Emotion Regulation | DBTSelfHelp.com

DBTSelfHelp:
(dbtselfhelp.com)

Emotion Regulation:

Emotion Regulation is the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy module that teaches how emotions work. It provides skills to help manage emotions instead of being managed by them, reduce vulnerability to negative emotions, and build positive emotional experiences.

Emotionally dysregulated individuals’ behavior often focuses around finding ways to get emotions validated or to get rid of the pain. This can lead to increasingly destructive actions.

Your emotions are not invalid or unimportant, but they must be managed.
Part of the management is recognizing these emotions, validating them, and accepting them as real and meaningful.

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PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EMOTIONS:
For example: Feeling shame because you got angry.
Anger is the primary emotion, and shame is the secondary emotion.

In order to manage the emotion, you have to get to the root of the problem, meaning the primary emotion.

Look for shame in particular as a secondary emotion. It is common to feel shame in response to the primary emotion or the behaviors you used in response to the primary emotion

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ABC Please:

ABC PLEASE is an Emotion Regulation skill you can use to reduce your vulnerability and make it less likely you’ll end up in Emotion Mind, where emotions control your thoughts and actions instead of Wise Mind.

Emotion Mind
Emotion mind occurs when your thoughts are being controlled by your emotions. Logical thinking and planning are difficult, facts may be distorted or made larger or more important. Thoughts and behaviors might be said to be “hot,” and the energy of the behavior tends to match the intensity of the feelings.

 Wise Mind
Wise mind is the point of overlap between emotion and reasonable mind, like on the Venn diagram. Wise mind is part reason and part emotion and what makes you know you’re in this mind is often a sense of intuition. It can sometimes be described as that ‘aha’ moment.

Accumulate Positive Emotions:
Build as many positive experiences into your life as you can, be Mindful as they happen, and file them away for later.

Not only can you call on those memories to cheer you up, but the process of compiling them improves your mood and makes you more resilient against distress. Try to regularly incorporate more and more positive experiences into your day over time.

Build Mastery:
Build Mastery is about doing something every day that makes you feel competent, confident, that you are good at something, or are making progress.

Try to do at least one thing that builds mastery every day. The more you do, the better you’ll feel as you build the confidence in your capabilities.

Cope Ahead:
Coping Ahead is preparing a skillful action plan to use when you get emotional. Make a list of skills to use and put it on your fridge. Create a coping box full of distraction techniques or a notebook of instructions and inspiration. Do whatever works for you, whatever will help you skillfully survive the emotional moment.

 Treat Physical Illnesses:
Check in with yourself. Do you have a physical illness that needs to be tended to? Do you have medication or treatments prescribed for you that you aren’t taking or doing? What things keep you from treating your physical illness? Take some time to think about this, and see what it would look like for you to take care of your physical needs.

Balance Eating:
The amount and types of food you eat can affect how you feel emotionally. Have you ever been “hangry”? Hunger can make you behave unlike yourself, so make sure to feed your body despite what diet culture says.

What foods make you feel calm? Energized? What foods make you feel bad? The key here is to eat foods that make you feel good. Maybe too many carbohydrates make you sleepy or too much caffeine makes you jumpy. Get in touch with your body and give it what it needs. Try to avoid judgment about what you eat, simply fuel your body.

Balance Sleep:
Sleep is crucial for your mental health. Lack of it can leave you grumpy, sad, or unprepared for the day. Learn to plan your schedule so that you get the sleep you need.

Get Balanced Exercise:
Regular exercise, besides being good for your heart, lungs, muscles, and bones, stimulates chemicals in your brain called endorphins, which are natural antidepressants. Even a short exercise regime can make you feel better about yourself and your life.
Create your exercise plan based on your ability level. No one’s body is the same.


Practice:

If you want to keep track of how you are doing at sleep, for instance, you might keep a little chart of what time you go to bed and how much sleep you get each night. Sometimes we are not really aware of how much sleep we get or what exactly we eat.
Practicing ABC PLEASE gets you to take a look at these parts of your life. Notice what you do and how you feel. Once you are aware of which areas are working well and which you would like to improve, you can choose something to work on.

