If you’re practicing DBT, you’ve probably noticed the gap between what happens in therapy and what happens everywhere else. Skills that make sense when your therapist explains them can feel harder to access during the actual moments when you need them. Diary cards that seemed manageable in session end up forgotten in a bag or filled out from vague memory.
DBT Pal is designed for that gap. It’s an iPhone app that keeps diary card tracking and DBT skills accessible when you’re not in your therapist’s office—which is most of the time.
Download DBT Pal on the App Store
for iOS and Android
What DBT Pal Actually Does
The app focuses on a few core things:
Diary card tracking: Log your emotions, urges, and the skills you used. You can do this in the moment or add entries later. The goal is reducing the friction that makes paper cards easy to skip.
Skills library: Access DBT skills organized by category—mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness. When you’re trying to figure out what skill might help, having them accessible in one place matters.
Reminders: Optional prompts to check in with yourself or practice skills. These are meant to support consistency without adding pressure.
Export: Share your diary card data with your therapist when that’s useful. This can make sessions more grounded in what actually happened during the week.
Why This Matters Between Sessions
Therapy happens once a week. The situations where DBT skills could help happen constantly—difficult conversations, anxiety spikes, moments of overwhelm, urges that show up unexpectedly.
The traditional diary card works if you remember to fill it out, have it with you, and have the space to reflect. In practice, those conditions often don’t align. An app doesn’t make reflection automatic, but it makes it more accessible during the moments when reflection matters.
What This Looks Like in Practice
- Logging an emotion and intensity after a difficult meeting, before the details fade
- Checking the skills library when an urge comes up and you’re not sure what to try
- Reviewing your week’s entries before a therapy session
- Setting a gentle reminder to check in at the end of the day
Bridge the gap between therapy sessions
for iOS and Android
The Skills Library
DBT Pal includes the core DBT skills, organized so you can find what you need without scrolling through everything:
Mindfulness: Skills for staying present and observing without judgment
Distress Tolerance: Techniques for getting through crisis moments without making things worse—including TIPP, self-soothing, and radical acceptance
Emotion Regulation: Skills for understanding and managing emotional responses
Interpersonal Effectiveness: Tools like DEAR MAN for navigating relationships and communicating needs
Having these accessible in the same place where you’re tracking can help during moments when you’re trying to choose what skill to apply.
Logging an Entry, Step by Step
An entry follows the same columns as a paper diary card, just with taps and sliders instead of a pen.
- Emotions. Pick the emotions that fit right now, or the biggest moment of your day, and rate each from 0 to 5. Add a short note if there’s something your therapist should see. Record what’s true now, even if it shifts five minutes later.
- Urges and actions. Tap any urges that came up and rate how strong they were. Then mark separately whether you acted on them. That split matters: a 4/5 urge you didn’t act on is worth seeing in session.
- Skills. Tap each skill you tried, grouped by module, and rate whether it helped. Log the half-working attempts too. Over a few weeks, that builds a record of which skills work in which situations.
- Notes. Free text for triggers, thoughts, or what you’d try next time the same thing happens.
- Finish. Save the entry. It’s there when you export before your next session.
A few things make it easier to keep going:
- On a bad day, log less. An emotion and a number is still an entry. You can fill in the rest later.
- Log the setbacks. If you acted on an urge, that’s one of the entries most worth talking about.
- After a gap, just log today. Missing a day is normal. Skipping a week because you feel bad about missing a day is the bigger problem.
Exporting for Therapy Sessions
If you want to share your tracking with your therapist, DBT Pal lets you export your diary card data. This can make sessions more productive—instead of trying to reconstruct the week from memory, you have actual data to reference.
You can export for specific date ranges and share however works best for you and your therapist.
When This Helps (and When It Might Not)
DBT Pal tends to be most useful when:
- You’re actively in DBT and practicing skills regularly
- Paper diary cards keep getting lost or filled out late
- You want skills accessible in the moment rather than just in memory
- Consistent tracking has been difficult to maintain
If you’re not currently in DBT or working with a therapist, an app alone isn’t a substitute for that support. The skills and tracking are most useful as part of broader treatment.
Try DBT Pal to support your practice
for iOS and Android
Getting Started
If you’re looking for a way to support your DBT practice between sessions, DBT Pal is available on the App Store. It’s designed to reduce friction in your practice, not add another obligation.
For more on diary cards and skills practice: