Dr. Yong Cho’s English Translation Forward
It has been 24 years since Dr. Marsha Linehan published her first Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) book, “the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder”, and it has been 10 years since the translated book was published in Korea.
Since then, DBT has become one of the most essential treatment approaches in the world. DBT was applied in various clinical and educational settings including hospitals and it gave countless people a new life and hope. Like a life-giving remedy, DBT miraculously changed the lives of individuals who had suicidal ideation because of their uncontrollable emotions and pain, individuals who had countless conflicts with others unintentionally because of the lack of self-awareness and problem-solving skills, and individuals who had no guidelines as to how to live a meaningful life by regulating their emotions and learning new behavior.
In the past 15 years at DBT Center of Korea, I have encountered many clients, empathizing to their pain, sharing their agony and laughter together while I conducted DBT. Dr. Marsha Linehan visited Korea herself and trained professionals through a workshop initiated by our institution. Dr. Anthony DuBose (Behavioral Tech, Chief Training Executive & Director of CE/CME) and Dr. Jennifer Sayrs (Evidence-Based Treatment Centers of Seattle, Executive Director) who are the key experts at DBT Center of Seattle visited Seoul to guide the Tree Group team on how to appropriately conduct DBT. DBT training, teaching, the clinical and operating systems are astonishingly detailed, thorough, ethical, and has its basis on sympathy. I believe DBT is the best system that exists today.
I encountered DBT for the first time in 1998 when I was being trained at the Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York. As I applied the novel treatment to clients from various cultures and races, I saw an unbelievable change from the clients. Individuals who could not control their emotions and demonstrated impulsive behavior with multiple visits to hospitals from self-harming formed new relationships with others and got a new job after being treated with DBT for 7 months.
In DBT for Korea, the typical symptom of the first-generation immigrants, Hwabyeong, was ameliorated by learning DBT skills. For the past 15 years, we conducted DBT individual sessions and skills training group sessions (we call this DBT class) for adults, adolescents, and parents. In the early days, DBT skills manual for adolescents and parents were not yet published, so the manual for adults was used as the main textbook with DBT research data for adolescents provided by Dr. Linehan’s Seattle team.
Dr. Rathus and Dr. Miller, the authors of DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents were key members of the early DBT expert group. They are the psychologists who extended DBT research and its clinical application to adolescents and their families. Without their efforts, the publication of the meticulous DBT manual and materials for young people would not have been possible. There is a lot of DBT therapists who are particularly dedicated to the program. One would be astonished if they experience the depth of Dr. Linehan’s lifelong research, treatment, and compassion for clients.
Therapists who practice DBT that is the combination of high professionalism, ethics, and religious devotion in research and clinical settings across all parts of the world are special people. They all have profound religious views based on mindfulness, wary of excessive commercialism and follows the ethical rules. They are the people who performs ‘challenging’ DBT for ‘challenging’ clients with ‘challenging’ amounts of time and effort. Perhaps clients and their families who received DBT are lucky.
In 2015 during which DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents was published in the U.S., Dr. Linehan published the second editions of 『DBT Skills Training Manual, 2nd edition』 and 『DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, 2nd edition』 and our team managed to translate the detailed manual with tremendous amount of information. DBT Skills Training Manual for Adolescents and Dr. Linehan’s recent publications are the ultimate outcomes of the past 25 years’ worth of DBT research, and the publications will be a huge support for experts and clients. The profits from the three books will be used for the publication of DBT research and DBT Center of Korea. I would like to thank all the staff of the Tree Group who helped the publication of the book. Thanks to the dedication of these people, the book could be published. I dedicate this book to everyone who may be suffering from their darkness, as I hope the book can be used ethically and appropriately to provide a new life for adolescents and parents with pain.
Yong Cho, Ph.D.
