- 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.