Mastering Creative DBT Group Exercises: Your Ultimate Guide

The Power of Group in DBT

While individual therapy provides a personalized space for exploring personal challenges, group work in DBT adds another dimension. Sharing, practicing, and receiving feedback alongside others with similar struggles creates a powerful sense of community and validation.

We know that individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) can benefit significantly from DBT by learning to regulate their emotions and improve relationships. This support network fosters a feeling of shared understanding, normalizing the challenges, and promoting resilience.

By witnessing others’ journeys, you’re reminded that you’re not alone, which fuels hope and encourages commitment to personal growth. Practicing these skills with peers provides valuable opportunities for feedback, observation, and support as you work towards a life that’s more aligned with your values.

Exploring the Core Modules

DBT group exercises typically cycle through the four core DBT modules: mindfulness, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotional regulation. Each module provides you with distinct skill sets, all intertwined and supporting each other to cultivate a more balanced and fulfilling life.

While each skill set offers valuable tools individually, it’s the integration and practice of all four, that empower you to effectively manage life’s inevitable ups and downs.

1. Mindfulness Exercises

A cornerstone of DBT, mindfulness emphasizes paying attention to the present moment without judgment. Mindfulness observing is not just observing what is going on around us though; it’s about watching your thoughts and feelings come and go, without fighting or pushing them away, and being aware of your five senses to experience what is happening around you.

These are some common mindfulness exercises practiced in groups:

• Mindful Breathing: Focusing on the sensation of your breath can be calming.
• Body Scan Meditation: You systematically pay attention to different parts of your body, noting any sensations or tensions without judgment.
• Mindful Eating: Instead of gobbling down your food, mindful eating invites you to savor each bite and be fully present during a meal. For example, using all five senses you take in all the various details and flavors of a simple food – like a raisin, appreciating every moment of its aroma, texture, and taste. This activity illustrates the power of redirecting attention, even amidst intense urges, in a non-judgmental way.

Remember, it’s okay if your mind wanders. Gently guide your attention back to the object of your focus. With practice, you build your capacity to be more present.

2. Distress Tolerance Exercises

Life throws curveballs, and distress tolerance exercises in DBT equip you with practical coping skills to navigate through these rough patches. Distress tolerance is the ability to acknowledge and endure challenging feelings without engaging in destructive behaviors like substance abuse or self-harm. Distress tolerance involves both:

• Crisis Survival Skills
• Acceptance Skills

Crisis Survival Skills include Distraction, Self Soothe, IMPROVE the moment, and Pros and Cons, and aim to get us through the current distress, without creating more problems. This set of skills can sometimes make you feel better but that’s not necessarily their purpose. They do however place us in a much better state to problem-solve when things are calmer.

Acceptance skills include the skill set of Willingness versus Willfulness, Turning the Mind, and the concept of Radical Acceptance. All Acceptance Skills can help us recognize, and sit with uncomfortable truths that we can’t change; at least not right now anyway.

It’s through implementing the Acceptance skills for those events, feelings, and facts that we don’t like that can help move us from pain to discomfort and allow us to acknowledge truth, in a nonjudgemental way. The sooner we accept what can’t be changed the less distress and suffering it causes us.

3. Emotional Regulation Exercises

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) emotion regulation involves gaining the capacity to change or regulate our experience of distressing emotions. We look to: identify our emotions, name and acknowledge the many nuances and ways they are presented to us, explore what action urges they can generate for us to engage in, and notice and reflect upon whether or not those behaviors work for us, or if they instead lead us to unwanted outcomes.

Emotional regulation teaches us that:

• Emotions aren’t inherently bad, even the difficult ones.
• Trying to avoid emotions completely is impossible, and unhelpful, and can lead to a buildup of suppressed emotions and potential “emotional explosions” when you’re finally unable to hold them back.
• Developing and practicing emotion regulation can be empowering and lessen our experience of long-term distress and suffering.

DBT group exercises allow you to examine common myths about emotions that may cause greater distress, by acknowledging the validity of their presence and exploring how they function. Often we make incorrect judgments about the presence of our emotions and by recognizing and reframing them in more useful terms we gain some freedom.

Some emotional regulation strategies practiced in DBT groups are:

• Emotion Pictionary: Similar to the standard game, emotion Pictionary involves drawing images that express various emotional states. But instead of depicting an actual word or object, participants choose a slip of paper listing an emotion – like joy or sadness – and attempt to capture that feeling through their art.
• Acting Opposite: You identify an action urge caused by intense or problematic emotion and then choose to do the complete opposite of the urge, breaking that cycle of self-destruction and helping to interrupt any automatic or unconscious thought and behavioral patterns.
• PLEASE Skills: This simple mnemonic encapsulates essential steps for balancing your body and mind and strengthening emotional resilience.

4. Interpersonal Effectiveness Exercises

Whether with family, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances, the ability to navigate relationships effectively is vital. Strong interpersonal effectiveness skills are critical, and within DBT, group exercises serve as a safe practice ground. These exercises provide support in maintaining relationships, as well as in working through difficulties.

