Your Experience is Valuable
Every person has value, including those on a DBT team. As a DBT therapist who has also been a DBT client, you offer unique insights and perspectives. You bring to the table inside knowledge about what it is like to be on the couch and fight your way out of hell, so you can go back and help others find their life worth living. Understanding the value of these experiences builds stronger teams and more effective clinicians.
DBT clinicians who have also been DBT clients often carry a quiet, complex pressure that is rarely named and even more rarely validated. Many clinicians describe an internal narrative that sounds like: “If they knew my history, they would think differently of me. Maybe I’m not as credible. Maybe I don’t belong here.”
This experience is common, and it makes sense. Several forces can contribute to questioning your value:
Even with all of these pressures, doubts, and old messages, your story does not diminish your worth as a clinician. In fact, the same experiences that once made you question your value often become the foundation of what you bring. When we look beyond stigma, a different picture appears, one where your lived experience is used to produce more productive research, enhance best clinical practices, and dismantle decades of assumptions.
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Here are some some way you add value to your teams and DBT community:
You show that respect is built through curiosity, compassion, and accountability.
Modeling Respect
You can connect clinical experience with human experience
Building Bridges
Your unique perspectives and positions can enrich your consultation team, supervision, and research
Broadening Insight
Your Value
Lived
Wisdom
You have learned the skills as a client that you teach as a therapist
You may catch subtle language, behaviors, or emotions that others may miss
Deeper Understanding
Navigating and disclosing your own experience shows strength not weakness
Modeling Resilience
Disclosing your experience allows you to be fully present and relatable
Communicating Authenticity
Dr. Lyndsi Bodtmann, co-founder and director of the New Jersey Center for Cognitive and Dialectical Behavior Therapy, discusses the value that DBT therapists who have also been DBT clients bring to the team.
A participant from a study acknowledges the commonalities among DBT therapists.
“And when I go over the biosocial theory, it's like, okay, yeah, many of us that come to DBT, and frankly, most of us that work in it, have this emotional sensitivity and reactivity." - Nancy