Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Healing beyond binaries. Rooted in care. Designed for your liberation.
What Is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)?
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based therapeutic approach developed to support individuals in managing overwhelming emotions, reducing self-harming behaviors, and building a life worth living. At its core, Dialectical Behavior Therapy balances two essential truths: the acceptance of who you are and the commitment to change what causes you pain.
DBT is particularly effective for individuals navigating:
🌿 Emotional dysregulation
🌿 Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
🌿 Anxiety and depression
🌿 Suicidal ideation or self-harm
🌿 Identity-based trauma
🌿 Neurodivergent stress responses
Related Service: Learn about our Trauma Recovery Service, and read about what somatic therapy is and how it supports Queer Healing.
Your healing doesn't need to fit a binary. We reimagine Dialectical Behavior Therapy through a queer-affirming, trauma-informed, and liberatory lens.
Why DBT Matters for Queer and Trans Communities
Mainstream mental health care often asks queer, trans, and neurodivergent people to conform, mask, or shrink in order to “heal.” But true healing is expansive. It welcomes contradiction, honors complexity, and holds space for identities that exist beyond the edges of normativity. That’s what makes Dialectical Behavior Therapy such a powerful tool in queer and trans liberation.
A Queer Lens on DBT
At Velvet & Vine, we don’t treat your queerness or neurodivergence as the problem. We treat the systems that made you feel unsafe, unseen, or unlovable. Dialectical Behavior Therapy becomes a practice of reclaiming agency, building emotional capacity, and making values-aligned choices in the face of ongoing structural harm.
DBT offers structure and flexibility, boundaries and compassion. This mirrors the duality so many of us live with every day: being proud of who we are while managing the pain of rejection, invisibility, or trauma. That’s where the dialectic lives — in the both/and.
What to Expect from Dialectical Behavior Therapy at Velvet & Vine
Our queer-centered DBT services are offered in individual and group formats, depending on your preferences and needs. We create spacious, supportive, and deeply attuned environments where healing can unfold at your pace.
The Four Core Modules of DBT
🌿 Mindfulness
Learn to notice your emotions, thoughts, and body sensations without judgment. For queer and trans folks, mindfulness is not just a practice—it’s a reclamation of presence in a world that often tries to erase us.
🌿 Distress Tolerance
Develop strategies to get through emotional crises without making things worse. We focus on radical acceptance and skillful coping that respects your lived experience, not strategies that pathologize your pain.
🌿 Emotion Regulation
Understand your emotional landscape and learn how to respond—not react—to difficult feelings. This module supports folks who were never taught that their feelings mattered, let alone how to work with them.
🌿 Interpersonal Effectiveness
Build skills to set boundaries, ask for what you need, and navigate relationships with respect and self-respect. Especially powerful for people working through codependency, attachment wounds, or boundary violations.
How Dialectical Behavior Therapy Supports Identity and Intersectionality
Queer, trans, BIPOC, disabled, neurodivergent, fat, and other marginalized identities often exist in environments where chronic invalidation is the norm. DBT was originally developed to address chronic invalidation—making it inherently powerful for communities navigating multiple layers of oppression.
At Velvet & Vine, we adapt Dialectical Behavior Therapy to be:
🌿 Culturally responsive: Honoring the intersectional realities of race, gender, sexuality, class, and body size.
🌿 Neurodivergent-affirming: DBT can be modified to work with sensory needs, executive functioning challenges, or communication styles.
🌿 Consent-forward: Every skill, every session, and every shift is offered—not imposed.
We believe DBT is most powerful when it becomes a tool for embodied resistance. You’re not just learning skills to survive. You’re building a life rooted in joy, resistance, and possibility.
What Makes Our DBT Approach Different?
🌿 Queer-Liberatory Framework
We’re not just affirming. We’re actively deconstructing the harm done by cisnormative, heteronormative, and colonial narratives in mental health. Dialectical Behavior Therapy is offered here as a tool for reclamation, not normalization.
🌿 Trauma-Informed & Somatic Integration
We integrate somatic awareness and trauma-informed care into every module of DBT. Your body is not a problem to be solved. It’s a compass for healing. Somatic grounding practices and polyvagal-informed techniques are part of how we teach skills and help them stick.
🌿 Flexible, Adaptable, and Centered on You
Our DBT services aren’t one-size-fits-all. We co-create your treatment plan in collaboration, attuned to your sensory needs, your capacity, and your cultural context.
4. Relational Safety First
The foundation of Dialectical Behavior Therapy is the relationship between you and your clinician. We prioritize safety, consent, and attunement over rigid protocols. You are not a diagnosis. You are a person in process.
Is Dialectical Behavior Therapy Right for You?
You might benefit from DBT at Velvet & Vine if you:
🌿 Feel emotionally overwhelmed or reactive
🌿 Struggle with self-harm or suicidal thoughts
🌿 Want to better understand your emotions and triggers
🌿 Are living with complex PTSD or relational trauma
🌿 Are seeking skills to navigate intense or chaotic relationships
🌿 Want a structured therapy approach that still centers your autonomy
🌿 Are tired of being pathologized and want to be met with respect
And most importantly, if you’re looking for healing that doesn’t require erasing any part of yourself.
DBT as a Tool for Liberation
Dialectical Behavior Therapy is more than a clinical intervention—it’s a practice of becoming. For queer and trans people, especially those who’ve lived through trauma, rejection, or systemic harm, DBT can be a gentle but powerful way home to yourself.
At Velvet & Vine, we believe that healing is political, softness is sacred, and your wholeness is not up for debate. We are here to walk with you—not to fix you, but to help you hold yourself with care and courage.