Emotions Archives - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

April 13, 2023April 20, 2023

Umbrella Emotions

When we have an “umbrella emotion” (as we therapists call it) we have one dominant emotional reaction (lets say anger), that preoccupies us, but under the umbrella of anger may exist other emotions (like shame, guilt, fear – etc) that need to be addressed and resolved for us to feel at peace with a situation.
The reason it’s called an umbrella emotion is because the emotion we are most intensely in touch with is “hiding” other emotions under it, often ones we have difficulty accessing and feeling our way through – much in the same way we hide under an umbrella to shield ourselves from the rain.
When this emotional nesting happens we are not able to be in touch (consciously) with all that we are feeling, and as such we are less able to work through it. We can get trapped in our emotional experiences for extended periods of time, or we can’t make sense of them, or perhaps we avoid thinking about them because they feel like “too much”.
If you’re feeling “stuck” around releasing an emotion or situation, a helpful coping strategy is to go on an investigative mission within yourself to see what other emotions you may be feeling in addition to the dominant one you notice most. We usually don’t know what’s hiding under our umbrella until we go searching for it.
To do this scan well, we first need to have developed a personal lexicon of our emotions. This means knowing how each emotion feels to us when it’s present within our bodies, the types of events that often trigger each emotion, and the kinds of thoughts that often accompany it.
At a time when you’re feeling relatively even, take a moment to identify how Anger, Disgust, Envy, Fear, Happiness, Jealousy, Love, Sadness, Shame, and Guilt present themselves in you. Spend 30-60 seconds working to churn up each emotion in yourself and notice what you feel in your body and the kinds of thoughts (or memories) that arise.
You’ll likely find as you do an internal inventory that some emotions are easy for you to “map”, and others feel much more distant. It’s likely those “easy” ones are – at times – serving as umbrella emotions to those feelings that are harder to access (and may be hiding).
Once you’ve built your lexicon, you’re ready to use the coping skill at a time when you feel stuck. First, work to disengage (as much as you can) from the dominant emotion (you may need to ground or distract to do this). Then scan internally for evidence (AKA the thoughts and sensations you notice) that other emotions may be present within you.
When we’ve found our umbrella emotion and whatever’s under it, it can be a huge relief (i.e. I had no idea I was feeling so guilty because I was so preoccupied with my anger, but now that I’ve found my guilt I feel like I can let go of the situation much more easily). It’s not uncommon to have an intense release when we find what’s been hiding.
The more we can be in touch with our emotions, the more we can learn from them, regulate them, and be in control of our behavior when we feel them. More in today’s post and comments.

It’s not uncommon for our emotions to cluster and hide within one another, making them difficult to identify, sort through, process, and manage. Today’s skill is a form of emotion regulation, managing our emotions through identifying them. It helps to hold awareness that sometimes emotions hide, and so we have to search for and identify them before we are truly able to regulate them.

Why would our emotions hide? Our ability to feel and manage our emotions is hugely informed by prior experiences. Emotions that were welcomed when we developed will be easier for us to access, tolerate, and regulate. Emotions that were not welcome may get twisted and we may have to work to learn how to feel them, so they don’t come out exclusively on overdrive or jumbled up with other feelings.

That doesn’t sound like you? Sometimes we have beliefs about our feelings (fear is weakness, anger is destructive, etc). If we hold beliefs that some emotions are superior to others, we’ll have an easier time accessing those preferred emotions, and a harder time accessing those we’ve evaluated as problematic. Perhaps anger is easy for you to access because it helps you feel strong, protected, and tough – but guilt is less easy to access because it makes you feel vulnerable and weak. Getting in touch with all of these beliefs will help you build your personal internal lexicon, and help you better recognize and cope with your emotions.

Our emotions are most likely to get us into trouble when we aren’t fully in touch with them in our day to day life because they’re at risk of building up and exploding out of us, or we’re at risk of impulsively (and at times dangerously) responding to them.

IMPORTANT: When you are building your lexicon and getting in touch with different emotions you may get deeply overwhelmed or triggered if you tap into an emotion you have a highly negative relationship (or history) with. If this happens, you’ll likely need to self-soothe, ground, and distract to get back into your window of tolerance. Links to those skills are in the comments below, and if you’re concerned this will happen to you, wait to do this exercise with a trained professional (therapist /psychiatrist).

Comments:

Safety first: some folks (Especially folks who have a trauma history) may get overwhelmed (or leave their window of tolerance) working to build their lexicon. If you are concerned this might be you, then START with working on learning how to ground, distract, soothe yourself, and identify when you’re out of your window of tolerance. Please know, if this is you, you are demonstrating a sign that you may need professional help tolerating the process of getting in touch with your feelings, which is essential for your well-being and mental health.
The 10 emotions I listed are not the only ten emotions we are able to feel, however, they cover a lot of the bases. Feel free to add additional emotions to the list for your personal lexicon.
This skill is an extension of skills taught in Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy Emotion Regulation Module in her DBT curriculum. Within her skills training workbook there is a lot of information about each of these emotions and how they often present.
A lot of folks have a hard time telling envy and jealousy apart. A client actually gave me this incredibly simple framework that I will share with you all: Envy is related to something we don’t have but we want to have, Jealousy is related to having something we are concerned with losing.
A lot of folks have a hard time with the difference between guilt and shame. Shame is a feeling we feel that’s a reflection of our core sense of our self (I am bad). It may or may not be related to an event, but it’s a sense of our character. Guilt is a feeling that’s arises as a reflection of our belief that we did something wrong (but not that we holistically are bad).
I state in the post ” Emotions that were welcomed when we developed will be easier for us to access, tolerate, and regulate.” Please note that emotions can be “unwelcome” by others or by ourselves (For example: I’m afraid of my anger so I don’t want to feel it, but my parents didn’t have an issue with it – or – whenever I got angry I got in trouble so I learned it’s best not to feel or express it etc).
Not buying into the idea that feeling our emotions is useful? I have a post for you to help you accept the need for your emotions.
If you are saying to yourself (like many of my clients have previously said to me) “well I don’t ever feel that emotion”, then I am telling you (kindly) that you are cut off from it, because we all experience all of these emotions, it’s just a matter of how in touch we are with the fact that we’re feeling them. This doesn’t mean we all feel all of these all the time, or we should feel them in equal amounts, it just means that we all have the ability to feel them and do feel them when the situation calls for it. What I am suspect of is when someone says, “that doesn’t apply to me, I don’t feel _____”, I am not suspect of, “I rarely feel it, but yeah, I can map it in my body and get that I’m vulnerable to feeling it, even if do only rarely”. For example, we may not often feel envy which is different from “that doesn’t apply to me”.
Are you having trouble staying present in yourself for the scan of your body and thoughts? If so, you may need to work on building up your capacity to tolerate being mindful with yourself. I have a whole series of posts that can help. Start with this post, on foundational meditation and then move on to this post which will help you build your tolerance for directly observing your internal world Not sure you buy into the idea of meditation? Start here.
Struggle with beliefs around anger being “bad” or inherently problematic? I have a whole post on why we need it.
See my post on the basics of emotions (like what they are, and how they show up in us) if you’re feeling confused about emotions in general. This will be especially helpful for anyone struggling to develop their personal lexicon. I have an additional post on how to understand the process of feeling and releasing an emotion. I also have a post about how emotions that we struggle to tolerate experiencing can impact us.
Sometimes emotions under our umbrella are “secondary” emotions, or emotions we’ve had in response to an initial emotion. For more on what this is and how it works see my post from 10/3/21, first photo “Our emotions, when they are heightened, can feel like a freight train, plowing through and interrupting everything in their tracks”.
There is an excellent book, for children, that helps them build their emotional lexicon from the very start. Color Monster comes as a popup and as a board book.
If you’re wanting more for yourself (or for kids) about understand the function of emotions and how they work, Disney / Pixar’s “Inside Out” is a phenomenal resource.

