The Revised Edition of the DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets Is Now Available
The Core of DBT: Acceptance and Change
DBT teaches that building a life worth living requires both acceptance and change.
It invites us to accept this present moment as it is, while also taking steps to move our lives in a better direction.
This workbook offers concrete ways to work with emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and painful experiences. It helps readers learn what can be changed, what needs to be accepted, and how to move forward more effectively.
Why This DBT Workbook Matters Now
Today, DBT extends beyond clinical settings and offers practical tools for many people struggling with emotional pain.
This book is for
clinicians and counseling professionals
students who wish to learn DBT
individuals struggling with emotion regulation difficulties
families, parents, educators, and anyone who wants to live in a more effective and meaningful way.
What the DBT Workbook Offers
This workbook brings together the core materials of DBT skills training:
Mindfulness skills
Interpersonal Effectiveness skills
Emotion Regulation skills
Distress Tolerance skills
The workbook includes DBT skills handouts and worksheets that help readers practice and apply the skills in everyday life. In this revised edition, each handout is placed together with its corresponding worksheet, making it easier to understand, practice, and use the skills.
Revised with Leading DBT Experts
This revised edition was developed with the participation of a core DBT revision team centered around Marsha M. Linehan, PhD. The revision was designed to make the workbook easier to use while preserving the original structure, principles, and spirit of DBT.
The revision committee included internationally recognized DBT experts who have helped preserve and further develop the original DBT model:
Jennifer Sayrs, Emily Cooney, Jill Rathus, Shireen Rizvi, Katherine Comtois, Kathryn Korslund, and Janice Kuo.
In this sense, the revision reflects a distinctly DBT balance: preserving the core principles and spirit of the original skills training materials while updating the language, organization, and examples so that the workbook can be used more effectively by contemporary readers around the world.
A Translation Shaped by ‘Living Clinical Language’
One of the most important features of this revised Korean edition is that it goes beyond literal translation. The language has been shaped through years of direct clinical practice.
The translator, Yong Cho, PhD, is a psychologist licensed in New York State who has provided DBT treatment in both English and Korean since the early 2000s. Drawing on extensive clinical experience with both English-speaking and Korean-speaking clients, Dr. Cho translated the original text faithfully while also ensuring that the language could be used naturally in real therapy.
His guiding principle was that DBT should not remain as words on a page. It must become living language between therapist and client.
Dr. Cho has emphasized that translating a treatment manual is not simply a linguistic task. It is a clinical and cultural process in which Western treatment concepts meet Korean language, culture, and emotional experience.
Translating “Dialectical” as “다이어렉티컬”
The core DBT concept of “Dialectical” is difficult to capture fully through existing Korean terms.
For this reason, the Korean edition of DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets uses the transliterated term “다이어렉티컬.” This choice was made to convey more accurately the kind of thinking and therapeutic change that Marsha Linehan sought to bring into DBT: a movement beyond rigid, either-or thinking throughout the treatment process, rather than a narrow reference to philosophical dialectics.
Dr. Cho explains that he chose “다이어렉티컬” and “다이어렉틱스” in order to preserve the distinctive meaning of the innovative therapeutic process that Dr. Linehan devoted her life to developing.
A Message from the Translator
In the preface to the revised Korean edition, Yong Cho writes:
“The translator knows well, and has not forgotten, that what Dr. Linehan truly hopes for is that all people around the world who suffer from emotional pain may begin a new life through DBT. Just as the author expresses gratitude in the acknowledgments of the revised edition to the teacher who taught her how to let go of language, what matters in DBT is not the name or terminology itself. What matters is letting go of the frame of dichotomous language and using language as a means to reach clients effectively and provide treatment.”
This workbook is more than a collection of skills. It is one way of helping people begin to live again. It also reflects Dr. Cho’s mission: to offer new hope to those who are suffering through high-quality DBT treatment, and to train DBT professionals who practice with deep humanity and genuine clinical integrity.
The revised Korean edition of DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets is now available at major bookstores in Korea
