Programs · Intense emotions · Ride the Wave
Ride the Wave
Managing intense emotions with DBT
Intense emotions are not a defect — they are waves: they rise, they peak, and every one of them ends. This program teaches the DBT emotion-regulation skills for riding them: name the wave, check the facts, surf the urge, act opposite, lower your baseline. Sixty seconds of diary card a night, and your own data does the convincing.
With coach MayaProgram at a glance
- Who it's for
- For anyone whose emotions arrive big — fast, full volume, slow to leave — and cost them things: words they did not mean, evenings lost to a feeling, a lifetime of being told they were overreacting.
- What it is
- A structured 6-week DBT program for intense emotions, built from the protocol clinicians use.
- Format
- 10–15 min/day — coach videos, a diary card, and a weekly review that adapts your plan.
- Price
- First week free — including your baseline wave report. Then $99, one-time — not a subscription.
Waves have a shape, too
- Emotions that arrive fast, at full volume, and are slow to leave.
- Words said in the heat of it that cost you afterward.
- Evenings — or days — lost to a single feeling.
- A lifetime of being told you were overreacting.
- The urge and the action feeling like the same thing.
Your diary card drives the program
Not a course you watch — a loop you run. Ride the Wave reads which skills you actually used and which ones actually helped, and prescribes next week's focus skill from your own ratings.
Measure
A sixty-second diary card each evening, while the day is still honest — plus an optional wave log whenever a big one passes.
daily · 60 secLearn
Short sessions with Maya teach the method — what an emotion is, checking the facts, opposite action, lowering the baseline.
10–15 min · most daysAdjust
The weekly review ranks your skills by how much they actually helped, and prescribes the one to lean on next.
weekly review↻ the loop runs weekly — six times
Every skill you try gets rated for whether it helped. The weekly review finds the quadrant that matters — skills you rated highly but reached for least — and prescribes that one as next week's focus. Not the skill we like best; the one your own card says is working and going to waste.
Six weeks, one method
Seventeen sessions and five weekly reviews. The first week is free — including your baseline wave report.
Week 1Understand the WaveThe machinery, frame by frame3 sessions
Week 2Name It to Ride ItThe map, the facts, the ride4 sessions
Week 3Don't Make It WorseThe gap, the brakes, the second wave4 sessions
Week 4Opposite ActionThe heavy lifter4 sessions
Week 5Lower the BaselineFewer storms start on a lower sea4 sessions
Week 6Keep the SkillYour data, your drill, your page3 sessions
Maya
DBT: emotion regulation core · guides 4 programs
The steady emotion-regulation coach — warm, unhurried, and precise about what a feeling is actually doing before asking you to change anything. Maya treats big emotions as information, not malfunctions.
“Hi, I'm Maya. Over the next six weeks we're not going to make you feel less — we're going to make the waves rideable, and let your own card prove it.”
Linehan's module, faithfully built
Ride the Wave implements the DBT emotion-regulation module — Linehan's biosocial model, the model of emotions, check the facts, mindfulness of current emotion, opposite action, ABC PLEASE, and cope ahead — with TIPP from distress tolerance for peak arousal. Full DBT with a clinician is the treatment with the evidence behind it; this is the skills training, self-guided.
- Biosocial model and the model of emotionsLinehan
- Check the facts and opposite action
- ABC PLEASE and cope ahead
- TIPP for peak arousaldistress tolerance
Not crisis care, and honest about it
Self-harm urges pin a crisis-resources card for the whole program; urges with intent, or recent acts, get direct referral copy — full DBT with a clinician is the treatment with the evidence, and this program says so rather than competing with it. Diagnosed or suspected bipolar disorder routes to an education-only track pending clinician confirmation.
The TIPP brakes carry contraindication tags and flagged brakes are hidden — cold water for heart conditions, low blood pressure, or beta-blockers; intense exercise for anyone with an eating-disorder history. This program is not medical advice.
