We Accept Most Major Insurances
How We Treat Borderline Personality Disorder
Alta Health helps adults with complex mental health needs navigate BPD symptoms that impede emotional wellness and quality of life. Borderline personality disorder is a mental health condition that contributes to intense emotions, mood swings, fear of abandonment, low self-esteem and self-image, and unstable relationships. However, access to psychiatry, psychotherapy, and other forms of evidence-based therapy, such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), can help address these challenges. We help clients reduce impulsive behaviors, improve emotional regulation, and strengthen relationships for a stable, fulfilling life.
Our team of providers is dedicated to building a treatment plan that meets you where you are on your mental health journey. We provide an insurance-based model to bridge the gap between mental health care and accessible treatment options for working adults. Whether you need outpatient treatment (OP), an intensive outpatient program (IOP), or a partial hospitalization program (PHP), we provide BPD treatment rooted in compassion and individualized care to ensure meaningful progress.
A Supportive Outpatient Mental Health Environment
BPD symptoms can cause intense, emotional overwhelm and instability. Emotional overwhelm and impulsivity can make it feel impossible to function. However, access to a calm, wellness-oriented environment can help eliminate some of the stressors that contribute to overwhelm, impulsive behaviors, and instability in your life.
Our supportive, non-judgmental environment fosters connection, consistency, and emotional safety, encouraging stability and meaningful growth. Instead of feeling unseen and unheard in a clinical-heavy space, our modern in-person treatment centers offer structured care and flexible scheduling to support work, school, and daily responsibilities for clients across Dallas, Fort Worth, and the surrounding areas.
The Alta Health Difference
Alta Health was created to fill a gap in behavioral healthcare — offering accessible, outpatient-only mental health treatment that is compassionate, structured, and insurance-focused.
Outpatient-Only Focus
We exclusively provide outpatient levels of care, including PHP, IOP, and outpatient therapy. We do not offer inpatient, residential, or detox services.
Insurance-Based Care
Our programs are designed to work within insurance-based models, helping individuals access care without luxury or resort-style framing.
Wellness-Oriented Environment
We cultivate a calm and supportive space that focuses on emotional health, coping skills, and sustainable well-being.
Evidence-Based Modalities
Treatment is grounded in proven clinical practices such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and structured group therapy.
Patient-Centered Support
Each individual receives a personalized treatment plan designed around their unique mental health needs and goals.
Care Designed for Real Life
Alta Health’s outpatient programs are built to support individuals as they continue working, attending school, and managing daily responsibilities. Our structured schedules and practical skill-building help clients apply what they learn in treatment to real-world situations – promoting lasting well-being beyond sessions.
Our Evidence-Based Therapies for Borderline Personality Disorder
We provide evidence-based therapy in BPD treatment to help clients build coping skills and support the management of personality disorder symptoms. Through our wellness approach, you work with a clinician to build an individualized treatment plan, designed around your life for sustained wellness.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for Emotional Regulation
DBT is an evidence-based treatment that uses cognitive-behavioral techniques and mindfulness to address intense emotions and impulsive behaviors. Through DBT skills training, you’ll learn how to manage intense emotions, reduce impulsivity, and eliminate unstable relationships.
DBT is structured around four core skill-building components: mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and distress tolerance.
- Mindfulness: Accept emotions without self-judgment to reduce impulsive behaviors and improve self-esteem and self-image
- Interpersonal effectiveness: Build skills to cope with conflict, and foster self-respect and healthy relationships
- Emotional regulation: Identify and label emotions for self-understanding and reduce emotional instability
- Distress tolerance: Foster skills to distract, self-soothe, and adjust response to emotional pain and reduce self-harm or suicidal behavior
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for Thought Patterns
Through CBT, you learn how to recognize unhelpful thoughts and beliefs that contribute to intense emotions, mood swings, poor emotional regulation, and fear of abandonment. BPD symptoms can lead to significant impairment in thinking and behavior, such as black-and-white or all-or-nothing thinking, ruminating on past negative emotions and conflicts, assuming the worst possible outcome, and negative assumptions about others’ intentions or how they feel about you. Recognizing these are thoughts rather than reality helps stabilize your mood, increase your self-esteem, and improve your self-image.
