Getting Reacquainted With Our Emotions

Table of Contents

• What is Emotional Self-Regulation?

• What is Emotional Dysregulation?

• Ready To Become an Active Agent in Your Emotional Management?

• Reacquaintance Through Dialectical Behavioural Therapy

• References

• Free 20 Minute Consultation with FP Counselling

What is Emotional Self-Regulation?

It is the ability to manage your emotions and the resulting behaviour, including processing your emotions without reacting, adapting to the demands of the environment, and self-soothing, so we can use them optimally.

What is Emotional Dysregulation?

We all use less than ideal emotional regulation strategies from time to time, but when individuals regularly feel overwhelmed, we are much more likely to rely on unhealthy strategies. Often, it is our interpretation and not the situation itself that leads to a feeling of being overwhelmed, sometimes leading to what is known as a vicious emotional cycle, in which emotions, thoughts, and behaviour are all interconnected, can become a go-to pattern, and can range in intensity when connected to more serious negative experiences such as trauma or abuse. Individuals may struggle due to a combination of temperament and learned behaviour.

Unhealthy Coping

When emotions build and build to the point of becoming overwhelming. You feel like you’re going to explode; this may produce a deep need to do something that will bring down the intensity. Some may use self-injury as a coping mechanism to stop the overwhelmingness of the feeling, but this is a short-term and sometimes dangerous fix and can often leave lifelong scars, chronic injuries, or wounds.

Other unhealthy coping strategies may include abusing alcohol or other substances, avoiding or withdrawing from difficult situations, physical or verbal aggression, and excessive social media use, to the exclusion of other responsibilities.

Healthy Coping

Your therapist can help you swap unhealthy coping strategies for more adaptive ones, which may include talking to friends or family, exercising, journaling, meditating, spending time in nature, practicing mindfulness, focusing on basic needs (sleep, healthy eating, drinking water), identifying triggers, responding differently to negative thoughts, and taking a break.

Ready To Become an Active Agent in Your Emotional Management?

Your therapist can help you find different ways of looking at the negative thoughts that lead to uncomfortable emotions and are usually much easier to change than the emotions themselves. They can also help you become an observer of your feelings rather than enmeshed with them and finally find healthy coping strategies that work best for you.

These processes allow you to let go of emotions faster, reduce the intensity of emotions, down-regulate: moving from sadness to happiness or distraction from anxiety, or up-regulate: when in need of excitement! According to psychologist James Gross, this process can be implemented before feeling an emotion (antecedent-focused emotion regulation) and after reacting (response-focused emotion regulation). 

*This is a process, and there will always be opportunities to repair!

Learning To Control the Way We Respond to Our Emotions

1. Identifying triggers: This may help you prepare for or adapt situations to influence your emotional experience

2. Reframing: Your therapist will help you identify different ways of appraising a situation

3. Mindful acceptance of emotions and the wisdom they have to offer

& Remember self-compassion, practice & repeat!

Your Therapist Can Help You Pass on the Emotional Wisdom by Teaching You:

1. Ways to model effective coping strategies

2. Ways to avoid engaging in behaviour that is not in line with your values

3. Ways to provide a safe place for your children to practice labelling, responding, and appropriately expressing their emotions

Using age-appropriate language, you can start talking to your kids about emotions, encouraging them to name them as early as two years old! This process includes:

1. Identify emotion using age-appropriate emotional vocabulary

2. Identify triggers

3. Delay response time while teaching them about actions and consequences

4. Teaching adaptive age-appropriate coping strategies

5. Finally, don’t forget to validate their emotions!

Reacquaintance Through Dialectical Behavioural Therapy

Feeling stuck? Are your responses not moving you forward or making you feel any better? Are you avoiding certain emotions? Were emotions not talked about in the home? Running on autopilot, exhausted and coping ineffectively?

Society sure doesn’t help; we are bombarded explicitly and implicitly with a range of messages that downplay the importance of certain emotions while highlighting others. These messages may include “You are weak if you show that you are hurting, are sad, or need help,” “Men don’t feel sad or cry,” or “Certain emotions are not important.”

Your therapist will help you identify any underlying assumptions about emotions, and together you will debunk them. You and your therapist will work together to determine which emotions to listen to, at what time, and which ones to observe and let go.

Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), founded by Marsha Linehan, can help!

DBT helps clients slow down and become mindful of the process of experiencing emotions and teaches adaptive coping strategies. Essentially allowing you to take back your agency.

Emotional Regulation Activities Include Breathing Exercises

1. In for the count of 5, hold, and out to the count of 5, in for the count of 5, hold, and say reelllaaaxxx as you exhale to the count of 5

2. Belly breathing

3. Triangle, square, and rectangle breathing

Your therapist will help you identify triggers, including situations, people, topics, etc., learn to see the early signs of specific emotions in your body, and then become acquainted with your primary and secondary emotions.

Our emotions usually precede an urge which can lead to action but not always. By identifying these urges and deciding if, when, and how you would like to respond, you take back control of your emotions. Together we will investigate the outcomes of these emotions and resulting actions and make changes or practice acceptance as necessary.

By making small steps, you can progress towards your goals and improve your quality of life!

References

Chowdhury, M.R. (2022, March 23). What is emotion regulation? + 6 Emotional skills and strategies. Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/emotion-regulation/

Emotion regulation. (n.d.). Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/basics/emotion-regulation

How can we help kids with self-regulation? (n.d.). Child Mind Institute. https://childmind.org/article/can-help-kids-self-regulation/

Pelini, S. (n.d.). An age-by-age guide to helping kids manage emotions. The Gottman Institute. https://www.gottman.com/blog/age-age-guide-helping-kids-manage-emotions/

Rolston, A. & Lloyd-Richardson, E. (n.d.). What is emotion regulation and how do we do it? Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery. https://selfinjury.bctr.cornell.edu/perch/resources/what-is-emotion-regulationsinfo-brief.pdf