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What Good Are Emotions?

DBT looks at three major functions of emotions:
1. Emotions Communicate to and Influence Others.
2. Emotions Organize and Motivate Action
3. Emotions Can be Self-Validating

Communication & Influence
We communicate our emotions to other with verbal and nonverbal (facial expressions, body gestures or postures) language. When there is a difference in what a person communicates non-verbally versus verbally, the other person will usually respond primarily to the nonverbal expression.

People who struggle with symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder often find that their nonverbal emotional expressions do not match their inside feelings so they are often misread.
Some people laugh through their grief or cry when they’re happy. No matter the intent, the communication of emotions influences others.

Exercises
* Think of a situation where your expression of emotion was misread. What emotion were you feeling? What emotion did the other person interpret? How did it feel to be misread?
* Think of a situation when you misread the emotion of someone else. What emotion did you read from them? How did the misinterpretation affect your interaction?


Organization & Motivation
Emotions prepare for and motivate action. There is an action urge connected to each specific emotions that is hard-wired.

Anger may motivate and help people who are protesting injustices. The anger may override the fear they might feel in a demonstration or protest. Guilt helps spur apologies because it lets you know that you have done something against your values.


Self-Validation:
When dealing with your feelings this way is carried to the extreme, however, you may think of the emotion as fact. For example: “I love him, so he’s a good person” or “If I feel stupid, I am stupid.” While your emotions are always valid, they are not always facts.
This is difficult for people with symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder and others, because they are greatly affected by invalidating environments which leads them to distrust their own emotions. If your emotions are minimized or invalidated, it’s hard to get your needs taken seriously.

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Identifying & Describing Emotions:

1. Prompting event
Emotions can be either reactions to events in the environment or to things inside a person. These events and things are called Prompting Events. They prompt, or call forth the emotion.

Prompting events can be events happening in the present (an interaction with someone, losing something, physical illness, financial worries).  A prompting event might also be a memory, a thought, or even another feeling (you feel ashamed, and then feel angry about feeling ashamed, for example).

2. Interpretation of an event or experience
The emotion comes after the interpretation is made. It is triggered by the explanation you create in your head.

Remember that your interpretation isn’t always factual. It is valid, but not fact.


3. Body Response to Emotions:
Emotions involve body changes such as tensing and relaxing muscles, changes in heart rate, breathing rate, skin temperature and color, increases and decreases in blood pressure, etc. The most important of these changes for you to be aware of are the facial changes: clenched jaw, tightened cheek and forehead muscles, tightened muscles around the eyes so that they widen or narrow, grinding teeth, loosening and tightening around the mouth.

Take note of your posture and facial expression. Are you hunched over, trying to make yourself smaller? Are you smiling? What are your hands doing? Are they open, willing hands or are you wringing them? These seemingly small changes communicate a lot about how you’re feeling.

Researchers now believe that changes in the facial muscles play an important part in causing emotions. That’s why Half-Smile works.

4. Action Urges

Emotions involve what are called action urges. An important function of emotions is to prompt behaviors. For example if you feel angry, you may be prompted to fight. Or if you feel fear, you may be prompted to run.

The action itself, the fighting, or running, or hugging is not part of the emotion, but the urge to do the action, the feeling that prompts you to do the action, is considered part of the emotion.


5. Expression and Communication:

In order to communicate something, an emotion has to be expressed. Sometimes, if you have not learned to express your emotions, you may think you are communicating but the other person isn’t getting it. This can cause misunderstandings.
People convey emotion with facial expressions. Expressing emotions through behaviors can also cause problems, because different people interpret behaviors in different ways.




6. Emotion Name
It can be difficult to name your emotion if you’re not used to examining your feelings. With practice, however, you can become an expert.

Some people also often feel ambivalence, or more than one emotion at the same time, like both anger and sadness when someone dies or goes away. This is totally natural.
Use this wheel to help you determine your primary (the innermost circle) and secondary emotions.

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7. After Effects:

Emotions have after effects on our thoughts, our physical function and our behavior. Sometimes these effects can last quite a while. One after effect is that an emotion can keep triggering the same emotion over and over. This creates a cycle of suffering.

