DBT Archives - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

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).

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.

January 13, 2022March 27, 2023

One Mindfully

A simple, but transformative skill: learning how to be fully and wholly present in just one moment at a time.
Learning “one mindfully” (as we call it in the DBT world) can reduce anxiety, improve concentration, increase our ability to handle a crisis, increase our ability to connect to our authentic selves, and increase our efficiency.
The opposite of this concept is “mindlessness” (not fully being present with any activity – i.e. “going on autopilot”) or multi-tasking (attempting to do two activities at the same time).
The most common way many of us “multi-task” is something most of us would not identify as multi-tasking: Thinking about one thing while doing another.
Like the time you were in a meeting but actually preoccupied by the conflict you had the night before. Or, when you were writing an email while thinking about how to prepare for something later in the day.
When we use one-mindfully we work to be present with our whole selves, which means paying attention to the content of the moment while also paying attention to internal cues about our experience of that moment.
We set an intention for what we will focus our attention and energy on, and we work to keep ourselves focused on that intention despite urges to split our attention, or give in to distraction.
This does not mean that we cannot choose to change where spend our energy and attention or that we have to completely finish before shifting our attention; it means that when we change what we are doing (and where we are focusing) we do so with intention and awareness, even if we are right in the middle of something.
This also does not mean we cannot transition quickly between tasks (think about cooking: you are chopping the carrots, then stopping to stir the onions). We can be wholly present with one activity while another in the background does not have our attention.
This skill centers us, and requires that we recommit again and again to what we will spend our energy on in the face of distractions. It also requires that we reassess as time goes on to determine if we want to continue recommitting to that moment, or to changing where our focus will be.

Most of us struggle fairly significantly with “doing” one thing at a time. This is because many of us are “doing” one thing, but thinking about another. In this way, we’ve become accustomed to leaving the present moment for one in the past, one in the future, or one that may never happen. When we do this we reduce our ability to concentrate by dividing our attention. We also decrease the likelihood we will pick up on important cues from the environment around us; when we are distracted we are not able to be as perceptive.

In simple terms this skill is “doing” one thing at a time, but more complexly it is devoting your attention and energy to only one “thing” at a time. As Marsha Linehan says, this means, “When you are thinking, think. When you are worrying, worry. When you are planning, plan. When you are remembering, remember. Do each thing with all of your attention”. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and Marsha Linehan, would encourage all of us to spend as much time as possible being wholly present with whatever moment we are engaged in.

Many of us are spending large chunks of our time distracted, and not present in both mind and body in whatever moment we are in. To be wholly and fully present means paying attention to your outer world (i.e. the conversation you are in) and your inner world (your internal reactions to that conversation in your thinking, feeling, and sensing). Although it sounds simple enough, it is actually a lot of input to pay attention to at any given point in time and takes some practice straddling both your inner and outer worlds simultaneously.

One-Mindfully can be a powerful grounding and centering tool because it focuses us simply on the moment we are in. A common treatment for trauma, anxiety, and depression is learning how to be in and stay in the present. Like any new skill, I encourage folks to try this first in “low stress” situations (i.e. ones that are not likely to incite a lot of activation in your inner world) before high stress situations (i.e. ones where you expect to have a lot of thoughts, intense feelings, or intense sensations).

See comments for more on this skill including ideas for how to implement it today.

Comments:

