Breaking the Cycle: A Practical Guide to Using Chain Analysis With Your Clients Mini Course

Have you ever sat with a client who says, "I don't know why I did that"? They can often tell you what happened, but when you try to reconstruct exactly how they got from one moment to the next, the sequence turns out to be surprisingly hard to pin down. That's the gap Chain Analysis is built to close.

Chain Analysis is one of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)'s primary assessment tools. Done well, it moves you past simply naming a problematic behavior and into understanding exactly how that behavior unfolded and what may be keeping it going.

At TheraHive, we built Breaking the Cycle: A Practical Guide to Using Chain Analysis With Your Clients to give clinicians a clinically detailed, start-to-finish process for understanding why a behavior happens and what keeps it going. You'll walk away able to define a specific, observable target behavior, pinpoint the prompting event and vulnerability factors behind it, trace the links connecting one moment to the next, and turn that assessment directly into solutions analysis.

We demonstrate the process with a real case example and give you the practical questions and language to bring into your own sessions. The goal isn't finishing a worksheet or memorizing five components. It's understanding a client's life well enough to build interventions that actually match what's driving the behavior. We'll also show how repeated chain analyses feed into broader case conceptualization by surfacing patterns across episodes. You don't need to be running a full DBT program to use this. You just need clients whose behavior you're trying to understand and change.

This mini course is co-sponsored by Guidepost DBT and is approved by the American Psychological Association to offer Continuing Education credits. If you hold a valid license, you can earn 3 CE credits by completing this course.

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What You'll Learn

• ‍The five components of a complete chain analysis: Target behavior, prompting event, vulnerability factors, links, and consequences, covered one at a time with the specific assessment questions that pull clinically useful detail out of a client rather than a vague summary.
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• Where assessment typically breaks down: Each component comes with the pitfalls that interfere with a clean chain, from tangled prompting events to mistaking a longstanding trait for a same-day vulnerability factor, so you can catch the drift in real time instead of after the session.
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• How to move from assessment straight into intervention: The course walks the four DBT solution categories, skills training, cognitive modification, exposure, and contingency management, and shows how to map each one to the specific point in the chain where it belongs.

What's Included

The course delivers its content through written modules, a case study video with an added layer of clinical commentary, and interactive practice built around a fully fictional vignette so you can work through the material without any confidentiality concerns.

It's designed to help you:

• Identify and describe each of the five chain analysis components with clinical precision
• Recognize the common assessment pitfalls before they derail a session
• Choose the DBT solution category that actually fits a given link, not just the one you default to
• Practice mapping a full chain and matching it to solutions using a guided worksheet and tool

A post-test and program evaluation close out the course, with a certificate of completion for your records.

Who This Mini Course Is For

This course is a good fit if:

• You use chain analysis in your practice but want a more thorough, structured approach to it
• You're not trained in DBT but want a behavioral assessment tool that works across modalities
• You've noticed your assessments and your interventions don't always line up
• You want a clinical commentary walkthrough of what an experienced DBT clinician actually listens for at each link

No prior DBT training required, though familiarity with basic clinical assessment will help you get the most out of it.

Course Creators & Featured Contributors

	Dr. Alicia Smart, PsyD (Course Creator) is a Linehan Board of Certification Certified Clinician™ and the Co-Founder and Chief Clinical Officer at TheraHive. She has spent her career making evidence-based DBT skills accessible to people who need them, bringing both clinical depth and genuine warmth to every episode.
	Dr. Jesse Finkelstein, PsyD (Course Creator) is also a Linehan Board of Certification Certified Clinician™ and serves as Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at TheraHive. Jesse has a particular gift for translating complex DBT concepts into practical, livable guidance, the kind you can actually remember at 2:00pm on a Tuesday.
	Dr. Shireen Rizvi, PhD, ABPP (Featured Contributor) is a licensed clinical psychologist, board certified in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). At the University of Washington, her mentor was Dr. Marsha Linehan, the developer of DBT. She was TheraHive co-founder Jesse Finkelstein’s graduate advisor at Rutgers University and collaborated with Jesse to write the book Real Skills for Real Life: A DBT Guide to Navigating Stress, Emotions, and Relationships.

TheraHive Partners

Guidepost DBT is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Guidepost DBT maintains responsibility for this program and its content. TheraHive is co-sponsored by Guidepost DBT to provide the learning materials for this course.

 

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Get the Mini Course Free When You Enroll in a Group Program

If you're interested in going deeper, this mini course is included at no extra cost when you enroll in any TheraHive Group program. This includes our Parent DBT Skills Group, Adult DBT Skills Group, or Adolescent DBT Skills Group. If you purchase the mini course first and later decide to enroll in a group program, we'll apply the cost of the mini course toward your group tuition.

Ready to Get Started?

A chain analysis is only as useful as the assessment behind it. This mini course gives you the structure to run one well, every time.

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