First Graduation of DBT Therapists

We taught an Introductory Class of "Therapy" in the spring of 2019 to about 10 Somali speaking students. It was an intense learning process for all of us. The idea of psychotherapy was a very foreign concept to almost everyone there. We went over several concepts over the course of several weeks. Validation and invalidation probably got the most traction. We realized that students would need a lot of preparation and introductory material. We also realized our first group of actual therapy students needed to be fluent in English. After this group finished a month of introductory lectures we started looking for a group of English speaking students willing to enroll in a more structured training that would last almost 2 years.