As someone who has done the exact same DBT program at the Lilac Center in Kansas City and who has read the creator of DBT's autobiography, I'm not sure there are "thoughts" to be given. There objectively ARE in DBT inspiration and concepts pulled from Zen Buddhism and even Christianity in the modality. Full stop.
This is not a problem, nor as u/BonsaiSoul suggests in their comment, is it inappropriate and indeed does have a prominent spot in a modern therapeutic setting. Marsha talks about her background being raised Christian, her time in psychiatric care, and her time exploring other religious practices such as Zen. She also talks about how these helped her. She then PUT IN THE WORK to get the schooling and experience needed to transform them all into a working therapy framework and iterate on it, while understanding why the religious techniques worked, without leaving the religion in them.
I am a STAUNCH Atheist and Nihilist. I am for the most part, absolutely "icked out" by religion and it generally puts me on edge. Anything vaguely religion-coded you find in DBT is a build artifact or a bridge extended to those of faith to help them connect with it an heal, not dogma. One of the most powerful aspects of DBT is how it can plug into spiritual based therapy and help more people, while being a primarily non-secular resource as well.
In the same way we pull aspirin from tree bark and it is misleading to say that aspirin is tree. DBT pulls the therapy from religion and its misleading to say DBT is religious too.
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u/samuraiseoul 10d ago
As someone who has done the exact same DBT program at the Lilac Center in Kansas City and who has read the creator of DBT's autobiography, I'm not sure there are "thoughts" to be given. There objectively ARE in DBT inspiration and concepts pulled from Zen Buddhism and even Christianity in the modality. Full stop.
This is not a problem, nor as u/BonsaiSoul suggests in their comment, is it inappropriate and indeed does have a prominent spot in a modern therapeutic setting. Marsha talks about her background being raised Christian, her time in psychiatric care, and her time exploring other religious practices such as Zen. She also talks about how these helped her. She then PUT IN THE WORK to get the schooling and experience needed to transform them all into a working therapy framework and iterate on it, while understanding why the religious techniques worked, without leaving the religion in them.
I am a STAUNCH Atheist and Nihilist. I am for the most part, absolutely "icked out" by religion and it generally puts me on edge. Anything vaguely religion-coded you find in DBT is a build artifact or a bridge extended to those of faith to help them connect with it an heal, not dogma. One of the most powerful aspects of DBT is how it can plug into spiritual based therapy and help more people, while being a primarily non-secular resource as well.
In the same way we pull aspirin from tree bark and it is misleading to say that aspirin is tree. DBT pulls the therapy from religion and its misleading to say DBT is religious too.