March 16, 2023March 29, 2023

Pessimism

Pessimism is a coping strategy that protects us against the vulnerability of having hope.
Feeling hopeful leaves us open to potential disappointment or rejection. If we are fearful or avoidant of these experiences we are more inclined to rely on pessimism to protect us from experiencing them.
Our pessimism can blind us; it can limit our sense of the possibilities for ourselves and our future.
Many of us get stuck in a pessimistic stance without realizing it. To work towards recognizing pessimism in yourself, look out for rigidity; if it feels like you can’t imagine something would work, or something could change, or if it doesn’t feel worth trying, you may be approaching with pessimism.
While it’s okay to “start” with pessimism (if we are so inclined), it’s not recommended to end there. Instead, work towards integrating the counterbalance to pessimism, which is being realistic.
When we work towards being realistic we can see the possibility that the pessimistic outlook has some merit to it, but we can also hold hope and awareness that other outcomes are possible.
You’ll notice I’m not naming “optimism” as the counterbalance to pessimism. Optimism too is a strategy, one that can keep us hopeful, but can also limit our ability to see realistic barriers that might encroach on any given situation.
In its extreme, optimism can be a form of denial, while pessimism can be a state of hopelessness. It is helpful to try and step into you “optimistic” self to think through a scenario, as well as your “pessimistic” self. This can counter-balance rigidity and help pull you closer to a realistic stance.
It’s helpful to identify if a pessimistic stance comes intuitively to you as a first line response to an idea or potential pursuit so you can work on making use of it, and then counterbalancing it with a more realistic approach.
Ultimately, having a more realistic approach will not shield you from the vulnerability that comes with feeling hopeful or taking a chance, but it will enable you to make choices about when you are willing to enter a situation that involves risks (including the emotional risks of feeling rejected or disappointed).

For many of us, we have a pessimistic outlook as a way of insulating ourselves from the vulnerability we’d to feel if we allowed ourselves to hope. This is a tempting strategy to employ if we’ve been hurt, rejected, or disappointed in the past, and we can come to lean on our pessimism as a protective barrier between us and (potentially) feeling those feelings again.

Pessimism can be helpful because it enables us to think to through barriers to achieving a desired goal or outcome. It limits us when it interferes with our ability to assess an individual scenario based around its unique likelihood of coming to fruition. Pessimism also creates problems when it interferes with our ability to identify how valuable (and risk worthy) a pursuit is to us as individuals. When we rely on pessimism, our priority is often to shut down an idea or pursuit, often because we want to avoid a negative outcome (including feeling negative feelings).

An overly pessimistic stance can lead to feeling helpless and un-empowered. Pessimism can stop us in our tracks before we get started, and it can interfere with our ability to see genuine possibilities for ourselves and our future. It’s hard to act on your dreams (even ones that may be possible) if you’re a pessimist.

The antidote to pessimism is holding a realistic stance, one that holds awareness of why a situation might not work out *and* that there are other possible outcomes. When we’re realistic we can weigh the likelihood of success against our personal priorities and risk thresholds. To be clear, you can have a negative outlook on a situation and not be taking a pessimistic stance. Sometimes a situation is a long shot, or won’t work out, and you are realistically assessing the factors at play when you decide not to pursue it.

If you inclined towards pessimism, use it as a starting point and allow yourself to get in touch with the reasons why something may not work. Then, work to explore the potential for alternate possibilities and outcomes. At that point you can decide, based on your own personal thresholds, whether it’s worth it to you to take the emotional, social, financial, relational (etc) risk.

Comments:

If you are someone who relates to the notion that you want to protect yourself from negative emotions, I’d encourage you to read my prior posts on how all emotions (including negative ones) are useful and essential. The first covers how negative feelings are actually incredibly important tools to help us find long term happiness, and the second helps us better understand (and accept the need for) our anger.
The idea that pessimism serves a purpose is very linked to the concept of secondary gains, which are the positive aspects of something that is otherwise problematic in our lives.

October 26, 2022March 27, 2023

Distraction

Many of us know of the concept of distraction, not all of us know how to do it properly. Distraction, (when used carefully, judiciously and intentionally) is an essential coping skill in times of duress.
Many of us feel uneasy about distraction, because we aren’t solving “the problem”, when we use it. Instead, when we distract, we are giving our brains another focal point, for a period of time, that will enable us to take a break from the intensity of whatever we are distracting from.
If we can truly distract, i.e. truly sink in with our whole thinking and feeling world to something aside from what is distressing us, we often come back to that same thing at a later point (even hours later) feeling more refreshed and able to handle it.
Think about how you feel when you wake up after you’ve been upset. Often times you feel more distance, or are able to to have “new” thoughts or feelings about the same topic, even though you haven’t “done anything” directly to solve the problem.
We want distraction to be intentional: really sink in with your whole self, if, in the corners of your mind you’re still thinking about “it” (whatever you’re trying to distract from), you’re not distracted.
Properly distracting often includes refocusing yourself (again and again) on your distraction, or (if that doesn’t work) accepting your distraction is not stimulating enough and finding a higher intensity distraction to keep your mind off an activating topic.
To stay distracted: “leave” the situation. You may have to do this repeatedly. This can be done physically (literally leave an activating location), cognitively (when you notice yourself drifting into thoughts about “it” re-direct your attention), and through imagery (imagine the topic separate from you – in a box, on the other side of a wall etc).
We want distraction to be judicious: Use it only for brief periods of time (hours, maybe days depending on the urgency of the situation at hand). If we stay distracted from our problems we have actually shifted into avoiding them.
We have to police ourselves when we distract, only we know if we’ve drifted back and only we can refocus our attention. A major key to using distraction effectively is remaining invested in the need for distraction when we’ve chosen to use it as our coping skill.
Distraction can be anything as long as it (1) engages your whole self in a direction different than the topic you are distracting from and (2) doesn’t become a covert way of keeping yourself in the experience you are trying to distract from. More in today’s post about how to effectively distract.

