Learn Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills with quirky queers and cultural renegades.
Learn Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills with quirky queers and cultural renegades
We created our DBT courses because we wanted to build a community that wasn’t interested in:
Reinforcing harmful social norms around sexuality, gender, relationships and sex work.
Becoming more “normal”
Inflexibly applying skills
Do any of these sound like you?
- Your emotions feel out of control or completely inaccessible.
- You struggle to maintain friendships and romantic relationships, or the ones you have are filled with conflict or resentment.
- When you're really distressed you behave in ways that make things worse in the short or the long term.
- You're getting jerked around by your emotions and want to have more choice about how you behave.
We get it! We want to help you to find a more effective way!
If you’re a quirky queer or cultural renegade — like us — we know it can be really hard to know whether a particular therapist or skills group will be appropriate for you, especially when we live queer lives. When we looked for a community, we couldn’t find exactly what we were looking for, so … we created it!
Lots of folks feel like they might be a fit for our groups but aren’t sure if they are queer enough or quirky enough. If this is a space that appeals to you, we are pretty sure that you’re going to be a good fit. Many of the people in our courses are neurodivergent (sometimes with a formal diagnosis, sometimes self-diagnosed), trans or non-binary and/or prioritise relationships outside heterosexual and monogamous norms. But there are lots of kinds of cultural renegades – and we are here for most of them! (not for folks who think lawmakers should get to make decisions about other people’s bodies and choices or with bigoted views)
What they're saying:
WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE COURSE?
WEEKLY MEETINGS
Live zoom classes.
Learning materials
Workbooks, videos, and podcasts to support your learning.
COMMUNITY
A group of other quirky queers and cultural renegades & their closest people to learn alongside you.
SKILLS
Skills that give you more choices and control in your life.
WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE COURSE?
WEEKLY MEETINGS
Live classes.
Learning materials
Workbooks, videos, and podcasts to support your learning.
COMMUNITY
A group of other quirky queers and cultural renegades & their closest people to learn alongside you.
CHAT WITH THE COMMUNITY
A slack community where you can ask questions between sessions and share how things are working for you.
RELATIONSHIP TOOLS
Skills that give you more choices and control in your life.
Why should I learn DBT skills?
- DBT skills are clinically proven to reduce distress, depression, anxiety, and suicidality as well as to improve relationship quality.
- DBT understands the bio/psycho/social causes of distress and doesn’t judge us for experiencing it, so these skills often validate our emotions and recognise they are caused.
- The skills are simple to understand (if hard to fully integrate into life sometimes) and we have found them helpful in our own lives and think you will too (most of the time!).
- The DBT approach really centers our ability to be effective and make wise choices which centers our agency and values in building a life we experience as worth living.
READY to invest in changing your relationships with your emotions and the people around you?
DBT courses we run
INTERPERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS
The interpersonal effectiveness course will help you to navigate interpersonal relationships and work out how to balance your long-term objectives with the situation at hand. These skills can help you to revisit your values in relationships and to strengthen your connections with your closest people. You will be invited to consider your approach to solving interpersonal problems, explore whether it is serving you, and learn different ways of engaging when there is conflict.
DISTRESS TOLERANCE
DBT distress tolerance skills will help you cope with intense emotions and increase your ability to survive a crisis. You will learn greater confidence that you have the skills to survive intense emotions, ground yourself, and deal with the difficult parts of life effectively. You’ll also learn how accepting the situation as it is (even if it sucks) can help you make a change when you are stuck with perpetually challenging emotions.
EMOTION REGULATION skills
DBT emotion regulation skills help us get to know our emotions better so that we can be more effective at regulating them. We talk about our values around emotions and what intensifies them. These skills offer practical alternatives to rumination, which we know is terrible for mental health. They offer participants a way to gently explore their emotional reactions and experiences, which helps them make choices about what they do next. Because emotions love themselves and tend to perpetuate themselves, we will also work on how to problem-solve and change emotions when that is needed.
FAQS
Because they work. We have learned these skills and found them incredibly useful in our own lives and seen how they have improved the lives of people we have taught them to. We also know the evidence stacks up across different cultures, racial groups, age ranges, sexualities and class backgrounds. We know that learning DBT skills reduces distress, increases enjoyment of life and relationship satisfaction. Because we believe these skills to be particularly powerful and liberatory when taught by peers outside of institutions. We want these skills to be accessible to folks that find therapy hard to access – especially people who are trans, neurodiverse, sex workers and other quirky queers and cultural renegades.
We mean this expansively and we will not be policing identities. Anyone that is LGBTQ, a sex worker/performer and/or consensually non-monogamous certainly fits within our community. Many of us are neurodiverse, and this often links to our experiences of queerness in other parts of our life. We particularly welcome and center neurodiverse folks!
Anyone that doesn’t believe in structural oppression. It exists and it shapes our lives. We center that in our understanding of distress and how we work with emotional activation – so it isn’t going to work out if you’re not coming from the same place.
If you think “black lives matter” is a controversial statement, this isn’t the group for you.
We wouldn’t welcome anyone who identifies with TERF/gender critical ideology because we believe trans people know their own minds and bodies best. Similarly, we wouldn’t welcome anyone that thinks all sex workers need rescuing or who thinks that their work should be criminalised.
We will do our best to make accommodations when we know what folks need. We are disabled folks ourselves and have experience of asking for accommodations to be made and we know that can be very difficult. We have worked to make the course as accessible as possible, and would love to know what you need to make it work for you.
No. This is a place for learning skills. We recognize how many of us live with trauma and aim to operate in a trauma informed way. We have some guidelines about topics we avoid during our time together to keep the focus on learning skills. We think it is essential to have chances to work with and process trauma, and believe that many of the skills we will learn together are helpful in stabilizing mental health, which may make working with trauma in other spaces more effective.
This course is all about learning how to survive intense emotions and reduce emotional activation rapidly. You will learn to work out when you need to treat your emotion as the emergency, and a toolkit of emotional first aid tools.
This course teaches participants how to recognise, understand and regulate emotions so that they have more choices about how to manage day to day stressors and distressing events.
This course is about empowering us to handle interpersonal situations more effectively. This course invites you to reflect on the myths that hold you back in relationships and teaches you skills to be more assertive. We will talk about how to prepare for difficult conversations by creating scripts and anticipating pushback. These flexible and scientifically supported dialectical behavior therapy skills will help you to have clearer communication and more fulfilling relationships.
They are stand alone modules, but they do work best when used together. Afterall, it can be hard to have effective relationships if your emotions get in the way, and ineffective relationships can make it hard to manage emotions! They are connected, and so are the modules that we teach.