Skills for when emotion arrives like a crisis.
DBT is a structured, evidence-based approach for people whose emotional experience arrives intensely, feels difficult to manage, and creates significant difficulties in their relationships and daily life. It combines acceptance of experience with practical skills for changing how that experience is responded to. In-person in Miami, Gold Coast. Telehealth available Australia-wide.
Acceptance and change, held at the same time.
DBT was developed by Marsha Linehan, originally for people with borderline personality disorder, and now has a substantial evidence base across emotion dysregulation, self-harm, eating difficulties, and relationship instability. The core dialectic is that both things are true at once: your experience is valid and makes sense exactly as it is, and some of the patterns that have developed in response to that experience are causing real harm and need to change. The model does not ask you to choose between those two positions.
The approach works across four skill domains. Mindfulness: noticing what is happening in experience without being swept away by it or attempting to escape it. Distress tolerance: getting through crisis moments without making the situation worse. Emotion regulation: understanding how emotional experience works, what influences it, and how to work with it rather than against it. Interpersonal effectiveness: navigating relationships with clarity about what you need, what the relationship needs, and a maintained sense of your own self-respect.
What this practice offers is DBT skills integrated into individual therapy, woven alongside the broader relational and psychodynamic work that informs the approach here. This is not a full DBT program. A full program involves structured group skills training running in parallel with individual therapy, phone coaching, and specialist consultation. That model is typically offered through dedicated programs and is designed for presentations with significant risk and complexity. What is available here is the skills component: practical, structured, and genuinely useful for many people, without the group format. If a full program is what the situation calls for, that will be named directly in the first session.
The biosocial theory.
DBT is built around a specific account of how emotional dysregulation develops. Some people have a biologically based heightened sensitivity to emotional stimuli: they respond more quickly, more intensely, and return to baseline more slowly than average. When this is combined with an invalidating early environment, one where emotional experience was dismissed, punished, minimised, or met with unpredictability, the result is someone whose emotional world can feel ungovernable. The feelings come fast and big. The attempts to manage them can create secondary problems of their own. The skills are designed to address this directly: building the capacity to observe what arrives, tolerate what cannot yet be changed, and regulate what can be, without the additional suffering that comes from fighting the experience or being entirely swept into it.
The emotion lands before you have a chance to think.
People who seek this out tend to share something recognisable: the emotion arrives fast and with a force that does not feel proportionate. They say things in moments of distress they later wish they hadn't. They find themselves in relationship patterns that swing between intensity and rupture, and cannot always identify what changed the moment things shifted. Some have a history of self-harm, or of using other means, drinking, restriction, disappearing, to manage what feels genuinely unmanageable in the moment. Some have been told by people who care about them that their reactions are too much.
There is also a version of this that arrives later in a therapy process. Someone who has done substantial exploratory work, who understands where their patterns come from, who can narrate their own history with precision, and who still cannot stop themselves when activation is high. Understanding why does not always change what happens next. The gap between insight and behaviour is real, and it is exactly where skills work is most useful. The structure gives the nervous system something to do other than escalate.
DBT is less central when the difficulty is primarily about meaning: understanding what experience signifies, working through early relational wounds, or making sense of what has happened. Those questions sit more naturally within relational and psychodynamic work. The two approaches are not in opposition. Skills provide a floor to stand on; deeper relational work becomes more accessible once that floor exists.
Jackson Hill
MPsych Clinical · Griffith University 2018AHPRA Registered · Provider No. 5666808K
Member, Australian Psychological Society
I am a Clinical Psychologist based in Miami, Gold Coast. I use DBT skills within a broader integrative frame that includes relational psychodynamic work and Transference-Focused Psychotherapy. The approach in any given piece of work is shaped by what the person actually needs, not by a predetermined framework applied uniformly.
My clinical background spans Veterans Affairs, the Gold Coast Academy of Sport, high-intensity trauma, brain injury rehabilitation, and acute inpatient settings. I keep a small caseload and work under ongoing clinical supervision: not because it is required at this stage of my career, but because the work demands it.
No referral required to book.
A Mental Health Care Plan from your GP reduces your out-of-pocket cost significantly through Medicare rebates, but it is not required to begin.
Per 50-minute session
Out of pocket · $145 Medicare rebate
Sessions in-person in Miami, Gold Coast · Suite 11, 2098 Gold Coast Highway · Telehealth available Australia-wide · Walk-and-talk sessions available locally
Questions people usually arrive with.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy is a structured, evidence-based approach developed by Marsha Linehan, originally for people with borderline personality disorder. It has since developed a broad evidence base across emotion dysregulation, self-harm, eating difficulties, and relationship instability. The core idea is that two things can be true at once: your experience is valid and understandable as it is, and some of the patterns that have developed in response to that experience are causing harm and need to change. The approach works across four skill domains: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness.
A full DBT program involves structured group skills training running alongside individual therapy, phone coaching, and therapist consultation teams. It is typically offered through specialist programs and is designed for people with significant risk and high-complexity presentations. What is available here is different: DBT skills woven into individual therapy, without the group component. For many people, the skills component is where the practical value of DBT sits, and it can be integrated meaningfully into individual work alongside relational and psychodynamic approaches. If a full DBT program is what you need, that will be named clearly in the first session.
DBT tends to help people whose emotions arrive fast and with significant intensity. People who find themselves saying or doing things in moments of distress they later regret. Who notice relationship patterns that swing between closeness and rupture. Who have a history of self-harm, or of using other means to manage what feels unmanageable. Who feel their emotions are disproportionate to what is happening, or who have been told this by others. It also helps people who have developed good insight through prior therapy but still find that understanding does not change what happens when activation is high.
DBT is organised around four skill areas. Mindfulness: the capacity to notice what is happening in your experience without being swept into it or away from it. Distress tolerance: skills for surviving high-intensity moments without making the situation worse. Emotion regulation: understanding the nature of emotional experience, what influences it, and how to work with it rather than against it. Interpersonal effectiveness: navigating relationships with clarity about what you need, what the relationship needs, and your own self-respect. In individual therapy, these are not delivered as a formal curriculum but drawn on where they are most relevant to what you are working on.
Yes. With a Mental Health Care Plan from your GP, Medicare rebates of $145 apply. Sessions are $225 and your out-of-pocket cost with a valid plan is $80 per session. No referral is required to book, though a Mental Health Care Plan is worth arranging if you are likely to attend regularly.
Not an intake.
The first session is a genuine conversation: what is happening for you right now, what you are hoping for, and what it would mean for things to be different. Whether DBT skills, deeper relational work, or some combination of both is the right approach becomes clearer in that conversation. By the end, there should be a shared sense of what is being proposed and why.
Suite 11, 2098 Gold Coast Highway, Miami QLD 4220
jackson@jacksonhillpsychology.com.au · 0401 065 290
You do not have to arrive with clarity about what is wrong.
Most people do not. A first session is a commitment to one conversation: nothing more.
Book a session About the work →/2. ICONS/THERAPIST CHAIR.png){kind=logo}