Psychotherapy and Individual Therapy
Common forms of psychotherapy for BPD treatment include DBT, transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP), mentalization-based treatment (MBT), and schema-focused therapy (SFT). These evidence-based therapies are used with individual therapy to treat BPD symptoms.
Working with a mental health professional in individual therapy sessions provides an environment of emotional safety to reflect on your emotional patterns, how they impact your sense of identity, and how they affect your relationships. Individual therapy also helps you develop self-awareness and problem-solving skills, an understanding of emotional triggers, and decreased impulsivity. In addition, BPD treatment aims to help clients form coping skills to reduce mood swings, self-harm, suicidal behavior, and impulsive behaviors like substance abuse.
Psychiatry and Medication Management
Outpatient psychiatry for BPD treatment offers a comprehensive plan to manage symptoms, decrease emotional instability, improve coping skills and functioning, and treat co-occurring mental health disorders. Although evidence-based therapy is the first line of treatment for BPD, medication management can be an effective addition when appropriate.
Common medications a psychiatrist may prescribe to treat BPD include:
- Mood stabilizers: Reduce intense emotions, mood swings, emotional dysregulation, anxiety, and impulsivity
- Antipsychotics: Reduce anger, aggression, anxiety, depression, impulsivity, and self-harm behavior
- Antidepressants: Manage impulsive behaviors, mood swings, and co-occurring conditions like depression and anxiety
These medications can also help with other co-occurring conditions like eating disorders and substance use.
Skills Training and Group Therapy
Structured skills training addresses challenges with an unstable self-image, impulsivity, mood swings, fear of abandonment, and unstable relationships. You’ll practice the four core skill-building techniques, mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness to support more effective coping skills. Skill-building supports coping with intense emotions, improved communication, setting boundaries, and increased self-awareness.
Additionally, skills training and group therapy offer a variety of benefits, such as validation from sharing and learning from peers. Engaging in diagnosis-specific groups reminds you that you’re not alone and helps you feel understood without judgment. Other benefits of group therapy for BPD treatment include reduced isolation, improved social connection, enhanced interpersonal skills, and improved coping skills and self-awareness.
What to Expect From Our BPD Program
Alta Health’s outpatient borderline personality disorder treatment in Dallas offers an accessible program for emotional stability, sustainable coping skills, and balance. Each level of care for PHP, IOP, and OP ensures you or your loved one receives a flexible but structured, clinically proven treatment plan that fits into your life with evidence-based therapy and skill-building techniques.
Structured Yet Flexible Outpatient Programming
- Flexible scheduling for an outpatient program that matches your needs and life
- OP: Regular therapy sessions once or twice a week or every other week
- IOP: Regular therapy sessions several times a week
- PHP: Short-term, regular therapy sessions every day of the week or several times a week
- Fits into daily life: Continue living at home, stay connected to family, and maintain responsibilities
Skill-Building for Emotional Regulation
- Grounding: Reduces overwhelm and reactions by bringing you back to the present moment
- Journaling: Helps you identify triggers for intense emotions and understand emotional patterns
- Physical activity: Decreases intense emotions and reactivity by releasing endorphins to improve mood and reduce stress
- Breathwork: Helps anchor you to reduce impulsivity and intense emotions
Group and Individual Therapy Balance
- Personalized care addresses symptoms and triggers, and how to apply skill-building to daily life
- Improves skill development, emotional regulation, interpersonal skills, and relationship function
- Supports crisis skills to manage self-harm and suicidal behavior impulses
- Peer support reduces isolation and fosters validation and connection
- Diagnosis-specific group tracks offer comfort, safety, and condition relevance
Real-World Application
- Learn to apply DBT skills to manage intense emotions and impulsivity, and build stable relationships
- Mindfulness: Identify unhelpful thoughts to reduce impulsivity and manage intense emotions
- Distress tolerance: Practice distraction and self-soothing coping skills to decrease self-destructive behaviors
- Emotional regulation strategies reduce reactivity by labeling and validating emotions without accepting them as truth
- Interpersonal effectiveness: Build assertive communication to set healthy boundaries in your relationships
The Journey of Healing starts Today
BPD Symptoms and Conditions We Treat
We provide evidence-based support for complex mental health conditions, including trauma, depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and BPD. Whether you’re struggling with mood swings, panic, disconnection, impulsivity, or hopelessness, Alta Health can help you regain control and achieve lasting wellness.