Distraction is one of the key Distress Tolerance skills Marsha Linehan lays out in her Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Training manual. There are many ways to distract:

Activities: i.e. “doing” something else. Ideas: watch TV or a movie (be careful on the topic so it meets the criteria above), talk to a friend about something other than the topic at hand, read a book (it may be too hard to focus for some, if so, try something more stimulating), go out for a walk or run (but don’t think about the topic).

Emotions: Create different emotional experiences for yourself beyond the one that you are distracting from. To do this, you need to first identify how you are feeling and then dive into a different emotional state (perhaps through TV, conversation with others, music, books etc).

Thoughts : Try something that challenges your brain, like a crossword, mystery, or puzzle.

Contributing and Comparisons: The idea with these two is to extend our focus to people and situations beyond us and the issue troubling us at the moment. With contributing, you do an activity that is nice for someone outside of you, to help you feel like you’ve made a positive impact on another person or situation.

With comparisons, we are reminding ourselves of the full spectrum of human experience as a way to help ground ourselves in our awareness of where we fall on that spectrum. The key with comparisons is to leave the comparison with an awareness that that things have been different for us, and could be worse (which doesn’t mean they aren’t bad now). This means you can think about others coping worse than you in that moment, others in worse situations, or compare how you feel now to a time when you felt different (to remind yourself that you too will feel different some day). We need to resist the temptation to compare to someone in an enviable situation, that will not help.

When we use comparisons properly we often find we feel more grateful for our lives, communities, resources and strengths. We have to be very careful not to go to a shaming, judgmental or envious place, otherwise we can invalidate ourselves (it’s worse for him, that means I shouldn’t be so upset).

Why We Need Coping Skills

It’s not uncommon for many people, mental health professionals included, to think of coping skills as “a crutch”.
Many folks get stuck because they hold beliefs that they (or their patients) “should be able to feel their feelings as they are”, rather than accept that people may need to learn how to tolerate their emotional world through the use of moderators (like coping skills) that make emotions tolerable enough for us to be present with and then make use of.
We all have varying levels of skill at interfacing with our emotional world constructively. Those of us that didn’t have strong models for accepting, managing, and constructively expressing emotions are more likely to need to learn coping skills. Those of us that had them modeled for us are likely to find the tactics and concepts intuitive.
When we are not as skilled at naturally accessing our emotions in a constructive manner we may feel overwhelmed by them or numb and unable to be in touch with them. This is where the intentional use of coping skills tailored to you and your individual strengths and needs come in.
Those that struggle with flooding / emotional overwhelm may need distraction and present centered coping mechanisms (like grounding or meditation). Those that struggle with finding and feeling their emotions may need embodiment based coping skills like body scans, or deep breathing which help you connect more sustainably to yourself.
Even if you have strong emotional regulation skills (whether they were learned or came to you intuitively) there are also conceptual coping skills that are useful for everyone to learn and practice that help improve relationships with others, your relationship with yourself, and your communication.
There are many conceptual coping skills (see comments for ones I have covered in this account). An example: approaching a situation from a nonjudgmental stance. Instead we work to be descriptive and in doing so reduce the likelihood that judgments get in the way of our ability to get to the core of our reactions, preferences, values, and needs.
Other conceptual coping skills include acceptance, (where we work to acknowledge the limits of our control, and the reality – as it really is – in front of us) and willingness (which means openness and readiness to interface with your situation in in a manner that has your short and long term goals in mind).
Many of us get stuck because our life long way of doing things, feeling our feelings, problem solving, and addressing conflict feel like a core part of us – just who we are and how we are. But, if we can be open to expanding our approach, and integrating coping skills we can change lifelong patterns that haven’t served us.

One of the things I encourage in my practice, as well as in this account, is being able to live in harmony with your inner world, which does require an ability to tolerate your feelings and respond to them in a constructive manner. However, many of us get stuck because we don’t know how to feel our feelings without ruminating (I.e. keeping them activated in a cyclical manner without working though them); or some version of numbness (where we can’t feel our feelings and experience ourselves as cut off from them).

When we struggle to have a harmonious relationship with our feelings we can get pushed out of our window of tolerance to a place where our thinking world and our emotional world cannot work together. At those times, it is difficult to step back and get to a reflective place where we can notice, make sense of, feel AND think through what may be happening in an integrated manner.

A lot of therapists and self-help books encourage you to “feel your feelings”, which yes! We need to do. But we need to do so constructively and in a manner that helps of make use of them. Our emotional worlds can be chaotic and overwhelming; coping skills are tools that help us manage, navigate, and make use of our emotions in a constructive manner so they don’t overpower us.

There are in the moment coping skills like deep breathing or body scans that help to alleviate the intensity of emotion, or help us get in touch with our emotions. There are also conceptual coping skills that are windows through which we are work to see our lives, relationships, responsibilities and goals. When we use conceptual coping skills we are shifting our mindset so we can respond to the moment with what the moment needs, and what we need to bring about long and short-term success.

Often, once we’ve developed a regular practice with coping skills we actually have an increased tolerance for our capacity to feel our emotions at depth; this is because we know and trust we can feel deeply without being overrun. Our therapies, relationships, capacity for vulnerability and communication are all positively effected because we can fully feel our feelings, think and reflect in an integrated manner.

Comments:

