What Is DBT And How It’s Principles Shape My Approach to Bodywork
"The body keeps its own quiet counsel, waiting for someone to finally listen."
TL;DR — The Heart of It:
Healing means building the capacity to move through life's ups and downs without becoming overwhelmed by them.
DBT reshaped how I understand healing itself and that shift now guides the way I use touch to support nervous system regulation.
Bodywork offers something DBT also teaches, a safe and repeated experience that helps the nervous system learn it no longer needs to stay on guard.
Healing often gets treated like a subtraction problem. We assume it means getting rid of stress or pushing away anxiety; basically eliminating any emotion that feels too big or uncomfortable to hold. And somewhere along the way we decided these emotions are ugly and that avoiding them is the goal. This is often what spiritual bypassing looks like, even when we never call it that.
Avoiding discomfort is not healing. Rather, healing is closer to building the capacity to experience the full range of life. It’s about experiencing the ups and downs without becoming overwhelmed by either one. We can appreciate these movements too, as life would simply not hold the same beauty if we only had the light and never the dark.
This idea has shaped everything about how I approach my work and it comes directly from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT. I want to be clear from the start that my sessions are not psychotherapy and I do not overtly practice clinical DBT in the room. I’m a licensed massage therapist, not a clinical psychologist and as such the main focus of my work centers the body, not the mind. However the principles behind DBT have shaped how I support nervous system regulation through touch and that influence deserves its own explanation.
What Is DBT?
DBT stands for Dialectical Behavior Therapy. It was developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan, originally created to support people experiencing intense emotional dysregulation. Today it reaches far beyond that original use. People turn to DBT for anxiety and depression, for trauma and chronic stress and for the emotional overwhelm that shows up in relationships. I think almost everyone could benefit from learning these skills, whether or not they identify as needing clinical support.
With anxiety, DBT works to build a felt sense of safety, regardless of the situation someone is in. It teaches the nervous system to trust that it is okay in that whatever comes up, can be moved through. With depression, it works to dismantle the pressure to be perfect and teaches how to sit with waves of sadness without needing to immediately fix them. For trauma, it offers a path back into the body after disconnection that often happens as a survival response. With chronic stress, it supports the nervous system in learning how to slow down through practices like mindful breathing. And in relationships, DBT's interpersonal effectiveness skills help people hold their boundaries while still meeting others with warmth.
DBT is known to organize skills into four areas: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotional Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness. Mindfulness teaches present moment awareness. Distress tolerance builds the capacity to sit with discomfort without needing to escape it. Emotion regulation helps people understand and work with what they feel instead of being controlled by it. Interpersonal effectiveness supports healthier communication and boundaries in relationships. Together these four areas give people a concrete, research-backed way to navigate difficult emotional territory. DBT is often mentioned alongside its close relative, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This is just my personal opinion but compared to all other therapies, I find DBT particularly useful because so much of it centers on building skills rather than only shifting thought patterns.
"Skill is just devotion, practiced until it becomes instinct."
Why Would a Massage Therapist Care About DBT?
As a massage therapist, I work with the body every day. Many people forget that emotions live in the body just as much as they do in the mind. I often notice clients describing their body in mechanical terms and then describing their emotions in a completely separate way, as if these two things exist on different tracks. This instance is quite common so when someone shares something emotionally intense during a session, I will gently redirect to asking how that feeling shows up in their body. As soon as this happens, there’s a sudden pause and then I notice a subtle shift. People start to realize that emotions are not just mental experiences.
Emotions can show up physically. You may be familiar with the sensation of shoulders tightening and breathing turning shallow, or how the jaw clenches while muscles quietly guard themselves. The nervous system can stay activated long after the moment has passed. Related to this topic, a well-known TED talk by Amy Cuddy called "Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are" touches on this same idea. She describes how posture often reflects our emotional state and how protective postures like hunched shoulders or a collapsed chest can be the body's natural attempt to create safety around the more vulnerable parts of us. If you’re interested in the psychology of posture and haven’t heard this talk, I definitely recommend a viewing of it on Youtube!
The mind and body are constantly influencing each other. Bodywork gives us a chance to notice these patterns without judgment and DBT offers a helpful framework for understanding why they exist in the first place. It teaches that there are no good or bad emotions, only emotions that need a way to move through us. In DBT's mindfulness module, clients practice body scans to notice where tension lives and where the body feels more at ease. The goal is never to fix what is there. It is only to notice it. This same intention runs through the stillness practice I use with clients before the bodywork even begins.
DBT is often recommended for people who have disconnected from their bodies and emotions as a way of surviving something difficult. It gives them the skills to reconnect without fear and needing to control what they feel. Throughout my 6 years in the massage therapy world, I’ve found bodywork to be one of the most direct ways to practice that reconnection. That’s why I see bodywork and DBT as so closely connected.