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Opposite to Emotion Action:

Opposite to Emotion Action is a technique for changing painful emotions. The idea behind opposite action is that it can help you deal with distressing emotions by setting into motion an action that is helpful instead of harmful. Doing this counteracts the suffering you might otherwise feel because of the distressing emotion and prevents you from doing something harmful.
For example, if you are feeling very depressed and low and like no one wants you around and you might as well just stay in bed, a way to act opposite to the emotions is to get yourself up and do something (go for a walk, go to the grocery store, visit a friend, go to therapy, etc.). You are not denying your emotion, but you are challenging it by acting opposite to it. Instead of staying at home in bed, you are getting up and going out. You may not see big changes, but little by little you will notice changes in the way you feel.


WHEN NOT TO USE OPPOSITE ACTION:

Sometimes this is not the best thing to do. If you are afraid because you are in an unsafe situation, pay attention to that fear. Do not go into that unsafe situation.
If you feel guilt because you have done something that is contrary to your sense of right or your own ethics, then do your best to repair the situation and to apologize. This is not a situation where you would want to act opposite
to your emotion, because your emotion fits the situation.


Example:

FEAR
To act opposite to fear, you must do what you are afraid of doing, over and over. This is much like exposure therapy. Approach events, places, tasks, activities, people you are afraid of. Do things to give yourself a sense of control and mastery. When overwhelmed, make a list of small steps or tasks you can do, then do the first thing on the list.

ANGER
Gently avoid the person you are angry with rather than attacking them. Do something nice rather than mean or attacking. Imagine sympathy and empathy for other person rather than blame.
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Easier said than done.

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PLEASANT ACTIVITIES:

SELF-SOOTHING TECHNIQUE
Some of us may recognize these techniques as things that we already use. But many of us have never learned how to self-soothe, how to do those often simple things that make us feel better.
These are mostly very physical techniques, that use different body senses. Some of us have never had the feeling that we could do things to make ourselves feel better, calmer, feel relaxation or pleasure.
I urge you to experiment with these techniques until you find some that are comfortable and helpful for you. And when you find these, practice them. Use them when you are feeling distressed, when emotions feel overwhelming, when situations feel like you can’t stand them any more. Instead of doing something that hurts you, try something that gives you pleasure and comfort.

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INCREASING POSITIVE EMOTIONS:

Building up more positive emotions does not invalidate the negative emotions you feel. It is a way of expanding your experiences and providing alternatives to difficult times. This skill can be very challenging if you are used to dealing primarily with negative emotions. Positive emotions may feel foreign or distant. As with all DBT skills, the solution is to practice.

You can build positive emotional experiences in two ways:
1. Short term experiences
2. Long term experiences


Short term examples:
Going for a swim
Going out for pizza
Going for a walk
Calling a friend to chat
ETC.

Long term experiences:

GOALS
What are some things that you can do to make your life more worth living in the long term?

If you are going to school, or planning to go to school, you have a plan, and are working toward a goal. For some people, their job may be a goal in itself, or preparation for a goal (another more challenging or interesting or better-paying job).

RELATIONSHIPS
Another important area to work on for a more positive future is your relationships. This is not an easy area for many. But you can do some things that will help.
REPAIR A RELATIONSHIP
If you really care about a relationship that has gone bad or just lapsed, work on repairing it. Renew a relationship or to work to repair a relationship. The rewards can be great. Make sure you are not returning to a relationship that harmed you in the past.
CREATE A NEW RELATIONSHIP
You can also reach out for new relationships. This can be hard. Choose a community activity like a club, bowling, singing, church, community gardening, etc. Go every week, and you will see the same people over and over and begin to chat and feel familiar. Invite someone you like for coffee or a walk. Maybe you might try something like that for one of your Pleasant Events for this week.
WORK ON A CURRENT RELATIONSHIP
This could include spouses, partners, children, parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, any one who is close to you or with whom you spend a lot of time. If you think that your positive feelings would improve by working on a present relationship, then give it a try. Don’t let all your happiness depend on one person. Try to cultivate a variety of relationships.