*For the mental health professionals out there*: you may recognize this post as talking about the division we so often see between the cognitive / behaviorally oriented treatments and psychodynamically / relationally oriented treatments. I hear time and again how there is this divide in the field, often with skepticism about the validity of the treatment the other party offers. From my perspective, folks who are seeing limited progress from the relationally or psychodynamically based approaches may need some of the coping skills I describe in this account that fall into the behavioral or cognitive category. The coping skills provided by those interventions can create internal safety for our clients, which eventually enable them to lean more fully in to the psychodynamically and relationally oriented treatments which often require a level of collaboration and openness that may not be accessible without having some core distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and cognitive challenging skills. Similarly, clients who have solely done skill building work may eventually benefit from the insight oriented and relationally based work of a more psychodynamic and relational oriented therapy; having the tools to tolerate their inner world may enable them to not just use skills, but to work to begin to relate and connect to others (and them selves) in new and more effective patterns. It is not uncommon for me to work with psychodynamically oriented clinicians and see their “stuck” patients for skill building. Similarly, for my clients who I work with from a more relational or psychodynamic perspective, sometimes our work needs to shift into skill building to tolerate the depth of the insight oriented work. It doesn’t need to be either/or!
*For folks in therapy that feel stuck*: Talk to your therapist about the style of therapy they are doing with you! Do you feel like you can’t think / feel / reflect at the same time? You might need something more concrete from your therapist to get you adequate coping skills to handle what arises in your life. Alternately, do you feel you have great coping skills, but haven’t seen the kind of pattern change you would like? Talk to your therapist about looking at patterns and doing insight oriented work to help break old patterns that are no longer serving you.
I briefly mention “non-judgmentally” in this post. I have three extensive posts on this. If you (and most of us do) struggle with judgments please read further on how to take a nonjudgmental stance, how to deconstruct judgments, and the problems judgements create for us .
More here on a conceptual coping skill on finding balance in relationships, and effectively considering ourselves and others (at the same time).
For Communication coping skills to reduce conflict see this post on taking a pause from conflict; this post on patterns to avoid in your relationship and in conflict.
For help with the conceptual coping skill of acceptance see, more here.
For help with tolerating very difficult times see a collection of coping skills under the acronym IMPROVE.
For help with learning how to be in the present (which is useful if you are prone to flooding or disconnecting) see posts on being one-minded; meditation, and for newbies to meditation I’d encourage you to start with introductory meditation for mental health.
This post contains a fusion of perspectives from attachment theory (which prioritizes finding safety), DBT (which emphasizes the role of therapist as both supporter and teacher), and mindfulness based therapy. For more reading on any of these topics see Daniel Siegel’s mindsight (which goes into more depth on the impact of leaving the window of tolerance), Marsha Linehan’s textbook on DBT (this book is VERY dense and is a textbook used in graduate level classes), and David Wallin’s Attachment in Psychotherapy which is meant for clinicians but is more accessible to a non-clinician audience than the Linehan book.

March 10, 2022March 27, 2023

Anger

We may not like it, but we need anger, and we have the capacity to experience it for a reason.
For so many of us our anger has created problems for us; we can’t connect to it because we don’t trust it, or when we feel it we do so in ways that we (or others) experience as out of control.
Anger is a signal that something (internally, externally, or both) isn’t working for us and needs to change. It can motivate us and help us protect ourselves from being harmed by situations, experiences, or people.
When we are not accepting of our anger we are at risk of repeatedly falling into situations that are hurtful to us; we need our anger as a cue to us that something isn’t working.
The key to having a productive relationship with our anger is noticing and responding to it in a way that doesn’t create problems for us or our relationships.
Part of having a harmonious relationship with your anger is learning to sit with it, be curious about it, and identify what it is signaling to you about your needs, limits, expectations, environment, and relationships.
When you feel anger, it becomes your job to identify what isn’t working about a situation, and address that situation in a manner that holds respect for you; your values, limits, and well being; and the emotional (and physical) well being of those around you.
We can be quick to confuse our “trigger” (what set off the anger) with the cause (which might actually be about an expectation, our limits, our needs, etc). The fact that we feel anger means something isn’t working, BUT that something isn’t always the “thing” we get angry at.
Because anger narrows our focus and intensifies our drive to act it can be counterintuitive to zoom out and sit with the big picture, but often that’s exactly what we need to do.
The more we can embrace the need for anger, and accept that it serves a functional purpose, the less we fight it when it arises, and the the more able we are to tame it, and express it in ways that protect us and our relationships.

Many of us have an uncomfortable relationship with our anger. It feels threatening, overwhelming, and potentially damaging to relationships. If you’ve followed this account for sometime you know that I am an advocate of building a harmonious relationship with your inner world, which includes all of your feelings – even anger.

In moments of an immediate threat our anger can help us protect what is ours; we can get physically aggressive or we can yell and intimidate. When we want to maintain positive relationships with others, however, our relationship with our anger needs to shift; we still want to feel it to receive cues about our needs and limits, but we need to be careful about how we express it. This does not mean that we “don’t want to feel angry”, what it means is we need to have our anger AND be thoughtful about what we do from there.

Anger, like all emotions, serves a functional purpose about the intersection of our needs and our environment. When we feel anger we are receiving a cue about feeling exploited, threatened, unsafe, or wronged. It can help to think of your anger as a signal that a limit has been passed, that a boundary is needed, that something needs to change, or that we feel unsafe.

To have a productive relationship with our anger we need to learn to sit with it, be curious about what’s causing it, and then address that cause in a manner that’s consistent with our long term goals and values. Anger has a heat and an energy about it that can make us want to act quickly. It can be intense, but we need to work towards learning to slow down, unpack it, and act on it with care.

This is where the thoughtful reflection and awareness about the function of anger is essential. Your anger has arisen to try and keep you safe. Trust that, then ask yourself what feels threatening and why; what expectation has been violated and how universal is that expectation; what is your anger telling you about the gap between what you need what you are getting; what is making you feel unsafe, exploited, or unseen and how can you address it? Try and be open to both internal and external causes of your anger

Comments:

Like all emotions, our ability to feel and manage our anger is informed by prior experiences. Emotions that were welcomed when we developed will be easier for us to access, tolerate, and regulate (i.e. turn the volume down on). Emotions that were not welcome may get twisted and we may have to work to learn how to feel them, or they may only come out in big ways, or jumbled up with other feelings. If anger wasn’t tolerated in your development, or if it only erupted in ways that were hurtful to relationships, chances are you too have internalized that “anger is bad” or “problematic” or “to be avoided” etc. It’s not uncommon for someone to tell me they don’t feel anger, or they perceive it as bad. In my experience, this generally means anger exists within this person’s inner world, and they need help learning how to feel and tolerate it. Without that tolerance, the anger can shift into guilt, shame, anxiety, or depression. For more on how our development shapes our ability to access and tolerate certain thoughts and feelings see my post on how our brains work as an association machine.
I mention that anger has a heat about it in the post, it most certainly does, and if we don’t have adequate emotion regulation skills or distress tolerance skills one of the only ways we know how to cope with it is to push it down (i.e. pretend it’s not there) or let it build up and erupt. For more on how emotions effect us even when “we don’t feel them” see my post on emotional blocking and its impact. For more on distress tolerance skills see this post on in the moment coping mechanisms, and this one too , and this post on why we need distress tolerance skills. There will be more emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills to come, but one huge way to improve your tolerance of your emotions (and decrease your impulsivity to release them in a burst) is to take up a meditation practice. And of course, any very intense emotion can be quickly tamed with grounding skills (though they work best when you practice them in low intensity situations first).
For those of us that have a history of not feeling heard in relationships, we are more prone to express our anger in a way that is “larger”, as an attempt to control situations through intimidation, or as an attempt to be taken seriously and heard. Part of grappling with changing how you express anger, may be grappling with the secondary gains you experience about the ways your expression of anger helps you feel heard, empowered, and in control. Read more more here on secondary gains and how to work through them.
Anger and conflict is inevitable in relationships. For tips on how to manage moments of anger in relationships in a constructive manner see posts on problematic dynamics to avoid, the importance of taking time in conflict, and this post on fair fighting.
I mention in the post that all of our feelings are signals about the intersection of our needs and our environment. It’s true. For more on how we can learn from our emotions see this post on emotions as traffic signals.
Moments of anger can push us out of our window of tolerance (and leave us vulnerable to overly internalizing or externalizing. Read here for more on how to recognize when we (or others) are internalizing or externalizing .
Do you have a hard time with your anger? Perhaps it feels unjustified or not ok. See my post on acceptance for help working to trust it.
I talk in the post about how our “short term” selves often want to release our anger, at the expense of our “long term selves”. For more on this concept and how to grapple with these different priorities see my post on our long and short term selves.

