DBT for Weirdos: A Weekly Practice Group
A weekly Dialectical Behavioral Therapy-based practice group facilitated by Clarity Beaumont.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), developed by Marsha M. Linehan, is a skills-based approach that helps people navigate intense emotions and relationships by balancing acceptance and change through attention-training, distress tolerance, emotional skill-building, and effective communication.
DBT in this context is a practice-based space where neurodivergent folks and people who struggle to relate to dominant culture build flexible skills to stay present, navigate intense emotions, and reduce unnecessary suffering—by working creatively within the tension between acceptance and change, rather than trying to fix themselves or perform better for external systems.
Why DBT?
Life can be so hard.
And for some of us, the ways we react make it even harder.
There is a kind of creative tension between:
Acceptance ↔ Change
Emotion ↔ Reason
Self-compassion ↔ Accountability
In this space, we can play, we can learn, and we can utilize new skills in an improvisational manner.
Group Specifics
Sundays @ 5:30pm PT/8:30pm ET starting 5/24
Weekly for 8 weeks
Online via Zoom
90 mins
No cost
We ask that all who join do their best to commit to showing up each week for 8 consecutive weeks.
Calls will not be recorded.
No breakout groups.
Sharing is not mandatory but also will be restricted by time to accommodate more shares.
Be aware this could be a group of 30+ people.
We start and end on time.
Group Structure & Themes
Weeks will alternate between specific DBT Skills and Attention Training (“Mindfulness”).
Themes:
Radical Acceptance: It’s 100% understandable why we are the way we are:
We cultivate a field of non-judgement: there is nothing wrong with you.
And sometimes you have to choose what doesn’t feel right.
Learned behaviors can be replaced with skills:
Emotional “regulation” (regulating is for banks, we’d do better to think of it as not being hijacked by our nervous systems without our consent).
Interpersonal effectiveness without chaos: connection and clarity (“boundaries,” asking for what you need, etc.)
Skills require repetition and practice, but they are experiments not rules.
We practice inside toxic systems. Being highly functional inside of late stage capitalism isn’t the goal, minimizing suffering is the goal.
Action beyond insight:
what do you do when you’re triggered or activated?
what do you say?
how do you interrupt maladaptive patterns that cause more suffering?
Intimacy With Reality (“mindfulness”) / aka Attention Training:
Play/Improv/”jazz” type approaches. Get weird.
Stimming can be good.
Somatics and “just enough but not too much” sensing.
Opposite Action (FAFO, collect data, notice patterns).
Distress Tolerance:
First things First = Foundations: sleeping, movement, nutrition, hydration.
Nervous system recalibration.
Abstinence practices (not just from substances)
This if for you if…
You experience emotions so intense they “hijack” your behavior and lead to frequent ruptures or upheaval in your life
You’re autistic, on some kind of spectrum, feel like an outsider, are neurodivergent, and chronically freaked out
You’re ready to practice, not just talk about your problems
You’re willing to let go of deeply ingrained behaviors and thought patterns based not so much on what might be true but on what is actually effective
You can commit to 8 consecutive weeks of live meetings (they will not be recorded)
You’ve done other types of therapy before (not required but helpful)
This is not for you if…
You’re being court-ordered to do DBT
You’re not into creative stuff
You want a very traditional or clinical therapy environment
You want a very non-traditional, woo environment
(We aim to strike a balance)
You can’t attend group sober (you don’t have to be sober in life, just in group)
About Your Hosts
Claire Beaumont: Facilitator
Claire Beaumont is a trained facilitator with 18 years of field work and decades more lived experience working with creatives, intensives, and neurodivergent type folks. Her work focuses on the importance of play, and reducing shame and judgment while exploring difficult topics in balanced ways. She currently lives in San Diego with her partner, children, and a calico cat.
Rachael Rice: Admin and Supplemental Support
Rachael is an artist, writer, educator, multi-instrumentalist and certified weirdo who started her multi-decade therapy journey after her mom died in 1999. She is here to support the facilitator, the group participants, and most of all to practice. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, his kids and one orange tabby.
Her full bio can be found here.
About the Container
Some Tenets:
More than one thing can be true at the same time.
Healing isn’t about tolerating pain or distress more, it’s about expanding your capacity for subtle, non-addictive pleasure.
We’re not here to be fixed or perform better under capitalism, we’re here to minimize needless suffering FOR THE SAKE OF ALL BEINGS.
While every effort will be made to make this a “safe enough space,” part of the practice is to be able to tolerate the reality that we will often not all agree with each other, we live in an extremely polarized culture, and friction is inevitable. That said, this is explicitly a queer-run and inclusive space with the overall intention to REDUCE SUFFERING and that includes mitigating the ways dominant identities can run roughshod over others and do harm. However, towards the goal of greater resilience, everyone is expected to wipe their own emotional and spiritual ass; please bring your wisest adult self to the group.
This is a beta group in which the hosts are trying something neither has done before, because neither have been able to find DBT groups that accounted for neurodivergence and the ways mapping onto harmful systems warps a person’s ability to respond to life with generosity, creativity, and compassion. We’re just trying this thing out together, so bare with us and we look forward to your honest feedback!
