Deborah Spiegel - Creative DBT Activities Using Music

CREATIVE DBT
ACTIVITIES
USING MUSIC

Interventions for Enhancing Engagement
and Effectiveness in Therapy

Deborah Spiegel
with Suzanne Makary
and Lauren Bonavitacola

Deborah Spiegel, MT-BC, is a board-certified music therapist who has been in the field since 1976, providing music therapy for people of all ages.

She was first introduced to Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) in 2001 when she worked as an integral member of a DBT-based treatment team at the Colorado Mental Health Institute. She was trained in DBT alongside her treatment team, by representatives of Behavioral Tech.

Over the following 11 years Deborah developed a system of strengthening and generalizing DBT skills within her music therapy groups and in using music activities while teaching the DBT skills as a DBT skills group leader in her skills training groups.

Deborahs passion for DBT-informed music therapy led her to spearhead a research project to validate the effectiveness of DBT-informed music therapy. For updates on research regarding music therapy and DBT visit: dbtmusic.com.

Ms. Spiegel presented a two-day workshop for the rehabilitation therapy department in eight California State Hospitals in 201415 called Supporting Patients in DBT through Rehabilitation Therapy. (This included music therapists, art therapists, dance therapists, recreation therapists, and occupational therapists.)

Prior to that, starting in 2011, she facilitated a similar workshop called DBT: Practical Life Skills Reinforced through Music Therapy for music therapists at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Maryland, Immaculata University in Pennsylvania, Eastern Michigan University, and a variety of other locations nationwide.

After her first online presentation of this class in February of 2012, what is now The Spiegel Academy was born. She is CEO and director of TheSpiegelAcademy.com, offering convenient, quality, and affordable online continuing education classes for music therapists and allied health professionals on a wide range of topics, including that original workshop.

Besides being a DBT-informed music therapist, Deborah Spiegel has a unique qualification: a certification in clinical hypnotherapy (since 1989), which adds depth to her guided imagery sessions. The process gives the recipients tools to help them connect with their own inner wisdom to bring about changes in their own lives. This informs the imagery scripts she has shared in this book. Deborah conducts imagery/hypnotherapy sessions in person or over the telephone or internet in her private practice. She often uses these to strengthen DBT skills.

Lauren Bonavitacola, PsyD, MT-BC, is a licensed psychologist, DBT-Linehan Board of Certification Certified Clinician, and board-certified music therapist working for Cognitive & Behavioral Consultants of Westchester and Manhattan (CBC), an outpatient CBT- and DBT-based treatment, training, and consultation center. She is the Director of Trauma-Focused Treatment Programs at CBC and works with adolescents, adults, couples, and families.

Dr. Bonavitacola has expertise and specialized training in the delivery of evidence-based treatments for trauma, anxiety, mood, substance use, eating, and personality disorders across the lifespan. She specializes in the implementation of DBT for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and associated conditions, as well as CBT for anxiety and mood disorders, particularly Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in adolescents and adults.

She received her bachelors degree in Music Therapy and Music Performance with a minor in Psychology from the University of Miami, and she earned both her masters and doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Rutgers University Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP).

Additionally, Lauren consults to several school districts in New York on DBT implementation in schools as well as conducting trainings in house and at schools on DBT and CBT treatment implementation. She is a supervisor of pre-doctoral psychology externs and post-doctoral fellows at CBC. Dr. Bonavitacola also teaches and supervises for The Spiegel Academys DBT-Informed Music Therapy Program.

Dr. Bonavitacola has published written works in several peer-reviewed journals and books and presented on topics related to CBT and DBT at national and international conferences including those sponsored by the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), the International Society for the Improvement and Teaching of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (ISITDBT), and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA). She is an active member of both ABCT and ISITDBT.

Suzanne Makary, MT-BC, is a board-certified music therapist who has spent her career serving adults with mental health challenges. She completed her internship in 1997 at Allentown State Hospital. Since that opportunity, Suzanne has worked with an interdisciplinary team in the partial hospitalization setting.

Throughout her journey as a professional, Suzanne designs and leads daily music therapy groups to assist in learning and reaching wellness goals with her clients. She found Marsha Linehans original text Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder inspiring and used concepts found in this text to help frame her work. In 2017, Suzanne completed the yearlong DBT-Informed Music Therapy program through The Spiegel Academy.

As a DBT-informed music therapist, Suzanne has created a curriculum for the Innovations Partial Hospital Program at St. Lukes University Health Network focused on teaching DBT skills daily.

Suzanne finds sharing ideas as professionals with one another and our clients to be rejuvenating. This text allowed her to do just that through contributing some of her original ideas and working with Deborah to expand the first edition.

Lauren Bonavitacola, PsyD, MT-BC

As an excited and motivated second-year psychology graduate student, I learned about the work of Deborah Spiegel at a training that she conducted at Immaculata University in Pennsylvania. I was studying clinical psychology at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP) at Rutgers University and had just started to dive deeper into my training and understanding of DBT under the direction of Shireen Rizvi, PhD, a former graduate student of the treatment developer herself, Marsha Linehan, PhD. Prior to graduate school, I had completed my undergraduate degree in music therapy and it was during my internship at a child and adolescent inpatient hospital that I was first introduced to DBT. I was pretty immediately drawn into its pragmatic nature and could easily see how this approach could be beneficial for the emotionally dysregulated teens I was working with at the hospital. I had always hoped that during graduate school and beyond I would find a way to integrate clinical psychology and music therapy; therefore, when I saw that Deborah had found a way to infuse music therapy interventions into the teaching of DBT, I was very intrigued! Attending this initial workshop marked the start of what would end up being a very rewarding and enriching professional relationship and collaboration.