Now accepting applications for May 2025
Who we are:
Heather Menzies
Heather Menzies
Heather Menzies
Heather is a nurse (RNBN) who has worked in the field of mental health over her 16 year career in nursing, and is currently one of the Mental Health Liasion Nurses in the emergency department at Boundary Trails Health Centre. Working in the emergency department she has seen the need for expanded services in our area and is excited to be part of filling a need in the communities we serve
Amber Thiessen
Heather Menzies
Heather Menzies
Amber is a Mental Health Liaison Nurse at Boundary Trails Health Centre. She has also recently completed her Masters Degree in Counselling and practices at Pembina Counselling Centre. She believes there is always hope in the midst of our struggles and that we can learn skills to help us change.
Julia Stoesz
Ramona Martens Wiebe
Ramona Martens Wiebe
Julia is a Certified Professional Counsellor who has a Master's Degree in Counselling Psychology. She has a private counselling practice in Morden. She sees building emotional regulation skills as vital to building wellness and effectiveness in all kinds of life challenges. She is excited to expand her services to DBT clients through Boundary Trails DBT.
Ramona Martens Wiebe
Ramona Martens Wiebe
Ramona Martens Wiebe
Ramona has her Masters Degree in counselling. She has seen people heal when they feel connected and safe. She believes that people are doing the best they can and that with tools and skills they can do better. Ramona looks forward to helping clients learn DBT skills and putting them into practice.
What is DBT?
DBT is for challenges with Emotional Regulation
DBT stands for Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. It is an evidence-based treatment initially created by University of Washington psychologist Marsha Linehan for the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder.
Since then, it has also been shown to be effective for people of all kinds who feel emotions very intensely and have difficulty regulating them as well as those who feel very numb or disconnected from their emotions and have trouble feeling them appropriately.
The goal of DBT is to help people manage their emotions and behaviours so that they can reduce emotional suffering, be more effective in accomplishing their goals, and create a life worth living.
What is "Dialectics"?
A dialectic is when two seemingly conflicting things are true at the same time. For example, in DBT we believe that we need to do better at accepting ourselves as we are AND we also need to work at changing our behaviours and effectiveness in our lives.
These two goals appear opposite, by keeping both truths in mind at the same time, we can find ways to navigate life in a more "even keeled" way without being overly rigid or overwhelmed.
What does DBT offer that is different than other therapy methods?
One of the exciting parts of DBT is that it has, at its core, an intensive, comprehensive focus which means it involves an intense commitment to both a learning component (skills group) and a therapy component (1:1 therapy) over a finite period of time.
As well, DBT emphasizes that talking about our difficulties only takes us so far. We also need to be able to develop more effective skills and learn how to practice and use them in everyday life.
We believe that the intensive combination of compassionate support AND learning to use new skills is the magic that creates measurable change for those that struggle with intense emotional regulation difficulties.
For more information about what this looks like in our program, please click below.