Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP)
If individuals continue to struggle to make sufficient gains in our Outpatient Eating Disorders Clinic and IOP, or are at heightened risk for inpatient hospitalization, they are admitted to our PHP. We offer a continuation of our IOP’s concurrent FBT, and assimilative integration of ERP into our core CBT-E framework, and extend our treatment model to include two, individualized Therapy Tracks:
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO DBT)
Our Individualized Therapy Tracks provide two distinctive treatments that target core personality pathology that can often contribute to a patient’s eating disorder behaviors.
Our DBT Track incorporates core principles, skills, and interventions that target emotion dysregulation, and disorders of “under control”, where individuals struggle with high emotional sensitivity, impulsivity, interpersonal challenges, and difficulties with managing their emotions. DBT embodies a balanced approach of both acceptance and change, incorporates four skills modules that cover mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness, and has aims of helping patients to become more effective at managing their emotions and behaviors, and creating a live worth living.
Our RO DBT Track utilizes theory and techniques from a distinctive evidence-based treatment, that specifically targets disorders of “overcontrol”. Individuals that are “overcontrolled” display too much self-control, and struggle with low receptivity and openness, difficulties with flexible responding, low emotional awareness and expression, and struggle to form intimate interpersonal relationships. These difficulties can contribute to patients quietly suffering with social isolation, feelings of loneliness, and difficulties with interpersonal functioning, even though their suffering may not be apparent. RO DBT is unique in that it targets patient’s maladaptive social signaling (any behavior that is carried out in the presence of another person) whereby patients learn how to become more playful and flexible, take life less seriously, express their emotions and vulnerabilities more openly and candidly, as well as ways that they can signal cooperation with others. Ultimately, the goal of RO DBT is to help patients to “rejoin the tribe”, increase their social connectedness, and to create a life worth sharing.
As individuals learn and implement the respective DBT and RO DBT skills across their time in PHP, they can continue to generalize these skills and address their eating disorders at a stepped down level of care.