Blog

Overcontrolled is a term that I’ve come to discover describes me well

I was born with a temperament that generally makes me leery of risk taking, I tend to inhibit emotions and impulses and it takes a lot to get me excited about something. Different aspects of my childhood and familial experiences reinforced these tendencies. The result is that I have develop an overcontrolled coping style (something […]

Learning About Friendship: Lessons from Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Recently, my 14-year-old niece was visiting and overheard me talking about Radically Open-Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO DBT) with my partner: My niece: “What’s RO DBT?” Me: “It’s a therapy I use to help people who suffer from conditions of overcontrol.” My partner, being undercontrolled, pipes up and says: “Your Auntie helps people who don’t know how to make friends.” […]

Heat on/Heat off

Most people can recall a childhood memory that stands out as significant in terms of pleasure or pain. For those of us who lean to overcontrolled, we might have superior capacity to remember times that were especially embarrassing or in RO DBT terms, “heat on.” For me, what stands out is being a grade one […]

Why Too Much Self-Control Can Be a Bad Thing

Self-control refers to our ability to restrain acting on momentary urges, impulses, and wants in favor of longer-term goals. Who doesn’t want more of that? Read the entire blog on PsychCentral

No One Saw It Coming: Out-of-character acts of violence

Have you ever read those newspaper stories about the shy, quiet, caring individual who has killed, sometimes many of their class/work mates, and wondered what makes these people tick? You are not alone – indeed as a forensic psychologist employed to rehabilitate these individuals, they often have me scratching my head wondering ‘how the hell did they get […]

How to do self-enquiry: Using a self-enquiry journal

Self-enquiry is a type of mindfulness practice from radically open dialectical behavior therapy (RO-DBT) used to help people learn about themselves and the ways they interact with the world and others around them. For example, you might practice self-enquiry when you find yourself closed – to new information or to someone else’s perspective or to […]

What is Self-Enquiry? The Practice of Mindfulness Questioning from Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy

We all have blind spots. We all bring unconscious biases into all of the situations we experience and we are all limited in terms of our self-knowledge. This means that we all have more to learn about ourselves. I think back to being a young man and wonder at the incredible number of blind spots […]

Better When Together: First International RO DBT Supervisor and Trainer Retreat

Radically Open Ltd organized the very first International RO DBT Supervisor and Trainer Retreat last September. A wonderful group of Senior RO DBT clinicians and researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, France and the Netherlands got together with the aim of learning how to teach and supervise other clinicians wanting to learn […]

How Overcontrolled Clients Get Stuck in a Cycle of Disconnection from Peers: A Case Study

Alexis, a 13-year-old musical theatre student, is overcontrolled. This means that musical theatre is the anchor of her life and the frame of her identity. She had recently approached her two theatre group friends to talk about why she had not been attending rehearsals and would be unable to participate in the next theatre festival. […]

Social Signaling: The missing ingredient in the treatment of chronic depression

Feeling happy is great—but when you are lonely—it’s hard to feel happy no matter how much you might try to accept, reappraise, or change your circumstances, keep busy, exercise, practice yoga, or distract yourself. In the long run, we are tribal beings—and we yearn to share our lives with other members of our species. It […]

Lonely Apes Die

What do lonely apes have in common with a method that offers help to people who suffer from chronic depression, recurrent anxiety, autism spectrum disorders, or anorexia nervosa? Read the blog on the New Harbinger Blog page

How is RO-DBT different from DBT?

Developed by Marsha Linehan, PhD, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a cognitive behavioral treatment that was originally developed to treat chronically suicidal individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Radically Open-Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT) builds upon this work. This new therapy is a breakthrough, transdiagnostic approach (developed by Dr. Thomas Lynch) that helps clients with extremely difficult-to-treat overcontrol […]