Goals of Emotion Regulation

Difficulties in regulating painful emotions are central to the behavioral difficulties of many individuals. From these individuals’ perspective, painful feelings are most often the “problems to be solved.” Dysfunctional behaviors, including suicidal behaviors, substance use disorders, overeating, emotion suppression, overcontrol, and interpersonal mayhem, are often behavioral solutions to intolerably painful emotions.

Individuals with high emotional sensitivity and/ or intensity, or frequent emotional distress, can benefit from help in learning to regulate their emotions. Emotion regulation skills, however, can be extremely difficult to teach, because many individuals have been overdosed with remarks to the effect that “If you would just change your attitude, you could change your feelings.” Some individuals come from environments where everyone else exhibits almost perfect cognitive control of their emotions. Moreover, these very same others have often exhibited both intolerance and strong disapproval of the individuals’ inability to exhibit similar control. Some people will at times resist any attempt to control their emotions, because such control would imply that other people are right and they are wrong for feeling the way they do. Thus emotion regulation skills can be taught only in a context of emotional self- validation.

Like interpersonal effectiveness and distress tolerance, emotion regulation requires application of mindfulness skills—in this case, the nonjudgmental observation and description of one’s current emotional responses. The theoretical idea is that much emotional distress is a result of secondary responses (e.g., intense shame, anxiety, or rage) to primary emotions. Often the primary emotions are adaptive and appropriate to the context. The reduction of this secondary distress requires exposure to the primary emotion in a nonjudgmental atmosphere. In this context, mindfulness to one’s own emotional responses can be thought of as an exposure technique.

As noted previously, the DBT model of emotion regulation is transdiagnostic, with data suggesting efficacy of DBT across a range of emotional disorders. As such, it is highly compatible with the similar transdiagnostic model underlying the Unified Protocol (Farchione, et al. 2012) (Barlow, et al. 2010) developed by David Barlow and his colleagues. Similar to DBT, the Unified Protocol addresses deficits in emotion regulation that underlie emotional disorders by

(1) increasing present focused emotion awareness

(2) increasing cognitive flexibility

(3) identifying and preventing patterns of emotion avoidance and maladaptive emotion-driven behaviors

(4) increasing awareness and tolerance of emotion- related physical sensations, and

(5) utilizing emotion-focused exposure procedures (Farchione, et al. 2012).

The specific DBT emotion regulation skills taught in this module are grouped into the following four segments: understanding and naming emotions; changing unwanted emotions; reducing vulnerability to emotion mind; and managing extreme emotions.

The skills you will learn in this module are intended to help you identify and manage the emotions that are causing you distress. I will not be using language that is sometimes used with DBT but is not consistent with the principles of IFS. So, you may not see me refer to experiences as positive or negative, good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, constructive or destructive, and/or healthy or unhealthy. I will use words like wanted or unwanted, adaptive or maladaptive, and/or effective or ineffective. This is an effort for me to avoid judgement or opinion about subjective experiential phenomenon. In IFS, the primary philosophy is that there are “No Bad Parts.”

Emotion regulation refers to the ability to recognize and respond to the emotions that arise within us, both pleasurable and painful. It includes being able to identify your emotions, understand what triggers them, and then effectively manage those emotions so that they don’t get in the way of your life goals. These skills can be used in a variety of situations. For example, if you’re feeling angry or sad about something that happened at work, these skills can help you deal with those feelings so that they don’t interfere with your ability to focus on your job responsibilities. If you’re feeling anxious about an upcoming exam or presentation at work, these skills can help you manage those feelings so that you are able to prepare for them successfully.

What Is Emotion Regulation?
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.

Either before or after reviewing the handout or worksheet, check off each goal that is important to you in the boxes on the handout; I invite you to share your choices with me. At some point, I will ask you to name the emotions that you most want to change. I might ask you to write the list on an index card (if possible). Discuss similarities and differences.

Understanding 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. (Lieberman, et. al., 2007) Some people always know what emotion they are feeling in any given moment. Others have no idea most of the time. For some, trying to figure out how they feel is like looking down into cloudy water. Can you take a moment to reflect on what type of person you are? How extensive is your emotional vocabulary? If you have the available resources, I invite you to read the book “Atlas of the Heart” by Brené Brown.
2. Understand what emotions do for you: It can be very difficult to change emotions when you do not understand where they come from or why they are there. It is also important to accept that there are correlated thoughts and body sensations associated with emotional states. You can start to understand emotions if you learn how your beliefs, past experiences, past relationships, and values affect your assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of your current experiences and interactions.

