EMOTIONAL REGULATION
Oftentimes when clients ask about how to cope or deal with emotions, they are asking how do I get rid of these emotions, how do I get past these emotions.
The question shouldn’t be how do I get rid of these emotions, the question should be how do I develop a bigger window of tolerance for my emotions, or the emotions of others. How do I not run away or shut down these emotions. A good question is why do I shut down or run away from emotions? A large part of this is how we have been socialized, cultural norms, family culture.
For others, esp with trauma, we may at times feel flooded by emotions. The challenge here may be how to bring down the intensity of emotions, so you can
make sense of them and use them to express what you need.
One of the most powerful tools in emotion regulation is simply identifying and naming the emotion you are feeling.
Find the words to describe your feelings rather than using vague or general terms. The idea behind this skill is that to manage an emotion, you must first know what it is.
Learn about the difference between primary and secondary emotions, and how to address each in the most helpful way.
Primary emotions: the initial reaction to an event or to triggers in your environment.
Secondary emotions: the reaction to your primary emotions or thoughts, and what often underlies the primary emotions. Fear, hopelessness, shame, etc. (Bray, 2013).
Practicing mindfulness helps us become more aware of our thought patterns, our emotions, and how our thoughts and feelings affect our reactions to events.
There are two categories of mindfulness skills: “What” skills and “How” skills:
- “What” skills:
o Observe;
o Describe;
o Participate. - “How” skills:
o Non-judgmentally;
o One-mindfully;
o Effectively (Dietz, 2012).
Humans have a tendency to become stuck when attempting to process negative emotions. Instead of simply letting them go, we can often hold ever tighter to them, obsessing over every little bit of our emotional experience and wondering why it’s happening to us.
It sounds paradoxical, but the act of accepting that we are feeling emotions we would rather not feel can be the key to letting go of them. When we accept that we are suffering, we stop running from the difficult emotions and turn to face them—and when we do, we might see that it wasn’t the big bad monster we thought it was, but a smaller and more manageable beast.
Follow these steps to work on your ability to let go of negative emotions:
- Observe your emotion. Acknowledge that it exists, stand back from it, and get yourself unstuck from it;
- Try to experience your emotion as a wave, coming and going. You may find it helpful to concentrate on some part of the emotion, like how your body is feeling or some image about it. For example, you could use this imagery:
“Try to imagine an ocean wave flowing through you, but not so big that it knocks you over. Don’t try to push the emotion away. This makes it bigger and increases our suffering. Don’t reject the emotion. Don’t judge your emotion. It is not good or bad. It is just there. There are no bad emotions, just emotions. Anger, fear, sadness are all painful emotions, but they are not bad. Everyone has them, and they are just as valid as the happy emotions. At the same time, do not hang on to your emotion. Don’t rehearse it over and over to yourself. Don’t escalate it or make it bigger. Sometimes when we feel a very painful emotion, like anger or a deep grief, we hold on to it, or we intensify it, making it stronger and stronger, in our efforts to deal with it or to give it our full attention. Try not to do this. Just let it be however it is. This can result in a lessening of the pain.” - Recognize that you are not your emotion. Your emotion is part of you, but it is not all of you. You are more than your emotion;
- Do not necessarily act on the emotion; having the emotion does not mean that you have to act. You may just need to sit with the emotion. Often, acting can intensify and prolong the emotion;
- Practice LOVING your emotions. This can be a difficult concept. Why would we want to love painful emotions?
We can learn to love our emotions just the way we can learn to love (accept) anything else about ourselves or our experience that we cannot change—our age, our height, freckles, the birds that sing early in the morning and wake us up, the weather, the size of our feet, allergies, etc.
Remember that acceptance (love) and approval are two different things. You don’t have to like your freckles, but they are there and you can’t change that, so if you just accept or love them, you will feel a lot better than if you keep fighting the idea that they are there (Dietz, 2012).
Headspace app for 10 minute meditations
Grounding techniques
https://drsarahallen.com/7-ways-to-calm/
https://www.healthline.com/health/grounding-techniques