Emotions are at the heart of so much of what we experience as meaningful – both the painful and the pleasant.
Emotion regulation requires us to practice non-judgmental awareness of our emotional experience. In extreme cases a lack of emotional dysregulation can be the cause of many behavioral struggles (substance abuse, self-harm, anger outbursts, etc). Even for those of us who don’t experience extreme emotional and behavioral dysregulation, these skills can help us to navigate difficult days, situations, and areas where we get stuck.
In DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) there are four main areas of emotion regulation skills.
- Understanding and naming emotions – understanding what emotions do for us can help us be less judgmental (toward self or others) when emotions show up. We understand that emotions have important functions. They help motivate us to a certain action, they signal to us about a situation, and they communicate quickly to others about how to interact with us. Noticing and naming an emotion can itself be empowering and help us be more in control of how we act in the presence of the emotion.
- Changing unwanted emotions – changing unwanted emotions is definitely possible and even important. We’re not talking about suppression here. Emotions are complex processes with many sub components. These include; prompting events, physiological sensations, cognitive interpretations, physical expressions (posture/ facial expressions), actions (things we do and say and how we do and say them), and after effects (what happens after we experience a specific emotion). We can check the facts to see if an emotion fits a given situation and then learn to determine if acting with the emotion, problem solving the situation, or acting opposite of the emotion is most helpful to us.
- Reducing vulnerability to “emotion mind” (reactivity) – Many unwanted emotions are caused by unwanted or upsetting events. All of us will experience situations and events that we don’t want. We can address those situations while also building positive and wanted events into our lives. Accumulating positives in the short term and the long term is critical to getting out of cycles of unwanted emotional states. Another big part of reducing our vulnerability to emotional swings is taking care of our body. Treating physical and mental illness, balancing our eating, getting enough sleep, avoiding mood altering substances, and moving our body daily (whether in exercise, work, play or a combination) are all important ways to give ourselves a much better chance at emotional stability.
- Managing extreme emotions – Sometimes emotions are just too much. We can use distress tolerance skills to survive the crisis of extreme emotions without making it worse. These may include distract techniques or other ways to reduce our distress. It may also include being mindful of our emotions and just letting them be. In this case. The intensity of the emotion may initially increase while we pay attention to it in a non-judgmental way. If we can practice this kind of mindful awareness of even intense emotions, they tend to come and go easier. It’s counter-intuitive but so powerful and can be very freeing to learn that even intense emotions will leave on their own and have less power over us than we think.