February 13, 2022April 26, 2023

IMPROVE

It does not make you inferior if a situation is more than you can handle; it makes you a person who knows your limits.
Sometimes, it is absolutely appropriate and necessary to temporarily bury feelings, hide them, or push them away. When we do this we are getting through the moment, and taking on only as much as we have capacity for.
We use distress tolerance skills as short term tools to help us manage when the intensity of our emotions is at a 9 or 10 out of 10. At those times we are at risk of coping in a manner that eases our duress for the moment, but creates problems for us down the road.
Think: substance use to numb ourselves, lashing out (verbally or physically) at others to release emotions, having an internal experience of our emotions that is so intense we can’t process what’s happening around us effectively, self-harm, or causing harm to others out of our own duress.
If you’ve ever looked back and thought, “I wasn’t in my right mind when I made that decision” chances are you could have used a distress tolerance skill to help you through.
Distress tolerance skills are not for the weak or people who “can’t handle it”, they are for any and all of us when a situation pushes us to our edge.
Remember, with distress tolerance skills we are not changing the moment, we are helping you get through the moment in a manner that will not create further problems for you once this moment has passed.
Distress tolerance skills have the added bonus of helping you “reset” so you can cope and come back online with you faculties intact, enabling you to manage the stressors ahead of you.
Using distress tolerance skills is often about getting out of black and white (all or nothing) thinking; “if I can’t make the problem go away, there is nothing I can do” is not constructive. You can improve your experience and increase your capacity to handle what is coming if you give yourself permission to use distress tolerance skills.
There is no right amount of time needed for you to be in a mode where distress tolerance skills are necessary, but generally speaking if you’re in a distress tolerance mode for more than 24 hours you may be navigating into the territory of avoidance, which creates a whole host of other problems in your life.
In today’s post I cover the skill “IMPROVE” from Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy textbook. Not every part of this will work for every person, consider this skill (and others I offer) as a buffet for you to pick and choose from for you to cope with your specific situation or stressors.

I – Imagery. If you can’t leave the situation in real life, you can temporarily use fantasy to create a new environment to be in. This skill can help us escape internal or external duress (i.e. imagining a more pleasant scenario), or, if it feels accessible, you can use it as a way of boosting yourself up (i.e. imagining yourself coping well).

M – Meaning. Terrible things happen. One way in which we can survive them is by making meaning out of them. This is often too big a task to do in the present, but what you can do is have faith in your ability to find meaning eventually. This can look like, “I don’t know how this will ever make sense to me, but I believe that I will find a way to learn, grow, and be a better person because of this”.

P – Prayer. If you are religious than this probably already makes sense. If not, think of prayer less literally as “asking god”, and more figuratively as a surrendering yourself to forces outside of your control. Prayer usually includes accepting what is happening and our limited ability to change it all while asking for help from some yet to be determined place (like from others, a future version of ourselves, our community etc).

R – Relaxing. Remember, our brains and bodies are connected in a giant feedback loop. If you are stressed, anxious, and upset your body is likely carrying that tension physically which signals to your brain the need to be on high alert (which can further heighten tension). You can interrupt the feedback loop by relaxing your body which will decrease your experience of the stress.

O – One thing in the moment. This is reviewed extensively here. This skill centers us and can reduce our experience of chaos.

V – Vacation (temporarily) from responsibilities. Also known as, a break, denial, avoidance, or time to regroup. For this to work you really have to clear your mind of the problem and focus on something else.

E – Encouragement. Our internal world can be brutal. Try shifting your internal voice to approach yourself like you would a friend or a child (with encouragement, kindness, a focus on capacity and strength, and without all the harshness that may be present for you at a difficult time).

Comments:

I write a lot in this account about the benefits of being present with your whole self throughout your day, which includes your body, emotions, thoughts, feelings, values, priorities, and the environment around you. While I absolutely stand by that recommendation, like nearly everything I’ve written about, this is not an all or nothing recommendation and the helpfulness of being present in this manner exists on a spectrum; there are times in all of our lives when we need to recognize our limits and our inability to be truly present in the moment. This post will help you identify where your limits are and, hint, often they are not where you want them to be. This post explains the rationale for distress tolerance skills. In it I cover the importance of having “distress tolerance skills” (as Marsha Linehan of DBT calls them) in your coping tool belt. I also cover how our brains respond to intense negative emotions in the comments.
Some of us may not identify with having our emotions at a 9 or 10 out of 10, but we do identify with repeatedly having those moments where we wish we hadn’t handled something in some way, or with feeling the opposite of intense emotions – nothing at all. The IMPROVE skills may be helpful for you too in those times, as well as grounding, another version of a “reset” for our brains that helps bring us back to the present and improve impulse control. Grounding skills are a version of vacation from responsibilities combined with one thing in the moment.
Another way to think about when to use distress tolerance skills is when you are outside of your window of tolerance.
When we force ourselves through a moment that is more intense than we know how to handle, without taking care of our emotional needs we are not only not using distress tolerance skills, we are at risk for experiencing the situation as traumatic. Read here for more on what makes something “traumatic”.
Your ability to use these skills heightens with a mindfulness practice, which helps us increase our ability to control what we place our attention on. See my prior posts on the rationale for mindfulness skills, for an introduction to meditation and its purpose, for sensory based meditation and for free form meditation.
Struggling with feeling like you shouldn’t “need” to do this or use these skills? See my post on Acceptance for help with this.
Are the concepts in IMPROVE new to you? That’s ok. The best way to help them become habits is to have realistic expectations for how to incorporate them into your life. See my post on how to make long term sustainable change.
A note on prayer. There are different types of prayer, why me prayers, asking for help prayers, acceptance prayers. In my experience “why me” prayers further our experience of helplessness where as acceptance and asking for help prayers are often more helpful in coping with an unfair or difficult moment.
Understanding how emotions work will help you better understand the “R” – Relax – skill. See post from November 1st, 2021 for more details on how our emotions work. As Marsha Linehan says of relaxing, “Often people tense their bodies as if by keeping them tense, they can actually make the situation change. They try to control the situation by controlling their bodies. The goal here is to accept reality with the body” by relaxing it. The quote is from page 99 of Linehan’s Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline personality disorder, 1st edition. Full Citation: Linehan, M. M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.
Further insight into the benefits of “one thing in the moment” “O” skill, from Marsha Linehan’s manual: “Focusing on one thing in the moment can be very helpful in the middle of a crisis; it can provide time to settle down. The secret of this skill is to remember the the only pain one has to survive is ‘just this moment’. We all often suffer much more than is required by calling to mind past suffering and ruminating about future suffering we may have to endure” The quote is from page 100 of Linehan’s Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder, 1st edition. Full Citation: Linehan, M. M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.