What Is Borderline Personality Disorder?
BPD is a mental health condition that affects emotional regulation and how you feel about yourself and others. Although BPD can be present in an adolescent, the condition commonly begins in early adulthood when emotional dysregulation symptoms are the most intense. The symptoms of BPD are typically characterized as intense emotions and mood swings, impulsive and self-destructive behaviors, fear of abandonment, unstable relationships, and a distorted self-image.
Common BPD Symptoms
Some common BPD symptoms include:
- Intense emotions, mood swings, emptiness
- Fear of abandonment
- Impulsive behaviors: spending spree, reckless driving, unsafe sex, substance use
- Unstable relationships
- Distorted self-image
- Self-destructive behaviors: self-harm, suicidal behavior
Related Mental Health Conditions
BPD commonly co-occurs with other mental health conditions, as well as behavioral and physical health conditions such as:
- Mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder
- Anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Other personality disorders, ADHD, and OCD
- Substance use disorder (SUD) and eating disorders
- Physical conditions, including diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular issues
When to Seek Treatment for BPD
It’s not easy to recognize when you’re struggling with BPD, especially when your symptoms feel like a normal or justified reaction to a perceived threat or pain. However, if you’re struggling with intense internal emotional turmoil, mood swings, emptiness, or self-image issues, it may be time to reach out for support. Signs that you may benefit from a PHP include:
Signs It May Be Time to Seek Support
Possible signs it’s time to seek help include:
- Difficulty managing intense emotions
- Risky or impulsive behaviors
- Self-image issues
- Ongoing relationship instability
- Self-harm or suicidal behavior
- Declining quality of life
The Importance of Early Intervention
BPD symptoms can make you feel broken, like a burden, ashamed, and mistrustful of others, which makes it harder to ask for help. However, early intervention can help alleviate emotional pain and restore your social functioning, enabling you to lead a fulfilling life. With support from a mental health professional, you can learn to manage your symptoms, foster emotional stability, reduce self-harm and risk for comorbidities, improve your relationships, and boost your self-esteem. Early intervention gives you the tools to rebuild emotional safety in yourself and with others, and improve your overall well-being.
Building Skills for Emotional Stability and Relationships
Coping skills and skills training are a crucial part of BPD treatment for managing emotional regulation and improving functioning in your life and relationships. At Alta Health, we offer evidence-based, mental health-focused care to address your specific needs and goals to manage BPD in your daily life.
Emotional Regulation and Distress Tolerance
Pain and distress are a part of life that can’t be completely avoided or ignored. However, together, emotional regulation and distress tolerance teach you how to recognize, understand, and accept emotional experiences while navigating a crisis. As a result, you’re able to face a crisis and manage intense emotions without resorting to harmful, impulsive behaviors.
Interpersonal Effectiveness and Relationships
Practicing interpersonal effectiveness teaches you how to improve communication to express your needs, build and set healthy boundaries, and build self-respect for genuine connections. Building these skills helps you end unhealthy relationships while fostering and strengthening positive, mutually supportive relationships.
Self-Image and Self-Esteem Development
DBT skill training gives you the tools to dismantle negative core beliefs about yourself, foster self-compassion, and find validation in yourself rather than seeking it from others. These tools help you build a more stable, positive sense of self, leading to a stronger self-image and greater self-esteem.
Mindfulness and Self-Awareness
Over time, mindfulness increases your awareness and understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and reactions. With greater self-awareness and self-understanding, you can more effectively accept those thoughts and feelings without judgment or attachment, thereby changing how you react in the present.
Expanded Support for Lasting Emotional Stability
Our mission is to provide compassionate, evidence-based mental health care that restores hope, builds resilience, and empowers you to live a healthier life. With a focus on mental health-only outpatient treatment, we’ve built a treatment program that meets you where you are on your BPD treatment journey.
