Program Certification Spotlight

Team Lead Info

Victoria Kessinger, LCPC, is a DBT - Linehan Board of Certification, Certified Clinician. She works with adolescents and adults, primarily treating PTSD and BPD. Before she was introduced to DBT, her clinical work was guided by Feminist Empowerment Theory. This theory continues to heavily influence how she works with clients, manages GLTC’s team, and makes business decisions. While she can be obsessive about adherence at times, her core career goal is to increase access to high-quality evidence-based care. 

When not providing DBT or DBT-PE, Vic enjoys hiking with her dog Arty, watching Big Wave surfing, trying to learn how to surf herself, and listening to live music. 

Tell us about your program.

Victoria Kessinger, LCPC, created GLTC’s DBT Program in 2019 because she became aware that Illinois lacked affordable Full Protocol DBT services. While there were several DBT providers in the area, many of them provided DBT-informed services and the few that provided Full Protocol DBT did not accept insurance. GLTC was created to fill that gap. Our mission is to deliver high-quality, evidence-based DBT to clients who need it, reduce financial and income-based barriers to care, and foster a team and practice environment that supports talented and intensively trained clinicians in sustainably practicing DBT.

We are located in the downtown area of Chicago, IL. We provide full protocol DBT to clients 12 years and up, accept insurance (BCBS and United Healthcare Services), work with clients to use Single Case Agreements whenever possible, and offer sliding scale and pro bono rates. Specifically, every therapist holds at least 1 sliding scale or pro bono spot on their caseload, each group at GLTC has 1 sliding scale or pro bono spot, and GLTC’s DBT Fellows and Practicum Students provide DBT at significantly reduced rates. This business model allows clients from varying economic backgrounds to receive high-quality, evidence-based treatment and has resulted in a diverse community of clients. 

Why does certification matter?   

We pursued certification as a way to ensure that we had built a program that would support clinicians in providing DBT with fidelity to the model, as well as to have a way of communicating to clients that they were receiving the high quality of services that they expect when they seek out and commit to DBT with GLTC. We see certification as a way of building and keeping trust with our clients - a way of demonstrating to clients that we are doing what we say we are doing. We feel this is especially owed to clients with complex, high-risk presentations who have tried many other treatments before getting to us. Clients deserve to know that the treatment they are committing their time and energy to is the evidence-based, gold-standard treatment for what they are struggling with. 

What did your team/program gain going through the certification process?   

Our Team gained the accountability needed to build systems that more effectively track treatment outcomes, help us adhere to contracting procedures, and make it easier for clinicians to stick to the model than to drift from it. The certification process pushed us to take a hard look at how vulnerable we were really getting on Team and to work together to name how we were being ineffective and increase our ability to be vulnerable with each other, own our fallibility, and get more comfortable observing polarization and calling out elephants in the room. It helped us make the Team what it is meant to be - therapy for the therapist. And it’s been feeling much more collaborative, supportive, connected, and useful ever since. 

At the same time, by going through the certification process, we gained a deeper understanding of how some certification requirements and DBT procedures conflict with anti-racism practices. For example, as a practice that accepts insurance, to expand our groups to two hours we had to reduce the amount of sliding scale and pro bono DBT we could offer, which further reduced the accessibility of the treatment and challenged a core part of GLTC’s mission.

In terms of our relationships with other practices and the greater DBT community, certification has granted us increased visibility and credibility, and helped us build camaraderie with other insurance-based practices that are struggling to provide Full Protocol DBT due to financial limitations. It has distinguished us from DBT Informed providers and clarified this for our referral sources as well as for our clients. Along with this has come increased self-confidence in our ability and in the quality of services we’re providing; it’s even got us thinking about ways in which we can start to further expand our competencies!

Last but not least, we’ve found that our Multifamily Group loves having a 15-minute break to get a snack and get to chit-chat, which warms our hearts. 

What is your favorite mindfulness exercise to do with your team?   

We have many favorites! Right now, one of the ones we enjoy the most is “Highs and Lows.” We find that this helps us all connect and learn more about one another’s lives; it encourages us to start Team off on a vulnerable note, reminding us all that Team is therapy for the therapist. It also has been helping us lately to get into a dialectical headspace right at the start of our Team meetings, as we reflect on some of the most enjoyable and most painful moments of our weeks or days. 

What are some ways your team supports each other in reducing burnout or individual vulnerabilities? 

Some things we do as a team to reduce burnout include always having a burnout section on the Team agenda, focusing on what the therapist needs and how the therapist is doing during Team shares (as opposed to case consultation and problem-solving), and ending the Team with sharing good news. We have a habit of sharing random pet pictures and other fun content on our “positive content” Google Hangouts thread, and we do our best to get together in person for social events whenever we can. We’ve also established a norm of always covering phone coaching when a clinician is on vacation, offering phone coaching coverage and/or other support when a clinician is burned out, and relying on a rotation system for major holidays in which one clinician will volunteer to cover coaching for the whole practice on each major holiday. This means clinicians can almost always get a break from phone coaching on major holidays, especially the ones that are most important to them and their families. 

 Any tips for other teams?

Make sure you have the administrative and leadership capacity on your team to have some folks take on the extra admin responsibilities that will be needed throughout the certification process; we worked hard to ensure we were able to pay leadership for their time spent working on certification instead of seeing as many clients, and this is a huge challenge for many practices. Make sure you take your values and mission as a team into consideration before going through this process; the requirements of certification are rigorous and may at times challenge other values of the practice. It can help to be prepared by thinking ahead about what sacrifices you are willing to make as a team, and where your firm limits are.