Emotions Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

May 26, 2021March 27, 2023

Controlling our Attention

We can’t control what happens to us. What happens to us includes events, but it also includes our thoughts and our feelings
Many of us experience inner anguish because we have trouble accepting that what we think and feel is not actually within our control.
We feel what we feel, we think what we think and the best way to insulate ourselves from tough times is work to build coping skills that help us live in harmony with our inability to have the inner world we believe (or have been told) we “should” have.
We can use meditation and mindfulness based skills to help us detach from the intensity of our thoughts and feelings. While we can’t control what happens, these skills help us increase our control over what we pay attention to.
We can use emotion regulation skills that help us to “turn down the dial” on emotions when they are intense, but not at their most powerful.
When emotions are their most intense we can use distress tolerance skills to help us get through a situation without responding to them in a way that will create a problem for us further down the road.
This account will help you learn skills in all three of these categories, and work to help you build awareness of when it makes sense to use which kind of skill.
These skills help us manage pain when it arises in a way that won’t create further suffering for us, and will help protect our relationships and get us through with as little suffering as possible.
No one manages their thoughts and feelings ideally 100% of the time. That is not possible. We are all human. The goal is to help you have the skills so that you know what to do, aren’t so lost in those moments, and can get through them with as little suffering as possible.

One of the things we therapists know, and we work to help our clients accept, is that coping is about learning and accepting what we can and can’t control. We can’t completely control what happens to us, our thoughts and our feelings.

Many of us have luck for sometime pushing thoughts and feelings down or away. We also can organize our lives in such a way that we can have some control over what happens in it, though that’s more often possible when we have more resources. Regardless, at best we only have some control, and we don’t have the level of control many of us wish we did.

I want to be clear: pushing feelings or thoughts down or away isn’t bad. It’s a skill. A skill that works some of the time. However, if we only rely on that particular skill for coping with our internal world we are not equipped for very difficult times, or for when a tidal wave of thoughts or feelings comes in. Further, we lose our ability to learn from our feelings if we rely too heavily on pushing them away.

So, we all need to have a broad array of coping skills. Think of them like tools in a tool belt, different skills for different scenarios.

Instead of trying to control what happens to us, our thoughts, or our feeling we can work to increase our ability to control what we pay attention to and to detach from the intensity of what we may be feeling or thinking. This can be done through meditation and mindfulness based work.

Sometimes we need to learn how to lower intense feelings, that’s called emotion regulation. We use emotion regulation skills when we feel emotions on a level where they “need some wrangling” (i.e. they aren’t dissipating on their own), but not when they are at their most powerful.

When our feelings are really intense, and emotion regulation skills don’t work we can learn to ride them out, let them peter off, distract, or soothe ourselves through distress tolerance skills. With these skills we are working on introducing new and different focal points to divert our attention for a period of time. We are not solving or changing, we are getting through and in doing so helping our brains “reset” so we can tackle the issue when our feelings are not as intense.

Notes:

This post outlines three of the fours modules in Dialectical Behavior Therapy’s skill’s training program. For more information Full Citation: Linehan, M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
Pushing thoughts and feelings down or away, as mentioned in the post, is a distress tolerance skill. It is a powerful tool to use when our emotions are too overwhelming for us to face, or when the scenario we are in requires we move forward rather than address our experience. For more on why we need distress tolerance skills see the argument for distress tolerance. As with ANY distress tolerance skill we want to return to the topic at hand once we are available to face it (i.e. the scenario allows it, and our internal world feels more balanced).
We use emotion regulation skills when we are still in our window of tolerance, but nearing the edges of it, or perhaps just outside of it. For information on what our window of tolerance is and what it feels like to be outside of it, see “window of tolerance”.
Another reason it is difficult to control our thoughts and feelings is outlined in the post “your brain as an association machine“.
Post covering how we can learn from our emotions is called “emotions as traffic signals” .
Unsure if your emotion is dissipating on its own, or if you need to intervene to help? See Emotions are brief.
One thing that feels important to acknowledge: While these skills can help us manage pain they are not the be all end all and it’s not as though these replace the need for therapy or support from others at times. These skills do not turn us into a one person “cope with anything and everything” machine. These skills help us manage pain when it arises in a way that won’t create further suffering for us, and will help protect our relationships and get us through with as little suffering as possible.

