Introduction: Emotion Regulation Module

Informed by Multiple Approaches of Emotion Focused Therapy

This page is subject to change without notice as new information is integrated into my eclectic approach to helping others. The approaches to mindfulness based therapy that will inform the mindfulness component of the work in this plan includes:

• Emotionally Focused Therapy
• Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy
• Emotion-Focused Therapy 

Emotionally Focused Therapy.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a well-known humanistic approach to psychotherapy formulated in the 1980’s and developed in tandem with the science of adult attachment, a profound developmental theory of personality and intimate relationships.  This science has expanded our understanding of individual dysfunction and health as well as the nature of love relationships and family bonds.  Attachment views human beings as innately relational, social and wired for intimate bonding with others.  The EFT model prioritizes emotion and emotional regulation as the key organizing agents in individual experience and key relationship interactions.

EFT is best known as a cutting edge, tested and proven couple intervention, but it is also used to address individual depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress (EFIT – Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy) and to repair family bonds (EFFT – Emotionally Focused Family Therapy).  This model operationalizes the principles of attachment science using non-pathologizing experiential (paralleling Carl Rogers) and relational systems techniques (paralleling Salvador Minuchin) to focus on and change core organizing factors in both the self and key relationships.

Most EFT research to date has focused on outcome and process of change studies with couples, and EFT for couples is the gold standard for empirically validated intervention in this field.  Future research will focus on EFIT and EFFT.  EFT has also generated many relationship education programs, for example Hold Me Tight:  Conversations for Connection, and Healing Hearts Together for couples dealing with cardiac dysfunction.

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Dialectical Behavior Therapy: 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. More so than in the other three modules, the skills in Emotion Regulation build on each other. As you learn each little piece and practice it, you are putting another building block into the structure of your own Emotion Regulation, learning little by little how to handle negative emotions and how to build positive ones. As you learn each new skill or awareness in your life, congratulate yourself. You are doing potentially the hardest work you will ever do, and the outcome of all the struggle and practice will be worth it.

For those who struggle with emotion dysregulation, emotions can frequently be very intense and labile, which means they change often. Emotions drive behavior. 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.

Because of this, learning to regulate emotions is a central part of DBT. This does not mean that the emotions are invalid or unimportant, and you are not trying to get rid of them entirely. They are valid, important, and also natural. But because emotions cause so much pain and often make you feel out of control, they must be managed. Part of the management is recognizing these emotions, validating them, and accepting them as real and meaningful. Emotions come and go, like waves. They are self-perpetuating. Once an emotions starts, it keeps restarting itself. That’s why it’s crucial to step in to stop the cycle.

Emotion-Focused Therapy

A therapeutic approach based on the premise that emotions are key to identity. According to EFT, emotions are also a guide for individual choice and decision making. This type of therapy assumes that lacking emotional awareness or avoiding unpleasant emotions can cause harm. It may render us unable to use the important information emotions provide. In this approach to treatment, the therapist and the person in therapy collaborate in an active process. Both are viewed as equal contributors. The person in treatment, not the therapist, is seen as the person most capable of interpreting their emotional experience.

EFT is founded in the idea that emotions should be used to guide healthy, meaningful lives. Its theory is based on a scientific inquiry into the human emotional experience. Scientific study of human emotion has provided information about: how emotions are produced; the importance of emotions to human functioning; and how emotions are related to thought and behavior.

Emotion schemes is the core concept of EFT. It was developed largely from these theories of human emotion. Emotion schemes are models that outline how emotion can: be experienced physically; cause physiological changes; influence thinking; and guide future action. EFT helps people both accept and change their personal emotion schemes.

EFT sessions typically center around the development of the following two key skills: arriving at one’s emotions through increased awareness and acceptance; and learning to transform emotions and better use the information they provide to avoid negative or harmful behaviors or other effects of certain emotions.

Therapists practicing this method take a compassionate, non-judgmental, and reflective approach to listening and questioning. This allows the person in therapy come to a better understanding of their emotions. Then, various therapeutic techniques known as emotion coaching are utilized. These help people learn new ways to use healthy emotions to guide their actions. Emotion coaching may further help people transform and move on from challenging emotions.