Structured Outpatient Treatment Programs
We offer a structured level of care for in-person outpatient treatment, with a focus on wellness, accessibility, and flexibility to help you continue meeting your daily responsibilities. Whether you enter our PHP, IOP, or OP treatment programs, we ensure you’ll receive tailored care to strengthen coping skills, improve emotional well-being, and restore balance in your daily life.
Ongoing Psychiatric Care and Medication Support
When appropriate, we offer carefully monitored medication management to ensure you receive the best care for your specific needs and goals. Under the psychiatric care of a mental health professional, medication can be a beneficial part of your treatment plan to address specific symptoms like depression, anxiety, mood instability, and impulsivity.
Skills-Based, Practical Treatment Approach
Utilizing skill-building in DBT empowers you to have control over your mental health and life with actionable tools. These tools focus on real-life coping strategies and behavioral changes that benefit your life, from reducing self-destructive behaviors to improving how you manage your emotions and your relationships. A practical, skill-based treatment approach means you don’t have to wait for change to happen – you can start making positive lasting change in your life now.
FAQs
PHP provides more intensive support compared to IOP, which can mimic inpatient care without an overnight stay. People often step down into a PHP after a stay in an inpatient program. PHPs typically have 5-6 hours of treatment per day, 5 days a week. In contrast, an IOP is less intensive, with an average of 3 hours of treatment a day, 3-5 days a week.
Inpatient treatment offers 24/7 medical supervision and is designed to help those in crisis who need constant monitoring. People with severe needs that require medical supervision stabilize first in inpatient treatment, before they step down into other levels of care.
A PHP can help bridge the gap between inpatient residential treatment and intensive outpatient treatment for those in addiction recovery. It offers more intensive care compared to other outpatient programs while still allowing the individual to go home. This helps people in recovery utilize the coping skills they learned in treatment while having access to continued intensive support.
Alta Health does not provide treatment for active substance use disorders, drug addictions, or dual diagnosis. If substance use or co-occurring conditions are identified, our team can assist with a referral and coordination of care with specialized treatment providers.
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is commonly used to help our clients manage intense emotions and improve emotional regulation. It’s most often used to help clients manage conditions such as bipolar disorder.
Clients can expect a flexible approach to outpatient treatment that respects their schedules and responsibilities. Outpatient programs provide critical therapies that help clients integrate into normal life while providing professional support. Group therapy, individual therapy, medication management, psychoeducation, skills training, and more are all important parts of an outpatient treatment plan. This allows professionals to provide daily structure, address mental health symptoms, and offer further referrals to care as needed.
Yes, a PHP can assist someone recovering from PTSD and other trauma-based conditions. PHP offers intensive care to clients who need more support than an IOP can provide, but still allows them to go home at the end of the day.
Alta Health offers fully outpatient care. You do not have to begin with inpatient care before stepping down to outpatient care. Many mental health conditions are mild or moderate enough to be addressed solely with outpatient treatment.
Alta Health offers a wide range of evidence-based mental health services and therapies, such as:
- Psychotherapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)
- Group, family, and individual therapy
- Trauma-specific therapy, such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
- Neurofeedback
- Relaxation techniques, such as meditation and mindfulness
- Psychoeducation and stress management
- Art therapy
No, a PHP is not considered a short-term program. This is because each PHP is highly personalized to each individual. As such, the length of time a person will need care can vary, with some needing long-term support. This is normal, and we encourage those seeking treatment to focus on healing without viewing it like a race. We offer flexible scheduling to help you or your loved one engage in daily responsibilities while receiving care.
Schedules vary by individual, but PHPs typically have 5 to 6 hours of treatment per day, 5 days a week. Clients arrive in the morning and mentally prepare for the day, which can include mindfulness or light movement. Afterward, there is a block of treatment, such as group therapy or individual therapy. There is a break for lunch, and then there is another block of treatment. Each day of PHP ends with a period of reflection or debrief, and afterward, clients go home for the day.
After a PHP is completed, there is an option to step down into a less intensive level of care, such as an IOP or outpatient program. This option is suggested to help individuals gradually return to normal activities while still having access to professional care.