Dialectical Behavior Therapy Wellness Planner: 365 Days of Healthy Living for Your Body, Mind, and Spirit (The Borderline Personality Disorder Wellness Series, 1)

Therapist, Amanda L. Smith, LMSW, is founder of Hope for BPD where she provides treatment consultation for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and case management for clients around the world. She also publishes My Dialectical Life--a daily email dedicated to Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills.

Her career in mental health began when she served as the executive director of the Pinellas County, Florida affiliate of the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI). In 2007, she founded Florida Borderline Personality Disorder Association—a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to providing advocacy, education, and support for persons diagnosed with BPD and their families.

Amanda received her MSW at Baylor University and is currently working as a DBT therapist.

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Wellness Planner is a helpful tool to use as you work toward creating a healthier, more meaningful life―a life worth living―by balancing acceptance and change.

You can use it to:
Track your emotions and behavior
Monitor your progress
Bring structure into your day.

Use the Planner to consistently track and report on your journey to healing. It's a journal that helps you keep everything in one place, and keeps you focused on where you are and where you want to go.

In Part 1, discover the value and details of mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. Next, in Part 2, take the Self-Care Assessment and then get started with the Daily Self-Care Tracker. After thirty days, take a new Self-Care Assessment to see how you've grown!

Start on any date with the monthly, weekly, and daily calendars designed to help you plan for success as you practice skills and make a commitment to daily self-care.

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Wellness Planner is a helpful tool to use as you work toward creating a healthier, more meaningful life—a life worth living—by balancing acceptance and change.

You can use it to:
Track your emotions and behavior
Monitor your progress
Bring structure into your day.

Use the Planner to consistently track and report on your journey to healing. It's a journal that helps you keep everything in one place, and keeps you focused on where you are and where you want to go.

In Part 1, discover the value and details of mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. Next, in Part 2, take the Self-Care Assessment and then get started with the Daily Self-Care Tracker. After thirty days, take a new Self-Care Assessment to see how you've grown!

Start on any date with the monthly, weekly, and daily calendars designed to help you plan for success as you practice skills and make a commitment to daily self-care.

I love dialectical behavior therapy. As a highly sensitive person who experiences my emotions intensely, learning dialectical behavior therapy (or DBT) has made a profound and lasting difference in my own life.

Now that I'm a social worker, I continue to use the skills I learned in DBT every single day but I'm also in the position of sharing my joyful enthusiasm for this compassionate and highly[effective treatment with others.

DBT was originally developed by University of Washington psychologist Marsha Linehan to help people who were diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. However, the treatment has now been adapted for individuals suffering from depressions, anxiety, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, addictions, and even attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

While DBT is based in cognitive behavior therapy (or CBT), Dr. Linehan found that a key to her clients' success was to balance both acceptance and change in their lives.

It was because of this reason that she added mindfulness, validation strategies, and dialectics to standard CBT. Because the goal of DBT is to help people create lives worth living, the treatment can be helpful to anyone interested in making positive and lasting changes

This wellness planner is intended to be a helpful tool to use as you work toward building a healthier and more meaningful life using your DBT skills. You can use it to keep track of your emotions and behaviors while monitoring your progress towards your recovery goals. It's also designed so that you can start on any date, so you can begin right away.

Remember: There is no substitute for working with a licensed mental health professional. This planner is not intended to take the place of an adherent dialectical behavior therapy treatment program.

For a complete list of skills, please see the second edition of Marsha Linehan's DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets. This book is published by The Guilford Press and is listed in the resource section at the end of this planner.

Above all else, don't ever give up.