Often, I see this struggle to be “one mindful” in the way many of us manage our relationships with our computers during the workday. Does this sound familiar: “You’re writing an email and you get a pop-up notification that you’ve gotten a calendar invite. Without even thinking you stop writing the email, review / accept the calendar invite, and then try to return to your email. But wait, now you lost where you were and so you re-read your last sentence, get back in the mindset of the the response and boom, an instant message comes in asking you if you saw the most recent email from so-and-so about this-thing or that-thing. So you scroll to the top of your inbox and read the email, respond to the instant message but wait now you can’t find that email you just had opened. Ok, you found it. But wait what were you saying, and ok now there is only 5 minutes left before the next thing on your calendar and somehow you haven’t gotten to that response yet. Now you feel this anxious pressure to get it out, but you are also aware this isn’t the quality response you wanted to send out so now you have to decide if it’s more important to get it out quickly or thoughtfully…etc”. Multiply that experience throughout your day and your day ends with you feeling frazzled, unproductive, behind, like you’ve missed a bunch of things and like you’ve been ping-ponging around all day. And that’s because you have! All those notifications are very stimulating and they are prime ways in which we forget to insert that intentionality into our decision about where we spend our time and attention when we are with our devices. One low-stress way to start trying to introduce this skill into your life is by bringing thoughtfulness to what notifications you need on, and how you respond to those notifications when they are on. As Marsha Linehan might say, “When you are writing an email, write the email.” If you find you are tempted to be distracted by your phone turn it over or put it on silence. If you are expecting to hear from someone important while you write, work to make yourself accessible in a way that will not distract you (i.e. ask them to call you, or silence texts from other people except that one person). Setting up a routine that enables a mindful perspective can take some work, but it should help improve concentration and productivity and leave you feeling better at the end of the day.
Back when therapy was always in an office you were forced to take a one-mindful perspective with your session. You didn’t have a screen, or your phone handy and the temptations to engage with something outside the content of the session were much less accessible. If you are doing remote based therapy try and re-create the in-office experience as much as possible by eliminating the possibility of something outside of the session distracting you away from being fully in the session.
If you are someone who commonly multi-tasks or operates in a “mindless” manner, it will take time time and deliberate practice to bring a more “one-mindful” stance to how you spend your time. For tips on how to bring this concept to your life at a pace that works for you, see my post on how to sustainably make long-term changes.
This concept / skill is kind of like living your life in real time meditation, albeit a meditation where you are responsive to your environment. Like our meditative practice, your mission throughout is to regularly bringing your attention back to your chosen focal point. For an introduction to meditation, and this concept of returning to a chosen focal point, see my introduction to meditation post (which has more direct parallels to today’s post), and my post on general meditation.
Sometimes we find that we can’t control our attention. That’s ok. No one is perfect at this. Sometimes we are coping best by accepting what is not within our control, and often times what is out of our control is content of our inner worlds. (If you struggle with this concept this post on acceptance might help). This can mean the thought, feeling, sensation, or external circumstance arising is too distracting or powerful to redirect yourself from (i.e. you just got news of something upsetting and of course you can’t focus on your previous intention). At that time, it can be helpful to view that as a cue that you need to switch your attention over for a period of time, even if you don’t want to. A powerful way in which you can stop ruminating (when you can’t stop thinking about something) is to set a timer for ten minutes, and just be with the worry. After ten minutes, when the timer goes off, you may find it’s easier to redirect your attention back to a different focal point. After ten minutes of really fully devoting yourself to it (instead of having it simmer in the back of your thoughts for hours at a time where you ping pong between thinking about that and all the other things in your day) you may have found a solution, or exhausted all the different ways you can think or worry about something, but either way it’s more likely to feel less pressing. There are other skills to combat intrusive worries for another day.
Regarding the idea of perfection – it is not realistic (or even the goal) to exclusively live in a “one mindfully” stance. Sometimes we do want or need to split our attention and that’s OK. The key is to selectively and with awareness choose to do so, and to use one mindfully with more important tasks.
A little more on identifying and understanding multi-tasking. There are three ways of multi-tasking: attempting to do one activity while you think about another activity (sitting in your meeting and thinking about that conversation you had last night), attempting to think about two things at the same time (going through the grocery list while you try and plan out that email to your boss), or attempting to do two things at the same time (talking to your friend and scrolling on your phone). A one-mindful perspective would encourage you to limit each as much as possible.
If you find yourself regularly tempted to split your attention or “zone out” start trying to pay attention and get curious about it. Sometimes there is a lot we can learn about what we are trying to distance ourselves from when we pull our full attention away in these ways.
Marsha Linehan’s skills, including one-mindfully, are outlined in full in her skills training manual and associated skills training workbooks.

