DBT Dialectical Behavior Therapy

In the whirlwind of high school, social pressure, and internal "storms," every teen needs an anchor. Our 60-minute weekly series is a warm, intentional space designed to provide exactly that.

We’ve traded the traditional, long clinical hours for a concentrated, high-impact hour that respects your teen’s time and energy. By focusing on deep skill-integration in a shorter window, we help prevent "therapy fatigue" and keep engagement high.

The Result: Your teen walks away with a clear, actionable tool every single week. This DBT-Informed model is grounded in the proven Miller & Rathus DBT-A framework, adapted for the real-world needs of busy adolescents.

A Different Kind of "Homework"

We recognize that teens are already navigating heavy academic loads. In the Anchor Group, we don’t do worksheet homework. We believe that filling out a diary card or a paper handout shouldn't be another item on an exhausting to-do list. Instead, our "homework" is lived experience. We invite teens to:

Experiment: Actually apply a DBT skill in the heat of a real-life moment.
Reflect: Bring those experiments back to the group—the wins, the missteps, and the "real-world" results.
Examine: We use our hour together to analyze what worked and what didn't, turning every life experience into a valuable lesson in resilience.

Our Compass: The Four-Module Path

This DBT-informed curriculum cycles through four essential areas of emotional health. Participants can join at the start of any new module to complete the full 24-week cycle:

Mindfulness: Finding the "Wise Mind" amidst the chaos.
Emotion Regulation: Learning to surf the waves of intense feelings without being pulled under.
Interpersonal Effectiveness: Communicating with clarity and keeping self-respect intact.
Distress Tolerance: Practical "survival skills" for when life feels overwhelming.
Walking the Middle Path: Our specialized module for bridging the gap between teens and parents.

Logistics & Investment

Location: 2975 Valmont Rd. Suite 310, Boulder, CO
Schedule: Thursday Evenings (Summer Cohort beginning June 2026)
Initial Clinical Consultation (60 min): $135
- A foundational meeting for the teen and guardians to ensure a good fit for the group.

The Monthly Anchor Bundle: $360/month

To simplify the process for our families and ensure consistent progress, we offer a bundled monthly rate that includes:

4 Weekly Group Sessions (60 min): Consistent, in-person skill building.
1 Integrated Family/Teen Check-in (30 min): A private monthly check-in to troubleshoot obstacles and celebrate progress at home.
The Anchor Toolkit: A curated collection of DBT-informed resources and reflection guides.

Professional Guidance

This group is facilitated by our dedicated clinical staff. While facilitators operate with independent clinical autonomy, they receive regular Clinical Guidance and participate in staff collaborative meetings led by Elizabeth Acuña Driscoll, MA, LPC, ensuring the highest standard of care and alignment with the Define Your Duende philosophy.

Is your teen ready to find their anchor?

The Anchor Group: A DBT-Informed Series for Teens (In-person)

Join our summer cohort

WHAT IS DBT?

The goal of DBT is to help clients build a life that they experience as worth living. In DBT, the client and the therapist work together to set goals that are meaningful to the client. Often this means they work on ways to decrease harmful behaviors and replace them with effective, life-enhancing behaviors.

There are four modules in skills training:

Mindfulness: the practice of being fully aware and present in this one moment
Distress Tolerance: how to tolerate pain in difficult situations, not change it
Interpersonal Effectiveness: how to ask for what you want and say no while maintaining self-respect and relationships with others
Emotion Regulation: how to change emotions that you want to change

Problematic behaviors evolve as a way to cope with a situation or attempt to solve a problem. While these behaviors might provide temporary relief or a short-term solution, they often are not effective in the long-term. DBT assumes that clients are doing the best they can, AND they need to learn new behaviors in all relevant contexts. DBT helps enhance a client’s capabilities by teaching behavioral skills in areas like mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. These skills help people develop effective ways to navigate situations that arise in everyday life or manage specific challenges.

The term “dialectical” means a synthesis or integration of opposites. The primary dialectic within DBT is between the seemingly opposite strategies of acceptance and change. For example, DBT therapists accept clients as they are while also acknowledging that they need to change in order to reach their goals. In addition, all of the skills and strategies taught in DBT are balanced in terms of acceptance and change. For example, the four skills modules include two sets of acceptance-oriented skills (mindfulness and distress tolerance) and two sets of change-oriented skills (emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness).

-*Adapted from https://behavioraltech.org/resources/faqs/dialectical-behavior-therapy-dbt/