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 situations that activate parts that make you feel overwhelming emotions. Can you take a moment to reflect on what kinds of emotional situations you have the most trouble coping with, solving, or changing.
2. Change painful emotions once they start: We may have polarized parts of our Psyche (our inner dialogue) that believe in myths about emotions, and convince us that changing emotions is not authentic, on the one side, or that all emotions (exiled parts of our Psyche) should be suppressed, on the other side of the argument. Protective parts may be afraid you are trying to get rid of them or “fire” them. Can you take a moment to reflect on whether these parts of you are afraid of being overwhelmed by all of your emotions, hoping to get rid of your painful emotions, or both. It is essential to remember that the point is to change the emotions YOU want to change, not the emotions other people want you to change. Emotion regulation skills will not be drilled into your subconscious against your will. At each point and for each skill, it is up to you to consider the pros and cons of maintaining an emotion or a particular emotional intensity. When the emotion or the intensity of the emotion is ineffective or too painful to bear, change may be desirable, and emotion regulation skills will be useful. If the emotion is not one you want to change, or if the intensity, even though painful, is effective, then changing the emotion or the intensity of the emotion may not be useful. You cannot force parts to feel, think, or do what you want them to. 
3. Emotions themselves are neither good nor bad: In and of themselves, emotions (parts) are not good or bad. They just are. Evaluating our emotions as either good or bad is rarely helpful. Thinking that an emotion (part) is “bad” does not get rid of it. It may lead us to try to suppress the emotion (exile the part or retraumatize the exile).
4. Suppression of emotions makes things worse: Suppressing emotions (a firefighter’s job is to recapture or numb the pain caused by activated exiles) is a temporary solution that causes greater problems in the long run. (Campbell-Sills, Barlow, Brown, & Hofmann, 2006) Emotions may be comfortable or uncomfortable, wanted or unwanted, excruciatingly painful or ecstatically pleasurable. Judging emotions (inner critic) as “bad” can make painful emotions even more painful.
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 certain things are true: 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; your emotion is sending you a message you need to listen to. Can you take a moment to reflect about times when emotions have been useful and when they have caused more problems. At your next session, we can discuss 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

Finally, emotion regulation will enable you to decrease your emotional suffering. Specifically, you’ll learn to do these things:

• Reduce suffering when painful emotions overcome you.
• Manage extreme emotions so you don’t make things worse.

Note: Please remember, that although it may take a lot of work at the start for you to regulate and control your emotions, over time you will get better and better at it. If you practice the skills every day throughout the day, at some point regulating emotions effectively will become automatic and often easy.

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Continue: Emotion Regulation Lesson 2

Copyright Disclaimer:

The content on this page was adapted from DBT® Skills Training Manual, Second Edition, by Marsha M. Linehan. Copyright 2015 by Marsha M. Linehan.

The handouts and worksheets are from From DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition, by Marsha M. Linehan. Copyright 2015 by Marsha M. Linehan. Permission to photocopy them is granted to purchasers of DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition, and DBT Skills Training Manual, Second Edition, for personal use and use with individual clients only.

References:

Barlow, D. H., Farchione, T. J., Fairholme, C. P., Ellard, K. K., Boisseau, C. L., Allen, L. B., et al. (2010). Unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders. New York: Oxford University Press.

Campbell-Sills, L., Barlow, D. H., Brown, T. A., & Hofmann, S. G. (2006). Effects of suppression and acceptance on emotional responses of individuals with anxiety and mood disorders. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44, 1251–1263.

Farchione, T. J., Ellard, K. K., Boisseau, C. L., Thompson- Hollands, J., Carl, J. R., Gallagher, M. W., et al. (2012). Unified Protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders: A randomized controlled trial. Behavior Therapy, 43, 666–678.

Matthew D. Lieberman, Naomi I. Eisenberger, Molly J. Crockett, Sabrina M. Tom, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, and Baldwin M. Way. Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli. Psychological Science 2007;18(5):421-428.

Tame Reactive Emotions by Naming Them (Mindful.org) Mitch Abblett