November 1, 2021March 27, 2023

What is an Emotion?

If you want to manage and cope with your emotions, a helpful starting point is understanding what they are, how they work, and how (beyond feeling them) they effect us.
What emotions we feel, and how intensely we feel them, is simply a combination of chemical processes in our brain and sensations in our body working as a feedback loop in response to signals from one another and our environment.
An example: You feel scared. Your brain sends that fear signal to your body. Your heart may start racing, you you may start sweating, you may instinctively raise your shoulders up by your ears. You may think to yourself, “this isn’t safe, I’m in danger”. Your brain then detects all that activity which continues prompting the emotion of fear.
Feeling emotions for extended periods of time is simply this feedback loop restarting again and again as we experience the emotion, thoughts, and associated body changes.
Each emotion has a series of specific body changes and sensations associated with it. Those body sensations are unique to each person, but there is often overlap between people in how they feel each particular emotion.
The more we can learn to notice and observe our emotions and their impact on us, the less controlled we are by them. An entry point to this (and there are others) is noticing and identifying what is happening in your body as you are feeling your emotions.
It can be a helpful exercise to think of something that made you feel a particular emotion, reconnect with that feeling, and then do a scan throughout your body to notice how the emotion effects you.
You can build up a personal catalog of identifiers for each emotion (i.e. anger makes me feel heat in my chest and tension in my jaw, guilt makes me feel a pit in my stomach and a knot in my throat etc).
There will be more to come on this topic, including why we have emotions and tips and skills for managing them.
See today’s post for a further explanation of why we need to pay attention to our bodies if we want to better manage our minds

If you’ve studied philosophy you know there is an age old question about the differences between mind and body. In this day an age, those of us familiar with neuroscience know that mind and body are actually part of the same intricate system of circuitry, feedback loops, and signals. Emotions are a complex part of this system, but simply put they consist of (neurochemical) changes in the brain that go on to have an effect on our bodies, thoughts, behavior, and even our interpretations of the environment around us.

Understanding how to manage our emotions becomes easier once we understand that they exist in a feedback loop with our bodies. We can enter that loop and begin the process of taming, settling, regulating, and managing our emotions by becoming familiar with how each emotion effects our body.

Try and bring curiosity to your body when you realize you are feeling an emotion. What do you notice? Pay attention to temperature, tension, pressure, tightness, etc. You may need to scan around to different parts of your body to gather all the information about what’s happening. As a bonus, the process of stepping back and observing yourself will likely help lower the intensity of the emotion you are experiencing.

If you’re not used to directing your attention to your body you may be surprised at how much is happening in it. If you find you feel numb and can’t feel your body that’s a cue you’re out of your window of tolerance and need to ground (see comments). You may also find you don’t feel some emotions even though you know they exist. Try accessing a lower intensity version of those emotions, for example if you are someone that can’t connect with feelings of anger, try connecting with frustration, or irritability – and notice how that effects your body.

Over time, that increased awareness of our body can help us detect emotions before they get too big (increasing our odds of wrangling them back in), and offers us the opportunity to intervene in the feedback loop with strategies to manage our emotions. More on those strategies in a future post, but for now work paying attention to your personal feedback loop and its effect on your body.

Comments:

This post contains a fusion of information from (1) Marsha Linehan’s Skills training manual for DBT, and her theory of emotions (pages 87, 88, and 137 of the manual), (2) Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The body keeps the score”, (3) Daniel Siegel’s “Mindsight” and (4) David Wallin’s “Attachment in Psychotherapy”.
As David Wallin explains, “Asking our patients to label what they feel…invites them to observe that experience rather than simply identify with it and feel overwhelmed. Enhanced bodily awareness and the growing sense that feelings can be painful without being intolerable sets the stage” for healing. This quote is from page 81 of David Wallin’s Attachment and Psychotherapy, a book meant for therapists but readable for not-therapists who are interested in learning more. Full citation: Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.
Scientists rely on this fact, that our emotions are neural processes, to make advances in medicine and to better understand human behavior and functioning. They’ll use scans /testing devices in research studies to help them determine what emotion a person is feeling based on which part of the brain shows the most activity. “In the early 1990s novel brain-imaging techniques opened up undreamed-of capacities to gain a sophisticated understanding about the way the brain processes information…PET and later… fMRI scans enabled scientists to visualize how different parts of the brain are activated when people are engaged in certain tasks or when they remember events from the past. For the first time we could watch the brain as it processed memories, sensations , and emotions and begin to map the circuits of mind and consciousness” – Page 39 of Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score”. Full citation: van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.4
Want to know more about the connections between how your brain, your emotions, and your thoughts work? See my previous post Your Brain as an Association Machine for more information.
I mention the feedback loop between our brains and our body in this post. Did you know most emotions last only a few seconds to minutes? If you’re feeling something for an extended period of time the feedback loop is restarting, which means there is an opportunity for you to intervene. Learn more about the brevity of emotions here.
Not sure you buy into the idea that you want to feel all your emotions? Or maybe you only want to feel some of them? Check out this post that explains the value in negative emotions.
Think you’re not someone who is effected by your emotions? Think again – we’ve all got them, and they can effect us even when we push them away or don’t feel them.
I mention Grounding and The Window of Tolerance in this post. If you find you need to ground a lot while trying to be in your body it’s a cue that you would benefit from therapy. It will help you widen your window of tolerance.