Healing Isn't About Feeling Calm All the Time
There seems to be a common assumption in the wellness world, one that rarely gets said out loud—it’s that true healing looks like being calm all the time. We see this reflected back to us constantly through images of monks, spiritual gurus and other notable figures who appear serene no matter what is happening around them. It creates the false impression that we need to mimic calm from the outside in. However, I’ve found through my experiences, that real healing works the opposite way. It moves from the inside out.
Calm, like any emotional state, is also not a permanent destination. Everyone experiences stress, including the people we hold up as the picture of peace. Stress is a deeply human experience and it’s incredibly okay to experience it. You are not weak or incapable if you find yourself feeling stressed. Like every animal, we move through periods of activation and rest. What matters is not the absence of stress. How we respond to it makes the difference and that response is exactly what healing helps us build.
Healing increases our capacity to handle what comes up in life. It has nothing to do with achieving perfection. DBT reflects this same idea; that we can build around resilience and nervous system capacity. This teaches people how to ride emotional waves and return to regulation more efficiently each time.
"Not every quiet moment is peace. Some are just the body catching up."
How DBT Principles Show Up During a Session
It is worth noting that a massage session already mirrors a lot of what DBT teaches. In my work, that overlap is intentional rather than incidental.
Mindfulness
In DBT, mindfulness means noticing sensations in the body, observing them without judgment and staying present with whatever arises. During a bodywork session, this looks like noticing the sensation of touch. Sometimes it’s also discovering tension in an area you never realized was holding anything. It also means releasing judgment about what you find there. An interesting observation I had earlier in my career, was when I noticed clients pausing to apologize for how tense a certain area felt. It was almost as if their body needed that forgiveness for holding stress. Now I open every session with a stillness practice, giving people the space to notice sensation and breath without any pressure to change what they find. And what I find is that the tissue naturally begins to soften once the nervous system feels this kind of permission.
Distress Tolerance
Distress tolerance is the practice of allowing temporary discomfort without needing to escape it right away. Many clients already understand this instinctively during deeper tissue work, where breathing through intensity becomes part of the process. The same idea applies emotionally. When something uncomfortable surfaces during a session, the goal is to breathe through it instead of satisfying the urge to resolve it immediately.
Emotion Regulation
The act of regulating emotions involves learning to read the body's cues before they build into full overwhelm. This might look like recognizing a tightening jaw or a shift in breathing as an early signal rather than waiting until the feeling becomes too big to manage. Building this kind of awareness gives people more choice [as well as more confidence] in how they respond to what is happening inside them.
Acceptance and Change
Dialectics sit at the center of DBT and the word itself points to a way of thinking beyond strict black and white categories. It means holding two seemingly opposite truths at once and in DBT that means accepting where you are, while still working to change it. Healing asks the same thing of us. And manual therapy as well, works the same way. We meet the tension that exists in the body exactly as it is, and from that place of acceptance, real movement becomes possible.
Is This Therapy?
So first, I want to be clear about the boundaries of my work. Bodywork is not psychotherapy. I do not diagnose mental health conditions nor do I conduct DBT sessions. Both of those practices belong to licensed professionals and I always encourage clients already in therapy to continue that work alongside their sessions with me, not in place of it.
What I offer instead is an environment; a container. The aesthetics and atmosphere of Veluna Wellness was built with the natural materials of the earth in mind. The elements such as stone, wood, fire, and smoke witnessed in my studio add warmth to the room, creating a space that feels more like returning to something ancient than visiting a clinic. Clients often describe the space as feeling like a womb, cave-like and grounded, far removed from the sterile or overly technical feeling of so many wellness spaces today. In that environment, clients are free to experience sensation without any pressure to perform or process what comes up. There is nothing to talk through and nothing to solve, only permission to arrive.
"Touch has its own language, older than words and slower to lie."
The Nervous System Learns Through Experience
The nervous system learns much the same way we learn anything else, through repetition and safe experience. Emotional regulation and nervous system regulation are not fixed states we arrive at once and keep forever. They are practices that deepen with consistency. This is part of the reason why I encourage clients to come in every two to four weeks rather than sporadically. That kind of rhythm gives the body enough repetition to begin learning safety.
Over time, clients often notice that their tension does not feel as constant or as pronounced as it once did. This shift doesn’t happen because the body has been fixed like a machine. It happens because the body has slowly learned, through consistent and safe touch, that it no longer needs to stay on guard. Mindful touch, a slower pace and the freedom to choose or pause, all contribute to that learning. It’s been my experience as licensed bodyworker, that much of the tension people carry has an emotional root. And when the nervous system is no longer stuck in fight or flight, that tension naturally begins to ease.
Bringing It All Together
DBT did not change what I do with my hands. I still work the same tissue, use the same techniques and still rely on the same instincts I have built over years. What changed is how I understand healing. Every session I offer now is designed to help clients build a greater capacity to experience their bodies with curiosity, safety and self compassion.
Peace was never the goal. What I hope for instead is that clients leave more able to move through whatever life brings them next. That, to me, is where DBT and bodywork meet. And it has become the foundation of everything I do at Veluna Wellness.
