunction with the e-learning to enhance that learning experience. Here is a link to Guilford Press to buy the Skills System text.
Training: The treatment developer, Dr. Julie Brown, provides 2-Day live online Skills System Instruction Trainings that help practitioners learn how to teach skills to individuals who experience behavioral health and learning challenges.
The Skills System is used with many populations, in various types of settings. The model is used by individuals, families and by treatment providers. People with and without mental health/learning challenges use the Skills System model to improve emotion regulation capacities. It is implemented with youth who experience behavioral control problems, transitional-aged youths, adults, and geriatric populations. The model is designed to be accessible to diverse populations, such as people with severe mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and/or autism spectrum disorder. Practitioners providing treatment in the areas of substance abuse, forensic services, and crisis supports also use the model.
Model Integration: When implementing the Skills System, it is necessary to integrate the skills concepts with other models that an agency uses. The Skills System plays well with others! Although the Skills System was specifically designed to be used within DBT, it can offer a tangible emotion regulation skill-set within motivational interviewing, trauma-informed approaches, and positive behavioral supports.
The DBT skills concepts were created for individuals who experienced high levels of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dysregulation. Unfortunately, the Standard DBT skills curricula are not accessible for people with significant learning challenges. Cognitive load demands are too high to allow for learning, free recall, and generalization in the natural environment. Most specifically:
The goal in creating the Skills System was to use a DBT-based framework that helped people experience a dialectical synthesis (the ability to be in pain AND be effective at the same time) versus polarization during emotional, cognitive, behavioral, relationship, and self-processes in complex life contexts.
Simultaneously, the framework had to be accessible for (1) Individuals diagnosed with moderate/mild ID (who often have limited reading abilities and impaired executive functioning) and (2) simple enough for collateral support providers to learn given the limited time/resources that are often available for training. Both of these groups had to be able to learn essential concepts, be able to recall them under-pressure, assemble adequate skills chains to manage the span of a dysregulation emotion, and generalize these capacities into diverse, real-life contexts.
This process involved de-constructing essential DBT processes, re-labeling, and reorganizing the concepts in a way that (1) provided effective emotions regulation strategies in the re-constructed form and (2) minimized extraneous cognitive load demands. The work of James Gross, PhD (editor of the Emotion Regulation Handbook, 2007, 2014) was integrated to ensure that all aspects of emotion regulation processes were addressed in the Skills System model; Dr. Gross also reviewed and endorsed the Skills System prior to the publication of this model. The work of Sweller (Cognitive Load Theory, 1988, 2010) guided the design of both the Skills System model and teaching strategies.
Dr. Jana Dreyzehner MD Coordinated the translation of the E-Learning videos into American Sign Language (ASL). Dr. Dreyzehner wrote the following description of the collaboration that made this amazing process possible. Thank you all! Development of ASL Translation Our Deaf Services clinical team at Life Connect Health has been [...]
The Spanish language option is now available on the E-Learning dashboard. Once the person chooses Spanish, they can: Watch Spanish subtitled videos. Complete exercises in Spanish. Download the skills map, skills cards, and skills posters that are in Spanish. Many thanks to the DBT team in Argentina and in [...]
The Skills System workgroup of practitioners who work with children completed a set of adapted handouts for Elementary children and High School students. The worked examples were adapted to be age-appropriate and relevant for these age groups. If you have purchased the Emotion Regulation Skills System text (2016), you [...]
Cancelation/Refund Policy: To cancel your registration, please email Julie Brown at [email protected] at least 24-hours prior to the scheduled event to receive a full refund. People who cancel within 24-hours of the event or who fail to attend will not receive a refund.
The E-Learning is a great way to learn the Skills System! Course 1. Skills Basics and Course 2. Skills Coaching Strategies each take approximately 2-3 hours to complete and can be accessed on any device.
Please Note: There are restrictions in the Terms of Use of Clinician Memberships. These are for outreach only. Programs are not allowed to train their in-house staff with Clinician Memberships. Staff must be trained on Group Memberships. Violating the terms of use will result in the termination of E-Learning access.
Enhancing the E-Learning Experience: If you would like to dive deeper into learning Skills or you would like to help others learn the Skills System, it may make sense to get the Skills System textbook. When you purchase the book, you can download 150 pages of handouts that can be printed for yourself, family, or caseloads. Each lesson in the Skills Basics course lists page number references to these handouts, so that the user can complete worksheets to deepen personal learning for each lesson.
To keep prices affordable, interior pages are printed in black and white, unless color is requested at an additional charge. To preview our products, download our E-Packet PDF containing sample pages from each level. To help you decide which products you will need, download the Victus Scope and Sequence.
The Core Teacher Edition of the Victus Study Skills System offers clear, concise lessons for each of the three foundational cornerstones students will learn. Although the basics of the course can be taught in five one-hour sessions, reinforcement and integration into actual class material will increase the amount of time spent.
The Student Workbook is designed to accompany the Core Teacher Edition. It is easy to use and provides opportunities for the student to practice the new skills in the workbook. This workbook has been used by thousands of students throughout the United States.
The Student Planner is our unique product that provides a method of daily reinforcement in setting priorities and arranging time around them. Customization for schools and large groups is available. The Planner is designed to be used by students in Levels 2, 3 and 4.
The Level 3 Power Point is used with groups because it provides an added visual reinforcement of the student workbook blanks filled in. It utilizes attractive slides to capture the attention and to engage the students.
The video shows the process in action and is a great reinforcement. Filmed in the classroom by professionals, this video shows our teachers actually teaching the 10 lessons of Level 3 to students and teachers. Although some details (page numbers , etc) differ from those in the workbooks, the 10 lessons are the same in the video and workbooks. The interactions students see in the video are a wonderful supplement.
This booklet is used by adults who want help in applying this unique results-oriented system in their own lives. It has been taught to countless adults who have found themselves held captive by the tyranny of the urgent, seldom finding time for the priorities they so wish to live.
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