Ride the Wave, next to the field
| Ride the WaveResiliens | dialecticalbehaviortherapy.comdialecticalbehaviortherapy.com | Grouport DBT Self-Guided Programgrouporttherapy.com | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $99 one-time (was $149) — the program is yours | Free | $500 one-time, lifetime access |
| Structure | 6 weeks · 17 sessions + weekly reviews | 40+ lessons across the four modules, each roughly 5 minutes of learning plus a 10-minute exercise; the email track runs 26 weeks | 48 video sessions of about 22 minutes each — over 17 hours — with 48 homework assignments and reading manuals across six modules. At the suggested one-per-week pace, that is roughly a year |
| Personalization | Diary card → skill leaderboard → focus skill | None — the same sequence for everyone, with no data collected | None |
| Human support | Self-guided · clinician-referral gates built in | None | Taught by a licensed instructor, with a peer community forum, but no direct instructor feedback |
| Access | Self-serve, start today | Free and open on the web | Direct-to-consumer, web only |
| Breadth | 70+ program catalog · bundle 2-3 related programs and save | The generic full DBT curriculum, not aimed at any specific problem | The generic full DBT curriculum; no diary card and no problem-specific track |
| Platforms | Web · iOS · Android | Web | Web |
Sources: competitor pricing and program pages — every production value carries a source URL and access date, and unpublished facts are labeled "not published," never guessed.
Why we built it differently
- Built for one problem, not all of DBT. Ride the Wave teaches the emotion-regulation module against the specific problem of waves that arrive big and stay — rather than marching you through all four modules to reach the part you came for.
- The card tells you what's next. Everyone hands you a diary card. This one is read weekly to find the skills you rated highly and reach for least, and prescribes that as next week's focus — the mechanic no competitor in this category offers.
- Six weeks, and finishable. The published trials of DBT apps report heavy dropout and low dose-completion. A six-week program with an end is a deliberate answer to that, not a shortcut.
Start free. Continue if it's working.
First week
- Onboarding + two full sessions
- Nightly diary card + wave log
- Your baseline wave report
Full program
- All six weeks of Ride the Wave, yours to keep
- Every session, review, and exercise
- Web + Untangle app access
Working on more than one thing? Related programs bundle together — two or three at a discount. Bundle pricing is coming.
Go deeper before you start Ride the Wave
- The DBT Diary Card: A Complete GuideHow the DBT diary card works, why daily tracking beats memory, and a step-by-step guide to filling one out with a worked example.8 min read min read
- Opposite Action: A DBT Skill for Unhelpful EmotionsOpposite Action is a DBT skill that helps you act against an unhelpful urge, one small step at a time, to actually shift how you feel.8 min read min read
- Emotion Regulation>+5 min read min read
Before you start
Is this the same as doing DBT with a therapist?
No, and we won't pretend otherwise. Full DBT — individual therapy, skills group, phone coaching — is the treatment with the evidence behind it. This is the skills-training piece, self-guided, for people who want to start now or reinforce what they're already learning.
Do I need a BPD diagnosis to use this?
No. Ride the Wave is built for emotions that arrive big and cost you things — not for a chart code. DBT skills were developed in that context and have since been shown useful far beyond it.
What if I have self-harm urges?
Crisis resources stay pinned for the whole program, and urges with intent or recent acts get direct referral copy pointing you to full DBT with a clinician. This program is not crisis care and doesn't pretend to be.
How much time does it take?
Sixty seconds for the diary card each evening, and ten to fifteen minutes most days for the session. A wave log takes another minute, whenever a big one passes — late entries are fine.
How much does it cost, and is it a subscription?
The first week is free, with no card required. The full program is $99, paid once — there is no subscription and nothing to cancel. When you finish it, it stays yours.
How do I know if it's working?
You take a validated questionnaire at the start, then again at each weekly review, so progress is a number you can watch rather than a streak. Across 6 weekly reviews the program adapts your plan from your own data — and if the number is not moving, you will see that too.
Ride the wave
Start the first week of Ride the Wave free — onboarding, two full sessions, your daily log, and your baseline report. Continue only if it's working.
No card for the first week. The full program is $99, one-time — not a subscription.