ABSTRACT
In contrast to most other psychotherapies, DBT requires that out-patient programmes offer a modality through which clients can access DBT providers outside of the clinical setting, when clients are in their natural environments. As a behavioural treatment, DBT emphasizes the need for such a modality to ensure learning will generalize beyond the therapeutic context. The treatment does not assume that skills practised in a clinical setting will automatically generalize to real-life settings. The context of applying skills may differ substantially from the context of learning skills, particularly in terms of the client's degree of emotional dysregulation and the environment's likelihood of providing a reinforcing response.