August 23, 2021March 27, 2023

No One Creates All the Problems in Their Life…

If something affects you, bothers you, or creates problems for you, it’s yours to participate in fixing, even if you didn’t create it or it’s not “your” fault.
Some of us are given the tremendous advantage of having the majority of our physical, social, emotional, and financial needs met from an early age. Most of us are not.
When we don’t have those needs met it can effect our ability to trust, connect, hold boundaries, be vulnerable with others, and be in touch with our inner world in a productive way.
Regardless, the accountability and responsibility lies within each of us to do what is in our power to move towards creating the life we want to have.
For many of us that can mean “cleaning up” after early formative experiences you didn’t have control over, but that have shaped you into being a person who has developed dynamics or patterns that create problems in your life moving forward.
Those dynamics and patterns become our responsibility to manage and deal with as we go through our lives, even if they were formed because of experiences we didn’t create
Many of us can get stuck in the in-between of “it affected me” but “I didn’t cause it”, leaving us in a passive or helpless place wishing for someone else to “clean up”, “deal with”, or tolerate some dynamic within us.
While, there is validity in the feelings of fear, anger, loss, and sadness that are tied to how unfair a situation may be, those feelings are your responsibility to work through so they don’t interfere with your ability to move towards creating the life you want to lead
No one creates all of the problems in their life; regardless each of us is responsible for dealing with them anyways.
With this mindset we can be the victim of something, but not a casualty of it

According to Dialectal Behavior Therapy we are ultimately the ones responsible for participating in our lives in a way that brings us meaning, joy, and satisfaction. Our ability to connect, relate, trust, share, hold boundaries, be vulnerable, and be productively connected to our thoughts and feelings is hugely shaped by our early relationships, relationships we have at a time when we don’t get to choose who we are around. For some of us, those relationships and that environment provide a ripe and fertile ground for healthy and safe development. Most of us, however, hit some “snags” along the way and struggle on some level with the dynamics just listed.

Those “snags” are our responsibility, even if we didn’t participate in creating them. For example, your difficulty with vulnerability becomes your responsibility, even if you were the victim of earlier experiences that made being vulnerable inaccessible.

DBT encourages each of us to hold our end goals, values, and priorities in mind, and to do what we need to – and can do (there will be limits here) to get ourselves in the life we want to lead. This does not mean “what happens” in your life is your sole responsibility. There are far too many external forces at play for that to be possible. What it does mean is the roadblocks you hit are yours to work through, regardless of how they got there.

For some of us we run into a thought traps around a fairness or a “who caused it” mindset. We can come to believe because a “mess” or “problem” in our life wasn’t created or initiated by us it isn’t our responsibility to participate in dealing with. We can get so focused on “who created it” or “how it got there” that we become distracted, helpless, and more focused on what is outside of our control (the choices someone else made) than what could be within our control (how we cope, manage, or can grow as a result of an experience).

There is validity in the unfairness or the bitterness felt around cleaning up a problem you didn’t create. Own, accept, process and work through those feelings rather than let them stop you from focusing on your growth and your goals.

Notes:

This perspective would most certainly acknowledge that some of us have more work to do than others because of factors totally outside of our control. That’s unfair. But it’s reality, and for us to be able to have the life we want its our work to do.
This does not mean there is no point to working to make the world and our society / culture a more fair place. What it does mean is that we don’t want the unfairness of something to create passivity in us that stops us in our tracks and strips us from working towards what is meaningful and important to us as individuals. What this principle says is that it may be unfair, but you are ultimately the one that suffers if you let that stop you or hold you back.
This perspective would also not say that “if we are unhappy it is our fault”, however it would say if we are unhappy we want to be on the lookout for ways in which we may also be struggling with passivity or helplessness in certain areas that may be interfering with our ability to improve our circumstances. For some, a lot more energy is focused on “who started it”. While is helpless to bring insight and awareness into how something developed, if we stop there we are at a stalemate of helplessness.
I can appreciate some may be reading this and thinking about it through the lens of community or systemic factors that have a huge impact on wellbeing (think gangs, gun violence, etc). This principle is much more about helping an individual challenge patterns of helplessness or passivity that may be keeping them stuck than it is about how to effect change on a much larger system (like a community). It is worth noting that the systems we are in have a huge impact on our wellbeing, happiness, and health and the more privilege we have the more able we are to minimize the impact of those systemic forces. If you read the post thinking more about larger systemic forces I’d encourage you to go back and re-read it through the lens of the individual.
Unsure why you’d want to be in touch with your inner world? See this post on Emotional Blocking, and this post on how our emotions are like traffic signals.
Helplessness and passivity are often NATURAL and HEALTHY reactions to environments where we don’t have control. If you struggle with these dynamics know that you may be applying a tactic that used to work in one life scenario in a way that no longer serves you. See Your Brain as An Association Machine for more information on how this can happen.
Elements of this post may be confusing for someone that identifies as “co-dependent”, given the lack of clear boundaries I am describing. If this is you, think about this through the lens of how you can “fix” by focusing on what is within your internal world or scope of control rather than how you can “fix” by working to change another person.

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 .