October 17, 2021March 27, 2023

Displacement

Our feelings are harder to access in environments where they are not welcome. This can be with certain people who we feel shut us down, and it can also be with our internal world if we believe certain feelings are bad, unproductive, or unacceptable.
When we can’t access and process through our feelings directly we may find ourselves prone to using displacement. When we “displace” we focus our energy, attention, and conversation around something other than the core issue at hand.
Displacement can be an indirect way of addressing an emotionally charged / intense topic or a topic we can’t find an accessible entry point into discussing or feeling our way through.
Example: you’ve had a bad day at work and take out your anger on your family once you’re home. Perhaps you’re feeling angry about work, and simultaneously feeling like you can’t change that environment / express yourself there and maintain professionalism (i.e. you can’t find an accessible entry point at work to handle your concerns in a direct way).
Although you don’t want to be irritable at home, you may (consciously or unconsciously) rationalize to yourself that your family is “stuck with you” and so you release your frustrations at home. In this scenario the person has displaced their anger at work onto their family members and in an environment where they feel their negative emotions are more tolerated.
Sometimes displacement of this nature can happen even when we don’t consciously *feel* angry. So yes, this means you can have a feeling, not register that you are having it, and then direct a release of it toward some other topic or person in your life.
The trouble with displacement is we focus our attention, energy, and conversation around the focal point, at times without acknowledgement or awareness of the underlying issue(s) at hand.
Unfortunately, even if we can “resolve” the displaced issue (in this example the conflict with our family), we haven’t resolved the core issue (work) and the recipient(s) of our displacement often leave the interaction(s) feeling like the other has been unreasonable.
If we are regularly displacing in our lives we run the risk of resentment in relationships, having the same fight repeatedly, believing our internal world is unreasonable, and feeling confused by or untrustworthy of our reactions.
More in today’s post and comments about how displacement can creep into relationships and decrease our ability to solve problems in our lives. Also, tips for how to find displacement and what to do about it.

When we “displace” we focus our thoughts, communications and/or reactions to a “stand-in” person / object / situation as opposed to the actual person / situation we are having a reaction to. When someone says they feel treated like a punching bag, often they are describing being the recipient of someone else’s displaced feelings.

Displacement can happen in lots of ways, imagine you and your spouse are in a fight about how the dishes are loaded in the dishwasher. More often then not those types of fights are a displacement of a different, larger, and more emotionally overwhelming topic. Instead of facing that topic head on, we can displace onto something more accessible and concrete, like how the dishes are loaded. In this scenario the intense emotions about a larger dynamic (could be anything, perhaps how heard one party feels) are displaced onto a smaller dynamic (how the dishes are loaded) that comes to represent the larger one.

Sometimes we can displace as a way of protecting ourselves from feelings we don’t want to have or believe we shouldn’t be having. At those times we can be fully wedded the the notion that we are having reactions to “the dishes” rather than some larger problem we don’t want to be true of our relationship or in our lives.

Other times when we displace, we may feel aware that the strength of our reaction doesn’t totally make sense. A helpful way to get to core of an issue when you suspect displacement is at play in yourself or others is to ask (in a collaborative, non-judgmental, and accepting manner):

Can you articulate why there is so much emotion or heat around this topic?
Does it feel like this type of thing happens in other ways we may not be discussing?
What else happened today or recently that this reminds me of that I might also be having a reaction to?
Does it feel like we might really be talking about something or someone else here?

Until we can get to the core of the issues we face we are at risk of having the same underlying concern or conflict around “stand-in” topics. With curiosity and introspection we can work to understand and know ourselves better to catch displacement in the act, and get to addressing core underlying concerns.

Notes

One of the reasons that therapy is effective is that a skilled therapist provides a space for someone to feel their feelings without judgment. The relationship becomes a safe place to release your emotions, and it’s not uncommon for patients to find themselves surprised by what comes out in a session. If this has happened to you in treatment this is often a great sign that you feel safe in your relationship with your therapist and they are helping you access, process through, and release what is already there and needs room to come out.
Once we’ve gotten good at recognizing the signs of displacement in ourselves and can recognize when we’re displacing from one topic to another the displaced topic itself can become a helpful entry point into conversation. For example, “I’m noticing myself feeling angry about the dishes but as I think about it, I’m realizing it’s not just the dishes, it’s more that the dishes are one example of how I feel like I ask you to do something and it doesn’t happen. I think we really need to talk about this because I can tell I’m getting resentful”.
Affairs in relationships can happen for many reasons, but one avenue for thinking about them (and there are many others) is through the notion of displacement. If you are having an affair one of many questions you can ask to build introspection and awareness is what need aren’t you getting met from your partner or your life that you have displaced into this other relationship?
I mention in the post that sometimes we can feel like our reactions don’t totally make sense for the situation we are in. Sometimes this is because we are displacing, but all feelings are valid even if they are about numerous situations at the same time. See this post on the cumulative nature of emotions as well as this post on how our brains make associations for a deeper dive into that topic.
I mention in the post that our feelings are harder to access in environments where they are not welcome including our internal world if we believe certain feelings are bad, unproductive, or unacceptable. See more here for how to approach your internal world in a way that won’t shut it down .
I mention in the post that we can have an emotion and not register we are having it. It’s true. For more about how this works see this post on emotional blocking.
Alcoholics Anonymous groups talk about displacement too, though they use the phrase “Coming out Sideways” to discuss how emotions or reactions can come out “sideways” to a focal point other than the core issue, problem, concern, or person.
Our insight into our use of displacement can vary even if we are otherwise self-aware and reflective. We can be very self-aware in some categories of our life and in some relationships, as less so in others. Further, we can displace more around certain types of issues than others. Our insight can vary based on a variety of factors including whether we’re in our window of tolerance, or when we’re operating outside of our limits.

October 4, 2021March 27, 2023

Primary and Secondary Emotions

Our emotions, when they are heightened, can feel like a freight train, plowing through and interrupting everything in their tracks.
Often this is because, like cars on a freight train, emotions and thoughts are pouring in rapid fire one after another with no end in sight.
An example: you feel angry for a moment, but then, perhaps you feel guilty for feeling angry (or expressing it). Perhaps that can lead to frustration that you feel guilty. So on and so forth.
Some of us have a hard time identifying what our feelings are, or labeling them into categories like “anger”, “guilt”, or “frustration”. Instead we just feel revved up or activated or (at the other end of the spectrum) numb or flat.
In the DBT world Marsha Linehan describes primary and secondary emotions to help us begin to make sense of our inner world. Primary emotions are responses to our external world (like events around you or the actions of others). Secondary emotions are responses to our internal world (i.e. emotions in response to our emotions or thoughts).
For most of us, secondary emotions are the ones that cause the most upheaval and distress.
That’s because we can have many secondary emotions and they often come in quickly and more powerfully than the primary emotion that preceded it.
Secondary emotions often have a judgment built into them (i.e. I noticed I’m angry, but I feel like I shouldn’t be angry, so now I feel ashamed about my anger).
This can leave us in a trap where our emotions are loud, overwhelming, hard to distinguish from one another, and subsequently hard to resolve – even if we’re really trying. Instead we can feel out of control spinning and cycling, often in ways that interfere with our ability to be present in our lives.

For us to manage our emotional world we need to know what we are feeling and how to take care of ourselves in response to that feeling. An essential skill to help us regulate (balance) our emotional world is learning how to feel and process through emotions in a way resolves them.