May 18, 2021March 27, 2023

Emotions Are Brief

Often, when we feel difficult feelings for extended periods time it’s because we don’t know how to release them
Our emotions are brief – often times only seconds to minutes
Many of us, however, get stuck in emotional states for far longer periods of time.
This happens because we re-expose ourselves to what sets off our feelings either with our thoughts, our memories, or the moment we are in
As a result, the emotional signal from our brain re-fires again and again stringing together one long experience of feeling an emotion
When this happens it can be time consuming, exhausting, and overwhelming.
We can get wiped out from these experiences of having such lengthy emotional states.
We can start to feel like our feelings are too much, too hard, too disruptive, and we can start to cope by just cutting them off or pushing them away
Or some of us lose hours of our time stuck in feeling states with little ability to truly be present in our lives at those times
We want to feel our emotions long enough to process through them and learn from them. But then we want to be able to move on from them and get on with our lives

Marsha’s Linehan’s research backed treatment, Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT) teaches: “Emotions come and go. They are like waves in the sea. Most emotions last from several seconds to minutes”.

When I share this with my clients I hear a lot of “Not mine. Mine last for hours”.
For many of us this is true, we can feel sad, scared, lonely, angry, upset – you name it – for extended periods of time, far beyond a few minutes.

So what’s happening?

DBT addresses this too, “Emotions are also self-perpetuating. Once an emotion starts, it keeps restarting itself”.

This means that when feelings go on and on it’s actually the same brief emotional signal being fired in the brain repeatedly (until something stops the signal). It all connects to feel like one big long feeling, but it’s not. It’s a bunch of very brief emotional signals from our brain strung together.

So why does the signal keep re-firing?

Often it’s because of how we RESPOND to the experience of having the emotion.

Sometimes our thoughts trigger the re-firing: “I can’t believe I did it again”, “I hate it when he does this, “I’m going to put her in her place and tell her…”.

Sometimes our memories trigger the re-firing, like when we play the scene over and over in our heads.

Sometimes the conversation or event that’s triggering the feeling goes on and on (like when you’re sad throughout an entire funeral or angry throughout an entire fight).

Why does this matter?

The crux of being able to cope productively with negative feelings is being able to interrupt that firing process at the appropriate time. When our emotions stick around for extended periods of time it’s because something (internally or externally) repeatedly sets off the emotion. Emotions themselves don’t necessarily HAVE to last so long, and we can learn how to interrupt the re-firing process with coping skills and with processing through the feelings.

There will be more on that to come (look out for distress tolerance and emotion regulation skills) so we can increase our ability to keep emotions with us long enough to make use of them, and then release them (rather than re-start them) once that process is done.

Notes:
1. The DBT quote comes from page 87 of Marsha Linehan’s Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder. Full Citation: Linehan, M., M., (1993). Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
2. We can feel more than one feeling at once, and we can have multiple feeling signals firing from the brain around the same topic.
3. Some people struggle to hold on to feelings rather than feel like they stick around too long. There will be another post on the impact of that relationship with your emotional world.
4. See post called Emotions as Traffic Signals for more about why it’s important to be able to feel our whole range of emotions, positive and negative.

May 11, 2021March 27, 2023

The Window of Tolerance

We all have a sweet spot in our ability to cope, manage, process, think, feel, and communicate.
When we are in that sweet spot (also called the window of tolerance) we generally feel calm, able to take on what comes, and able to think and feel at the same time.
When we are outside of that spot we can feel very intense anxiety, rage, or feelings so big we can’t even really identify them – they just fill us to the brim
We may be more likely to ruminate (i.e. not be able to stop thinking about something), become hyper focused on the topic at hand, or lash out our feelings at others.
We may also feel a tremendous degree of urgency to “fix” whatever has pushed us outside of our window.
We can also fall outside of that window in the other direction, to a place of more emptiness, depression, numbness, or avoidance
When we’re on that side of the window we may get sleepy or have a hard time paying attention
Parts of our ability to function are “offline” when we are pushed to either side of this window of tolerance
For us to be successful in our relationships, at work, and in managing our mental health it is essential that we recognize this window exists, and that we respond to it constructively
More to come in a future post about how to widen your window of tolerance, but the first step is recognizing it exists and to identify how it manifests in you.
We can all work to widen our windows of tolerance through therapy, meditation (more on this to come) and learning (and using) coping skills. One of the reasons your therapist can be effective in treatment is because they (likely) have done some work widening their own window to be able to tolerate what their clients bring to treatment.