BE MINDFUL OF POSITIVE EXPERIENCES
To be mindful of positive experiences means applying mindfulness to the things that give you pleasure. Focus your attention on the positive things that happen or that you do – a talk with a friend, a walk in the woods, an ice cream cone, a good night’s sleep, anything that you enjoy. Focus your attention on it and if your attention wanders, refocus as many times as necessary. This will help to get you into the habit of experiencing pleasure.




BE UNMINDFUL OF WORRIES
Distract yourself from thinking about when the positive experience will end, whether you really deserve this positive experience or what might be expected of you now that you’ve had this experience.

For example, if you find yourself thinking, “Gee, I’m having fun at the movies, but I am so messed up, I don’t deserve this,” distract yourself using other DBT skills. Focus on the experience. Keep those worry thoughts away. Don’t give up on the experience.


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Ride the Wave
When you are experiencing a strong emotion, it can feel like it’s going to last forever. You might go to extreme means to try to make it stop such as using destructive coping mechanisms. Once you get into a habit of using a particular action, it may seem like nothing else will cause the emotion to stop.

The truth about emotions is that they do not last, by nature. They come and go like waves on the ocean. Positive emotions fade into neutrality. Likewise, negative emotions eventually dissolve back into baseline.

Where you invite suffering in is when you try to manipulate emotions, either by trying to keep positive emotions around or end negative emotions artificially. The key is to let each emotion have its natural end. To do so, you have to have faith in two things:
1. That this is not the last time you’ll ever have this particular positive emotion
2. That the negative emotion will indeed pass


Ride the Wave is about surfing the emotional waves. Instead of using destructive coping mechanisms to end the emotion early or hang on to an emotion, you use other DBT skills to ride the wave until it passes.

LET GO OF THE EMOTION, NOT THE SITUATION:

Letting go of an emotion doesn’t mean that you’re letting go of the situation. It’s about weathering the emotion so you can be most effective. If you’re angry and having an argument, let go of the anger that’s making you want to react destructively. Once the anger has dissipated, return to the situation to finish the disagreement in a more effective way. You don’t always have to react when you are feeling a strong emotion. And you don’t need that emotion to power you. In fact, you’re often more effective when it’s come down to a manageable level or passed entirely.

You are feeling anger. It’s burning and burning you up from the inside with its intensity. Your action urge is to lash out verbally at the person who triggered your anger. Instead, pick a skill from your DBT toolkit. Use Wise Mind ACCEPTS to distract yourself from the immediate moment. Take a half an hour to watch a funny TV episode. Know that your anger is temporary. Be willing to let it go. That doesn’t mean you’re letting go of the situation, just getting to a place where you can be more effective.

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LETTING GO OF PAINFUL EMOTIONS

The best way to get rid of painful and negative emotions is to let them go. Letting go of emotional suffering associated with negative emotions is not the same thing as letting go of the emotions themselves. (????)

Letting go does not mean pushing away or stifling the emotions. The emotions are valid and represent experiences and interactions that were or are painful.


ACCEPTANCE IS NOT APPROVAL:

When you learn to accept your negative emotions, you begin to let go of the hold they have on you and the suffering that they cause you. Accepting your emotions, letting yourself realize that you have these emotions and that they are real and valid, is not approving of your suffering, or approving of the events that preceded these emotions. You don’t have to approve of our negative emotions as you learn to accept them. You can choose acceptance without choosing approval. That’s the dialectic.

Some examples of dialectics are:
* changing vs. not changing
* good vs. bad
* wise mind vs. emotion mind
* talking vs. being silent
* acceptance vs. approval

When you understand that you do not have to approve, that you only have to let the feelings in and acknowledge that they are there, accepting them in that way, it is not such an impossible process.

STEPS FOR LETTING GO OF PAINFUL EMOTIONS:

* OBSERVE YOUR EMOTION
* EXPERIENCE YOUR EMOTION FULLY
* REMEMBER: YOU ARE NOT YOUR EMOTION
* RESPECT, LOVE YOUR EMOTIONS