There are many tools for managing your emotions, but one way to help you through them is to learn how to identify them. Once we’ve identified them, we often feel better because our internal world feels organized and less chaotic by our awareness of what’s happening within it. This is similar to strategic problem solving, usually the first step in a problem solving strategy is identifying what the issue is so you can address what needs resolution. The concept of Primary and Secondary emotions from Dialectical Behavior Therapy gives us a helpful starting point to do this in our emotional world.

Primary emotions are reactions to events in your external environment (being angry at someone for criticizing, feeling happy that a loved one is coming to visit etc). Secondary emotions are are reactions to your internal world (i.e. your thoughts and feelings). For example: feeling guilty when you feel angry or feeling pride in your ability to be happy for someone else.

Secondary emotions tend to cause the most distress for a few reasons:

1. They can be set off in a long overwhelming string (which I call emotional chaining), with numerous thoughts and feelings coming from and leading to one another.

2. They can dilute, overwhelm, and drown out the primary emotion making it difficult to identify and resolve whatever set that off. This overpowering often leaves us confused, potentially upset with ourselves, and overwhelmed.

3. If we have judged ourselves for experiencing our primary emotion (i.e. I got angry, but feel like I shouldn’t have gotten angry), we will both be stuck with our feeling and our belief that we shouldn’t have it; a complete trap to effective resolution of what’s happening.

To increase your ability to manage your emotions, start working to identify “primary” and “secondary” emotions. Look out for the three traps listed above and see notes for more resources.

Notes:

This post references material from Marsha Linehan’s emotion regulation module in her Dialectical Behavior Therapy treatment manual, specifically pages 86 and 89 of the manual. Full Citation: Linehan, M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
If you struggle with secondary emotion trap number 1 (emotional chaining) and number 2 (secondary emotions overwhelming primary emotions) you want to work to help slow down your internal world so it doesn’t move quite as rapid fire. Working on staying in the present hugely helps here. There will be additional posts to come on this, but see this post on meditation for something you can start today.
If you struggle with secondary emotion trap number 3, (judgments), see these prior posts for help with tools and concepts to decrease the power of judgments; and this series on identifying, understanding, and challenging judgments.
Knowing how to manage emotions is a complex skill, sometimes we need to let ourselves ride them out, sometimes we need to pull away from them, sometimes we need to actively manage them. There will be many more posts to come on this topic but these previous posts on controlling our attention and knowing which types of coping skills to use when have helpful content.
Today’s post assumes you buy in that all feelings are worth having. Perhaps you don’t. This post covers some of the many reasons we want to keep both our positive and our negative emotions around.
Sometimes our emotions are too big or feel too far away for us to tolerate feeling through them. This happens when we are outside our window of tolerance. If this is the case you want to work towards grounding to help turn the dial down on the intensity (or the numbness) before working on feeling through.
This is similar, but not to be confused with behavioral chaining, a DBT technique in which you look back at each moment that lead up to a particular behavior to identify the feeling or experience that started the behavior.

May 31, 2021March 27, 2023

Emotional Blocking

Our emotions continue to effect us even if we don’t perceive them
Even if we don’t feel or notice our feelings they can still have a major impact on how we process the world around us
Some of us believe our emotions don’t influence us, and we are ruled only by logic or reason
Some of us know we have feelings, but they slip away and escape us before we can really make sense of them
This post is for those of you who feel like your emotions are far away or hard to hold on to. There will be posts to come to help you sustainably get in touch with your inner world
To get better at noticing, feeling, and making sense of our emotions we need to learn how to turn the volume up on our feelings in a way that doesn’t overwhelm us, but has emotions stick around long enough for us to make use of them.
Emotions are complex, but they involve brain and body changes in a feedback loop. We can learn to tap into that feedback loop to help us be in better touch with our feelings
For those of us that have a hard time registering what we are feeling starting with our bodies is often the more accessible entry point.
Each feeling has combination of body sensations and brain changes that make it distinct. We can learn to pay attention to those body changes and stay present with them as a way to help us connect more to our emotional world.
Remember: if something feels like too much, return to grounding skills.

Thus far I have written a lot about feeling overwhelmed by emotion, the times when we are filled to the brim or feel like we are bursting. For many of us, however, we have the opposite relationship with our emotions, we struggle with not being able to hold on to our feelings; they slip our of reach, or just aren’t there.

At times, it’s not an intentional pushing down or away, it’s just what happens, like the feelings don’t ever really seem to bubble up. Other times it may be more intentional. Some of us have come to believe that emotions are a waste of time, or we we’ve trained ourselves “not to have them” and consider ourselves to be ruled solely by logic and reasoning.

As Daniel Seigel writes, there are consequences to this non-experience of emotions too, “When we block our awareness of our feelings, they continue to affect us anyway. Research has repeatedly shown that neural input from the internal world of the body and emotion influences our reasoning and our decision making. Even facial expressions we’re not aware of…directly affect how we feel and so how we perceive the world.”

In short, what Dr. Seigel writes is that even if we don’t notice our feelings are there, they are. Even though we aren’t conscious of them, they impact us, our decision making, and how we perceive what’s going on around us.

So, for these folks, we want to help you learn how to turn the volume up on emotions in a sustainable way. For that to happen, we need to help you tolerate the experience of your emotions, which have probably been whittled down because at one point they were too painful, or perhaps you came from an environment where they were not welcome.

We can help you increase your ability to notice your internal world by helping you work to be more connected to your body. Emotions are complex, but they involve brain and body changes in a type of feedback loop. We want to help you plug into that feedback loop by being more present with your body. That way we can help you work to notice and gradually hold on to the emotional signals within you.

There will be more on how to do this, but keep your eyes peeled for mindfulness and body based posts to come.

Notes:

The Daniel Siegel quote comes from his book, Mindsight. (page 125). Full Citation: Siegel, Daniel J., Mindsight : The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York: Bantam Books, 2010.
The theory of emotions (the part about emotions being a feedback loop that involve brain and body changes) is a brief summary of what is laid out on pages 87 – 88 and page 137 of Marsha Linehan’s DBT manual. Full Citation: Linehan, M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
If you are eager to start working on increasing your awareness of your emotional world run yourself through the exercise of taking some core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, joy, confusion), and sit quietly. Work to pay attention to what happens in your body as you bring up a memory that includes each emotion. Each emotion has a distinct feeling experience in our bodies, and we want to become aware of how those feelings manifest in each of us. Knowing “what” they feel like and “how” it feels in our bodies, and being able to tolerate that feeling helps us become more able to identify and tolerate emotions as they come up naturally in our lives. Be sure you have mastered grounding skills before trying this, it may be overwhelming to start “turning up the volume”. If so, consider starting only with emotions that are more tolerable to feel and get to the more difficult ones once you’re comfortable there.
Wondering why on earth you’d want to feel your feelings – especially your negative ones? Read this post about how are emotions are like “traffic signals” in our inner world .