In the DBT world we would say we know we’re in our window when our “rational” (i.e. thinking or logical) mind and our emotional mind are accessible. As Daniel Siegal says, “If an experience pushes us outside our window…we may fall into rigidity [depression, cut offs, numbness, avoidance] or into chaos [agitation, anxiety, rage, emotions that feel so big we can’t even identify them they just consume us with intensity]”.

He explains, “We [each] have multiple windows of tolerance. And for each of us those windows are different, often specific to certain topics or emotional states. I may have a high tolerance for sadness, continuing to function fairly well even when I or those around me are in deep distress. But even a lesser degree of sadness…may cause you to fall apart. In contrast anger may be relatively intolerable for me…but for you, anger may not be such a big deal”.

Acceptance of the fact that this window exists, and there are limits in our ability to function based on our presence (or not) in it are crucial to success in managing your mental health, relationships, feelings, and thoughts. We are more likely to be pushed out of our window of tolerance at times when our safety is threatened; we are hungry, in pain, or tired. Some of us may be more inclined to fall to the rigid side (with less emotion) and others may be more inclined to the chaos side (with more emotion).

Daniel goes on to say, “Within our window of tolerance we remain receptive” (this means able to integrate information from our bodies, thinking selves, and feeling selves), “outside of it we become reactive” (this means we’re highly emotionally charged and less able to thoughtfully think through and respond to something with our full capacity to consider consequences, values, and priorities).

Many of us have spent a good chunk of our lives outside our personal windows without awareness that we CAN get to that middle ground place. When we are outside our window of tolerance it is not the time to make important decisions, or have important conversations. It is instead a time to work on coping and “coming back online” so we are out of the reactive place and back that receptive place.

Notes:

This posts combines a mix of the “wise mind” skill from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, developed by Marsha Linehan with information from Daniel Siegal’s book, Mindsight (pages 137-138). Full Citation: Siegel, Daniel J., Mindsight : The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York: Bantam Books, 2010.
It’s not always obvious when we’re outside our window of tolerance. For some of us it just is our sense of “normal” or “how we’re supposed to feel”. If you often feel the way I’ve described suspect you may regularly be outside of your personal window.
We can learn to recognize when we’re outside our window and we can develop coping and grounding skills to bring us back within our window so we can function and manage well. Those coping skills to follow in another post, try to work on knowing when you’re in and outside of your personal windows based on the cues I described. If you have a partner – heads up – they may have a sense of when this occurs for you better than you do!

May 5, 2021March 27, 2023

Introduction to Relational Trauma

Trauma is more common and varied than most of us realize
Often, when we think of something traumatic we think of a concrete event – a war, a shooting, a life threatening situation, or a situation in which pain was endured
Yes. Those are absolutely traumatic events, we in the therapist world call those “Capital “T” traumatic events”
There is another kind of trauma that is quite common, highly impactful, incredibly painful, and (in my opinion) under-acknowledged
We therapists call that “lower case ’t’ trauma”
That kind of trauma is also called complex, cumulative, or (what I will call it) relational trauma
In short, this trauma occurs when a child is repeatedly left with big overwhelming feelings that make them feel at fault, unsafe, scared, or inadequate without the ability to manage the feelings or recover from the experience
It may not threaten our lives, but it threatens our emotional safety and that has huge effects on our emotions and relationships moving forward
Relational trauma can sometimes only be discovered by the imprints it leaves behind
Effects of relational trauma can include: trouble managing feelings / in relationships / with trust; and chronic anxiety, depression, feelings of inadequacy, or struggles with self-worth.

