DBT Team Consultation Agreement


DBT Consultation Team

Goal: To help team members apply the principles of DBT, speak a common language, and work from the DBT model.

  • Make a commitment to be on-time, come prepared, listen with mindful intention, and stay focused on the common goal.
  • Share responsibility and liability for the outcomes of all clients treated by the team, which fosters an atmosphere of active problem solving.
  • Practice DBT skills in our own lives, especially in therapy with clients and at work with DBT team but also enough to make them reality-based for application in therapy with clients.

Six DBT Consultation Team Agreements

  1. Dialectical Agreement:
    Bring openness to varying viewpoints; no absolute truth; reality in the study of the dialectical and the middle path.
  2. Consultation-to-the-patient:
    Primary goal of team is to improve our own skills as CBT therapists; agree not to treat clients as fragile; treat team members as capable of speaking for themselves.
  3. Consistency agreement:
    Agree to accept diversity and change as they occur.
  4. Observing limits agreement:
    Observe our own limits; agree not to judge or criticize other members for having different limits from our own.
  5. Phenomenological empathy:
    Agree to search for nonpejorative or phenomenologically empathic interpretations of our clients’, our own, and each other’s behavior.
  6. Fallibility agreement:
    We are each fallible and make mistakes…truly absorb that and live it with compassion.