DBT is an effective skills-focused treatment that teaches you how to become aware of and effectively regulate your emotions so that you do not engage in harmful or unhealthy behavior, and to communicate your needs in a respectful way to yourself and another person. DBT allows you to achieve this by focusing on four core skills domains, including:

• Core Mindfulness Skills: Mindfulness helps you become aware of your thoughts, emotions, and urges. With greater awareness, you become equipped to learn how to manage them more effectively. Mindfulness teaches you to learn that internal experiences do not need to be acted upon, can be simply acknowledged, and that these experiences will dissipate in time. 
• Interpersonal Effectiveness: Interpersonal Effectiveness teaches you to think about what you most want to get out of an interaction with someone else and learn skills to make it more likely that you can achieve that goal. These skills teach you how to reduce distress in relationships and be assertive.
• Emotion Regulation: Oftentimes, when we feel at the most intense spectrum of our mood, we are unable to communicate effectively to get our needs met and achieve our goals. Emotion Regulation skills teach you how to reduce extreme fluctuations in your mood and improve your ability to manage your mood. Emotion regulation teaches you how to achieve a healthy balance in consciously managing the experience and expression of your emotion.
• Distress Tolerance: When we are in crisis, it can be difficult to know what to do or how to effectively handle the situation. Distress Tolerance skills teach you to soothe and distract yourself from a particular problem rather than dwelling on it and acting on harmful urges such as substance abuse and self-harm. These skills ultimately teach you how to survive crises without making the situation worse.