If there is one thing that I wish was more widely known and understood about trauma, it’s that it is far more common and varied than we give it credit for.

Most of us can intuitively understand Capital T Trauma. If you get in a car accident and it was terrifying, we understand and can offer empathy to you if you’re scared to get in a car again; your terror and discomfort is understandable to us.

Many of us have a more difficult time understanding and offering empathy for relational trauma and its impact. Unlike the accident described above, we don’t have that concrete experience to reference of “where the trauma came from” which can make it confusing to all parties when someone is triggered and responding to prior relational trauma. Instead, we often just think someone is being “crazy” or “ridiculous”*(6).

Usually, we know if we’ve experienced Capital T trauma, but sometimes we don’t know if we’ve experienced relational trauma. It can feel like how problems or feelings are managed or what we known to be normal.

As David Wallin puts it (full citation in comments(7)): relational trauma develops after repeated experiences in childhood of “fear, helplessness, humiliation, shame, and/or [emotional or physical] abandonment” from primary care givers (often parents) who did not help a child recover from intense emotional experiences or manage their overwhelming feelings.

That repeated experience of being alone with big overwhelming feelings without help managing or recovering can leave us scared of our feelings because we don’t know how to manage or recover from them. As a result we can learn to bury or hide feelings away. This inability to be in touch with and process our feelings limits our ability to know ourselves, develop priorities, and can lead to chronic anxiety and / or depression(5)**.

Experiencing relational trauma can also leave us with conflicting feelings about close relationships – we may want relationships but also feel scared or untrusting of them. Intimacy, closeness, connection, trust, and vulnerability can become inaccessible – until we recover from the trauma (which can be done in therapy, or in a series of safe, trusting, and healing relationships).

Notes:

Trauma is an incredibly complex, sensitive, and important topic. Quite frankly, I’m intimidated taking it on in a post because I know I cannot succinctly discuss it in a way that truly represents its scope, impact, and complexity – even over multiple posts. There are incredible books, researchers, therapists, and talks on this topic and I will do my best to be a bridge to those resources so you can learn more about this. If you are interested in getting started now “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk is an excellent introduction. Though he focuses on Capital T trauma much of what he writes about applies to relational trauma as well.
Sometimes we endure relational trauma from care givers who love us deeply and who we love, and who we may otherwise have good relationships with except for those difficult moments. Those caregivers are often trying their best and well meaning, but are not sure how to handle big feelings or big problems themselves. These are not necessarily “bad” parents or caregivers, though they may not have been able to give us what we needed developmentally in some of these more intense moments. They can be incredibly loving and effective parents in other moments. Sometimes these are caregivers who THEMSELVES experienced relational trauma and have not recovered from it, so are unable to help themselves (or the kids around them) effectively manage these difficult moments. If you endured relational trauma it doesn’t mean your parents were bad parents. If you think you may have inflicted some relational trauma it doesn’t mean you are a bad parent AND there is an opportunity to change patterns and work to heal all involved parties.
For help on parenting in ways that will not create relational trauma look into Big Little Feelings. They offer a $99 course, as well as free tips on their instagram page for parents and caregivers (friendly reminder, I am in no way connected to them or profiting off their course – it’s just plain old helpful material).
Like most everything else in this world relational trauma exists on a spectrum, meaning just a little can effect us a little and more frequent or intense experiences can effect us a lot.
Chronically burying or hiding away feelings can limit our ability to find long term happiness. See “Emotions as Traffic Signals” for more information.
For tips on how to deconstruct moments in which relational trauma may have been stirred up see “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.
The David Wallin book I reference is called “attachment in psychotherapy”. It was published in 2007 by the Guilford Press (NY, NY). The quote is from page 245 and is in reference to chapter five of the book Healing Trauma: attachment, mind, body, and brain”. That chapter was authored by Francine Shapiro and Louise Mayfield, and the book was edited by Marion Solomon and Daniel Seigel and published by Norton (of NY) in 2003. Formal Citation: Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

