Emotions-Emotion Regulation

Emotions/Emotion Regulation.
Emotions are crucial in navigating everyday life. Many of life’s problems can be solved by better emotional awareness.

“I need a drink after that”
“The day I’ve had..”
“She made me so angry”
“He had such road rage ..”
“It’s like treading on eggshells coming home from
school/college/work”…

Emotional awareness is key to emotion regulation. Then not needing to change the way we feel with anger outbursts, unhealthy lifestyle choices: drink, drugs, feeding our feelings, overeating, spending, shopping, gambling, other forms of self-harm.

Most of us have a more than reasonable grasp on emotional literacy.
We know that we need the so called ‘ negative emotions’ as much as the feel good ‘positive emotions’.
If we’ve never experienced sadness then we wouldn’t know joy. [ ie: the movie Inside Out and its sequel].
Yet still we go about our day, or many of us do – blaming external issues for rising levels of stress, overwhelm, reactivity.

‘What is an overall goal for therapy?’, I always ask new clients.
‘ Just to be happy’ is the response I hear most of all.

It isn’t possible or realistic to be happy all of the time.
I don’t deal in fairytales. I’m very direct.

A useful goal might be inner calm, fewer mood swings, learning to self soothe, self-regulate, differentiate what can be changed and what can’t. Finding out what the underlying issues might be, how the past and any subconscious patterns (ie: family of origin) might be sabotaging the present. Setting goals is then back in the client’s court – once we’ve explored expectations.

This applies to therapists, individuals, the workplace, managers, clinical supervisors, organizations and so many more areas.

Mindfulness has its place and is also part of DBT. Yet mindfulness, yoga or meditation alone have limited value for deep seated issues that have been building momentum for years – like steam in a pipe as Marsha Linehan’s DBT training suggests. They can be effective once the deeper work is done.

Many clients come to therapy /DBT for help with: sadness, anger,
low mood, volatile emotions, emotional vulnerability, feeling extra sensitive, outbursts at work, at home, anxiety, depression and more.

I work most effectively Psychodynamically, offering DBT as an adjunct alongside this.
Or DBT on its own when clinically indicated.

Solutions are surprisingly straightforward once we know how.