DBT Interpersonal Effectiveness teaches us about three major objectives to assist in being effective in situations. In interpersonal situations, we want to:

• Have our Objective Met: In some situations, our main concern is to have our own objectives and goals achieved.
• Maintain a good Relationship: At other times our interactions with others may be about working toward and strengthening positive and meaningful relationships.
• Maintain Self-respect: However, if we do things for other people because of social expectations, or out of obligation, this may be at the expense of maintaining a strong sense of self-respect and therefore this may require a different strategy when communicating or enacting behavior.

So by reflecting on which of these goals are our priority in a situation, and being able to acknowledge what is driving our behavior, it can make things feel more congruent with who we are.

Popular DBT Group Exercises: From Acting to Discussing

As you can see, DBT embraces a multimodal approach. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) includes various activities to help individuals learn new skills to manage their emotions and cope with stress. It goes far beyond merely talking about emotions.

There are various group activities utilized. The variety provides engagement and caters to different learning styles, which makes learning DBT less repetitive and boring, helping to keep you motivated on your path to emotional health.

Art activities, especially those involving creative visualization, can be an excellent way to access challenging emotions. Group activities range from creative expression to in-depth discussions, providing a diverse and enriching experience.

Creative and Playful

Some activities lean toward a playful and expressive side. By using a ‘show don’t tell’ approach can be very powerful in helping you understand how concepts ‘play out’ for you specifically and allow you to experience the effectiveness of the strategy, rather than being talked through it. Here are a couple of examples:

• Emotion Charades: You silently act out an assigned emotion while your group tries to guess what it is. This encourages awareness of nonverbal expressions of emotions, helping to build both interpersonal awareness and effectiveness in future communications.
• Coping Skills Charades: This engaging game involves acting out specific coping skills to aid retention and provide visual representations. For example, a person may mime “taking a walk” as their distraction skill.
• DBT Skills Bingo: A twist on a classic, this activity reinforces knowledge and creates a fun learning experience as participants recognize and mark down the listed DBT strategies, strengthening skill recall and making the process engaging.

Problem-Solving and Reflection

Other activities are more geared towards introspective problem-solving or working through hypothetical scenarios. It’s these reflective activities that can support the work in individual counseling and can often illuminate new or ‘blind-spot’ parts of personal difficulty. These can often surprise participants.

These activities can involve in-depth exploration, supporting that deep work on identifying and resolving triggers for unhealthy behaviors.

• Behavioral Chain Analysis:  Behavioral chain analysis helps us break down and reflect on the sequence of thoughts, feelings, and actions that lead to unhealthy behaviors, offering opportunities to make different choices and improve outcomes next time.
• DEAR MAN Practice: To be more assertive in interpersonal interactions, you’ll practice by acting out DEAR and MAN techniques, using scripts or personal scenarios to take turns making and responding to requests.
• Role-Playing Different Scenarios: In a friendly setting, you’ll act out hypothetical situations, like conflicts or asking for help, to practice DBT skills and receive helpful feedback.

A crucial aspect of these role-playing exercises involves analyzing, as a group, what strategies were effective. Discussing emotions and thoughts triggered during the role-plays fosters empathy and enhances the practice experience for those who did not role-play. For instance, after practicing DEAR MAN in a hypothetical scenario of asking for help with housework, those observing can reflect on their personal hesitations.

You explore your internal script like, “Well, maybe I haven’t actually DONE that much around the house yet…” and that can surprise them, illuminating roadblocks.

Creative Visualization: Beyond the Physical

Other exercises focus on visualizing challenging scenarios – like facing substance abuse triggers, giving you a ‘mental run-through’ without the pressure of real-life consequences. These visualizations provide a ‘preview’ and reduce uncertainty when encountering similar events, improving your readiness to use those crucial DBT skills in challenging moments.

Contact the Counseling Center Group to learn more about DBT Groups being offered today!

Whether they are creative and playful or centered around problem-solving, DBT group exercises provide support. These DBT exercises are meant to bring DBT skills alive.

As you experiment with assertiveness or analyze past mistakes together, those four core modules – mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness – become tools for daily life, not just theories from a therapist’s office.

But keep in mind, that these activities are most effective alongside individual therapy. You may discover a whole new appreciation for ‘acting opposite’.

Maybe those intense sensory details of the mindful eating activity stick with you, or maybe a peer’s struggle during DEAR MAN role-playing hits close to home.

For those struggling with BPD, the collective sharing and vulnerability within a safe space make DBT’s theoretical framework practical. This approach helps turn the inner critic into a compassionate ally and empowers individuals to move toward a more balanced, meaningful, and value-driven life.

By offering a practice space to step outside those comfort zones and witness how others navigate, DBT group exercises create those lightbulb moments that often translate into real-life transformation. Contact the Counseling Center Group today!