April 23, 2021March 27, 2023

Emotions as Traffic Signals

While “bad” feelings don’t feel as nice, they are actually incredibly important tools to help us find long term happiness
What if, instead of trying not to have negative emotions, we could learn to embrace them just as we do positive ones?
Negative emotions, like positive emotions, are signals to us about what does and doesn’t work for us
The trouble is sometimes we don’t feel the way we think we “should” feel in a scenario, and so we often want to push our feelings away.
Or, sometimes negative emotions are just plain hard to feel and hold on to because we’ve gotten so used to not feeling them and we don’t like how they feel.
We want to try and work towards connecting with our negative emotions in a sustainable way.
Negative emotions can teach us about what we value (sadness when we experience a loss), when we’ve made a mis-step (guilt), when we feel wronged or betrayed and need to protect ourselves (anger).
Without working on learning how to approach and tolerate these feelings we are vulnerable to missing important cues about what can make our lives better.
See post and comments for how this is different if we are depressed or anxious.

A common request I get in treatment, “You’re going to help me get rid of my bad feelings, right?”. It makes sense. Feeling good feels good and feeling bad feels bad. But, that’s not how it works OR how we want it to work.

Think of your emotions like a traffic signal that help you get to know your authentic self (meaning your personal beliefs, preferences, likes, dislikes, interests, values, and limits. See comments for more).

We are not capable of long-term and sustainable happiness if we are not in touch with our authentic selves, so learning to accept all your feelings is an important step in the process of having more positive feelings overall.

Red light emotions make us stop and signal to us that something isn’t quite right. Those include anger, sadness, guilt, shame, embarrassment – and most other emotions you might lump in the “bad” category.

Green light emotions are a signal to move closer to something. Those include joy, pride, satisfaction, hope, interest – and most other emotions you might lump into the “good” category.

Whenever we feel an emotion we are offered an opportunity to pause, reflect, understand, and learn. Examples of some of those lessons are in today’s comments.

Unfortunately, many of us struggle to tolerate the experience of feeling our negative emotions because they feel bad, we don’t like them, and most of us don’t have practice in accepting them. There is a sweet spot between feeling them “enough” to make sense of them, and stewing in them (or overwhelming ourselves with them). Finding that personal sweet spot can take some practice.

When we we’re depressed we’re often so over-run with negative feelings (they’re on overdrive) that they can be difficult to process through or make sense of. Sometimes we feel numb or don’t really feel anything at all. If either of those describes you that’s a sign to consider professional help from a therapist. See comments for more.

So, although you may be tempted to push away negative emotions, try to work towards seeing them as your teacher and your guide. This is best done once you are out of the throes of the negative emotion – sometimes just getting through is all you can do in the moment.

Notes:

Think about what each emotion signals to you. Some examples below for the purpose of some of our most common emotions.
When we feel anger we’ve received a signal we feel wronged, betrayed, or exploited in some way. We can learn from these situations and work to protect ourselves so we are not repeatedly in situations where we feel taken advantage of.
When we feel sad we’ve received a signal we feel the loss of something important or valued to us. Knowing what we value and working towards finding that in our lives (in other ways beyond the loss we just endured) offers us the opportunity to make more and more meaningful experiences moving forward. Sadness also helps us know and recognize how important something or someone was to us (which means we can sometimes feel surprised when we didn’t realize it until we lost it).
When we feel guilt we’ve received a signal that we’ve made a mistep. This signal helps us know when to make a mends, and helps us protect our sense of integrity and self respect.
When we feel fear we’ve received a signal that there is something to be afraid of. We want to work towards finding safety and security for ourselves.
When we feel joy we’ve found something that brings us pleasure. We want to (responsibly) keep that in our lives in a way that’s sustainable with other goals and priorities.
When we feel pride in ourselves or others we’ve received a signal that we or someone important to us has accomplished something of significance.
I mention your “authentic self” in the post. Many of us are confused about our authentic self because culturally, societally, and sometimes by our families we’ve been given messages about how we “should” feel, what we “should” think, and what “should” be important to us. These messages, some of which are well intentioned can confuse our ability to be in touch with how we actually feel, what we actually think and believe, where our limits actually are, and what is actually important to us. I talk about this further in my post on judgments and in my post on “should’s vs wants”.
Anxiety and depression can heighten emotions, and sometimes we can feel intense guilt, sadness, or fear that is not in proportion to the situation we are in or how we authentically feel about something. Feeling a lot of guilt CAN mean you really did something you feel is wrong, or it can mean your emotion is on over drive. While we can still learn from these emotions, the strength of the emotion does not directly match the strength of the lesson. Often times when we are anxious or depressed it’s not that there’s no reason for the feelings we are having, it’s that we don’t understand the reason – and the process of finding the reason can take a lot of reflecting and professional help. We also may need to learn when to listen to emotions and when to to challenge emotions, and figuring out when to do which is a complex process that is best done with a professional.
The premise of this post is that our emotions serve a function; we have them for a reason. Inside Out, the Pixar Movie is a great introduction to this concept, and explores how all of our emotions (including anger and sadness) serve functional and useful purposes for us. If you’re wrestling with this idea, or looking to introduce it to a child, consider watching the movie.