Emotional regulation is the conscious or unconscious psychological process of managing one’s internal emotional responses to external stimuli. Everyone regulates their emotional responses—which can involve both positive and negative emotions—to neutral stimuli in day-to-day life. However, regulating negative emotions is often a more common topic in therapeutic treatment.

Luckily, people can incorporate many emotion regulation skills into their daily lives to amend maladaptive behavioral responses. Learning how to regulate one’s emotions reduces stress, changes behaviors, and curbs outbursts that may negatively affect the well-being of oneself and others.

Emotion regulation is the ability to control or influence which emotions you have, when you have them, and how you experience and express them. Regulating emotions can be automatic as well as consciously controlled. In this module, we will focus first on increasing conscious awareness and control
of emotions. Second, we will provide so much practice regulating emotions that you will overlearn the skills. Ultimately, the regulation should become automatic. Emotions are out of control or ‘dysregulated’ when you are unable, despite your best efforts, to change which emotions you have, when you have them, or how you experience or express them.

The goals of emotion regulation are as follows.

Understand Your Own Emotions:

Before you can regulate your own emotions, you need to understand them. You can do this by learning to do two things

1. Identify Your Own Emotions. The simple act of naming your emotions can help you regulate your own emotions. Some people always know what emotion they are feeling. Others have no idea most of the time. For some, trying to figure out how they feel is like looking down into a fog.
2. Understand What Emotions Do for You. It can be very hard to change emotions when you do not understand where they come from or
   why they are there.

Decrease the Frequency of Unwanted Emotions

Once you understand your own emotions, you can learn how to cut down on the frequency of the ones you don’t want. You can do this in several ways:

1. Stop unwanted emotions from starting. You can’t stop all painful emotions, but you can make changes in your environment and in your life to reduce how often negative emotions occur. Consider this, what kinds of emotional situations are the most difficult to solve or change.
2. Change painful emotions once they start. People often believe myths about emotions, for instance, one part of them believes that changing emotions is inauthentic, or another part of them that believes all emotions should be suppressed. Consider this, are there parts within you that are afraid of you losing all your emotions, or parts of you that want to get rid of all your emotions. Just remember, you are the one doing this work. You get to decide how you want to experience your emotions, manage them, and/or regulate them.
3. Emotions themselves are neither good nor bad. Emotions just are, this is the reality of emotions. They are a vital part of who we are. We need them to live and thrive. Evaluating our emotions as either good or bad is rarely helpful. Thinking that an emotion is “bad” does not get rid of it. It may lead us to try to suppress the emotion.
4. Suppression of emotions makes things worse. Read that again. If you are also engaging in an IFS informed therapy, this is how exiled parts are created and burdened, negatively reinforced, burdened more, and perpetuated. Suppressing emotions is a temporary solution that causes greater problems in the long run. Emotions may be comfortable or uncomfortable, wanted or unwanted, excruciatingly painful or ecstatically pleasurable. Judging emotions as “bad” can make painful emotions even more painful, leading to additional suffering and misery.
5. Emotion regulation is for ineffective emotions only. Emotion regulation strategies are for emotions that are not effective in helping you achieve your own goals in life. Emotions are effective when: acting on the emotion is in your own self- interest; expressing the emotion will get you closer to your own goals; expressing your emotion will influence others in ways that will help you; and your emotion is sending you a message you need to listen to.

Consider this, when have emotions been useful for you and when have they been destructive. What are the emotions that give you the most trouble.

Decrease Vulnerability to Emotion Mind

Emotion regulation will help you decrease your vulnerability to emotion mind. It won’t take away your emotions, but it will help you balance emotion mind with reasonable mind to get to wise mind. And it will also increase emotional resilience—in other words, your ability to bounce back and cope with difficult events and emotions.

Decrease Emotional Suffering

Emotion regulation will enable you to decrease your emotional suffering. Specifically, you’ll learn to reduce suffering when painful emotions overcome you, and manage extreme emotions so you don’t make things worse. Although it may take a lot of work at the start of the emotion regulation module, with the goal to regulate and control your emotions, over time you will get better and better at it. If you practice a lot, at some point regulating your emotions effectively will become automatic and often easy.