Clinical psychology doctoral student, Yoel Everett received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to travel to Germany to work with Dr. Babette Renneberg and her team at the Freie Universität Berlin. This past summer he coded video recorded sessions of Dr. Renneberg’s 12-week parenting intervention to identify which Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) skills mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) find helpful.

Most parenting interventions focus specifically on parenting skills and don’t address the mental health needs of the parents. These types of interventions can be challenging to implement for parents with emotion regulation difficulties. DBT Skills is a treatment designed specifically to teach skills that improve emotion regulation. Integrating DBT skills into parenting interventions could increase their effectiveness with parents with BPD or other mental health challenges. Everett is working to develop an integrated intervention, but it is difficult to combine DBT and parenting skills without making the intervention unreasonably long. Collaborating with Dr. Renneberg and her team on this project will help him pare down the integrated intervention by identifying the most crucial DBT skills for parents.

To achieve this goal, Everett watched video recorded sessions of Dr Renneberg’s DBT-informed parenting intervention. During these sessions, participating mothers discussed the parenting and DBT skills they used over the previous week. Everett and Celia Bähr (a German speaking masters student) coded these discussions for which DBT skills were used and how they were used – to increase a positive parenting behavior, such as engaging with their child, or to decrease a negative parenting behavior, such as yelling at their child. He is currently conducting a similar study using recordings of DBT Skills sessions for parents at the UO and will be collaborating with Dr. Renneberg and her team on a descriptive paper identifying DBT skills that are most helpful to mothers with emotion dysregulation challenges.

*Everett is a doctoral student member of Dr. Maureen Zalewski’s Parent Mental Health Research Clinic.