April 20, 2021March 27, 2023

Understanding “Know your Limits”

“Know your limits”, you’ve been told. But what does that mean?
We are often given this advice without any direction as to how to do this, and many of us are operating outside of our limits without awareness
Signs you might be outside your limits: Irritability, anger, resentment towards others, a desire for someone to rescue you from having to acknowledge a limit you may may not want to be a limit.
Sometimes it’s more like a shutting down where we retreat away. Sometimes you may find yourself avoiding.
Many of us hit limits faster when we are tired, hungry, in pain, or scared for our safety (including both immediate threatening dangers, and more subtle /ongoing / systemic dangers, like feeling unable to provide for our families or feeling unsafe in our communities).
We don’t always get to determine our behavior based on where our limits are, but it’s always helpful to know when you’ve hit a limit so you can take steps to take care of yourself and pause (when possible) important decisions and activities
If you read this post and find that you are in this type of place a lot of the time / most of the time consider getting professional help, you may be struggling with anxiety or depression.

“Know your limits.” An easy piece of advice to give, and often a hard piece of advice to enact, especially if you haven’t had role models who knew and respected their limits, and who taught you how to do the same.

If you are someone who has a hard time with recognizing and respecting your limits (and you may not know this is you until you read further) it may help to consider that they may not be where you want them to be, or believe they “should” be.

Sometimes accepting our limits requires making sacrifices.

We can work towards developing awareness of our personal cues that we’ve passed our limits. It can look at feel different for everyone, so this will have to be a personal journey for each person to identify their particular signs. Here are some tips to help you get started on working towards learning where your limits are.

For many of us we get irritable or “snap”. We might say things we regret or start thinking repeated thoughts that are hard to stop (called ruminating), about how upset we are with ourselves or other people.

For others of us we shut down, fall asleep, zone out, or numb out.

Sometimes we look for someone to rescue us so that we don’t have to acknowledge a limit that we wish were not a limit, “maybe she’ll break up with me so I don’t have to”, “maybe I’ll just get fired so it could be over”, “If only he cleaned all this up then I could take a break”.

Sometimes it looks like tunnel vision where it becomes hard for us to problem solve or see the big picture. We can get fixated on one particular perspective or solution when we’re in this mindset.

If you feel the way I’ve described more often than not this is a cue that you may be depressed or anxious. I’d encourage you to seek out professional help.

We don’t always get to determine our behavior based on our limits, but we can work towards recognizing when we’re “not really here” so that we can hold off on important tasks or decisions, take breaks, ask for help, or at a minimum work on taking a few deep breaths and coaching ourselves through a difficult time.

—
Notes:

Helpful questions to ask: “Is my behavior and thinking in line with how I genuinely feel, my values, and my priorities?” Do I feel like my emotions are out of control?”
This post has connections to other posts I’ve written, specifically: we hit our limits more easily if our shoulds outweigh our wants, we can look out for increasing internalizing or externalizing when we’ve hit a limit, and we want to offer ourselves compassion as we work towards the process of learning what our limits are and learning how to accept and honor them.
Realizing you’ve hit a limit and aren’t sure what to say to others if you need a moment or to return to an important topic? How about “I need a minute”, “I’m not feeling well, I’m going to need to bow out”, “Can we circle back to this? I’m having trouble thinking through this right now”, “ok, I’m putting myself in a time out, I’ll be back in a bit”.
This is not about perfection. No one can be perfectly “available” at all times, but the idea here is to work towards building that awareness of when we really don’t have it in us to be mostly there in a way that aligns with our values, our priorities, and with capacity to manage our feelings.

April 15, 2021March 27, 2023

For Every Action there is an Equal and Opposite Reaction

What if no one is ever “over-reacting”? What if our strong emotions are reasonable reactions to the moment we are in, as well as other moments and experiences that preceded it?
When we tell ourselves or others we are “over-reacting” we shift the focus from what may be causing the reaction to how big the reaction is.
We want to learn from big strong feelings, and while we need to be able to manage them, we can’t learn from them when we push them away or deny them.
Ongoing emotional suppression (pushing emotions down) and invalidation (denying them) have big risks – they can contribute to anxiety and depression.
When faced with strong emotions, try approaching them with curiosity, even if you don’t like or agree with them.
This means acknowledging, but then temporarily setting aside that part of yourself that wants to say, “but wait! this doesn’t make any sense! This is ridiculous!”
This curiosity and willingness to understand our emotions will make it more likely we can learn and grow from these experiences – and take care of ourselves and others before blow-ups and melt-downs happen.

When faced with powerful emotions – our own, or others – it’s tempting to say we (or others) are “over-reacting”. Unfortunately, when we respond in this way we not only invalidate (deny) the emotions, but we also reduce our ability to understand what may be behind the reaction. Repeated experiences of invalidation and emotional suppression can heighten anxiety and depression

But! There is another way we can engage with these moments that improves self-awareness / partner – awareness, connection, and decreases the likelihood of repeated conflict or ongoing internal struggle

First we must make some basic assumptions internally before engaging with what’s happened (and yes, you really must buy into these points for you to truly be curious rather than critical).

1) Let’s assume the big reaction comes from a valid place even if we think this reaction is stronger than what the situation calls for

2) Let’s remember that at any given time all of us are responding to whatever happened immediately to spark a reaction (also called a trigger), as well as a lifetime of other experiences that preceded this moment and that may be informing how we respond

(A key point: Even though our feelings are valid, how we express them can be problematic. Just because it “comes from a valid place” it doesn’t mean we don’t want to work towards changing how those big reactions come out or or processed within us)

Next, we introduce as much curiosity as possible to try and understand what has happened. We cannot truly be curious if we are still invested in the idea that “this was too much”, so keep coming back to those assumptions until you really buy in

The KEY here is to move away from invalidating by saying or thinking “this has been blown out of proportion”, “you’re just being crazy”, “you’re over-reacting”, etc to a mindset of curiosity and trust, “something’s really gotten stirred up here, let’s try and get to the bottom of it”

Once we REALLY understand it, then we can address it and maybe even solve for it, but until that understanding happens we’ll be having the same internal struggles or the same fight over and over again with our partner, self, relative or friend

Notes:

Pro tip – wait until emotions have calmed before trying to dive into being curious about them
Pro tip – this really only works with a (mostly) mature adult brain (brains reach maturity in our 20s). I.e. This exact version of coping is not suited for kids and some adolescents, though there are versions of this you can bring to your relationships with your children. See @biglittlefeelings and @janetlansbury or read Daniel Siegal’s whole brain child for more info on young kids and how to approach their big feelings in a productive way
Sample questions to help promote curiosity. This is a great journaling exercise or topic to think through on a walk. *Can you name what you’re feeling? (You are probably feeling more than one thing). Try and lay all the feelings out. It doesn’t matter if it feels conflicting or doesn’t make any sense. *Have you felt this way before? In what other kinds of situations? Lay those out too. Is there a link you see between this past situation and the current one? (i.e. do reactions like this tend to happen more when you feel lonely, unheard, misunderstood, exhausted, etc)? *Does your reaction feel linked to anything else going on in your life at this time, or in past relationships? Let your mind wander a bit, it doesn’t have to “fit” or “make sense” at first. Sometimes we only see these connections after we’ve laid them out and sat with them for a while.