Home Psychology How to calm your inner storm (Part-II)

How to calm your inner storm (Part-II)

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How to calm your inner storm (Part-II)

Most people learn how to regulate their emotions when they’re growing up. But for some, the strategies they adopt are unhealthy or unhelpful.

By Sheri Van Dijk

Key points – How to calm your inner storm

Emotions serve a purpose, even when they are distressing. They provide information about situations, motivate action, and send messages to others. Through emotion regulation, we manage emotions without making them go away.

Emotion dysregulation is when you struggle to manage emotions in a healthy way. Everyone gets dysregulated at times. Frequent dysregulation is a factor in many mental health problems, including mood and anxiety disorders.

Try some quick-fix ideas to re-regulate. When emotions are intense, doing a forward bend or paced breathing (counting your exhale so it’s longer than your inhale) can calm you a bit so you can figure out what to do next.

Increase awareness of your emotions. Many people struggle to clearly grasp and name what they feel. Practice this by asking what triggered an emotion, and what you thought, noticed in your body, and did or felt an urge to do.

Reduce the intensity of emotions by ‘acting opposite’. If an emotion is getting in your way, identify what it’s urging you to do and do the reverse

Validate your emotions. Accepting what you are feeling, rather than judging yourself for it, can prevent extra emotional pain. It can help to write and revisit statements such as ‘It’s okay that I feel ___ right now’.

Reduce the intensity of emotions by ‘acting opposite’. If an emotion is getting in your way, identify what it’s urging you to do and do the reverse – for example, wanting to say something hurtful and acting civilly instead.

Learn more

In this section, I’m going to describe two more DBT exercises for managing emotions, for those interested in exploring further.

States of mind

When dealing with emotion dysregulation, one skill that everyone I work with finds helpful is the ‘states of mind’ exercise, which describes how we all have three different modes of thinking that we use to different degrees. Our reasonable mind consists of logic and facts – in this state, it’s hard to access our emotions, or we avoid or push them away. In our emotional mind, emotions control our behaviors – in this state, it’s hard to access reasoning. Finally, our wise mind combines our reasoning and emotion with our values, and a consideration of possible courses of action and consequences. Together, these culminate in that internal sense of knowing or wisdom we all have.

Often we need to work more consciously to get to our wise mind

While our wise mind is that balanced perspective we want to be able to access more often, it’s important to understand that the reasonable mind and the emotional mind are also helpful, and we’re not trying to get rid of them. We need to be able to think logically at times, without emotion getting in our way. Equally, our emotions serve a purpose and, while painful at times, they can help us and connect us to others. The emotional mind also includes pleasurable emotions, which we certainly don’t want to miss out on.

But often we need to work more consciously to get to our wise mind. By the way, if the idea of a wise mind seems foreign to you, rest assured that you do have one – we all do. Think of a recent time when you had a strong feeling urging you to do something, but you didn’t follow that urge: instead of staying in bed and calling in sick to work, you pushed yourself to get up and shower; or when you had an urge to lash out at someone in anger, you bit your tongue and did your best not to judge. These are examples of acting from your wise mind: you feel the emotion, but you don’t let it control you.

One way to conjure up your wise mind is to imagine you’re dealing with a crisis, whatever that might look like for you: perhaps you and your partner are fighting so much you’re considering separating; or you’ve just lost your job; or you’ve just received bad news about a loved one. Now imagine a person you know who embodies the idea of wisdom: this could be someone in your life now or from your past, or someone you look up to, such as a famous person or someone in your community. Next, closing your eyes, imagine what that person would say to you in this difficult time; and allow yourself to sit with that for a few moments, really feeling the experience in your body as best as you can. Hearing their words and tone of voice, maybe you can even experience the sense of being hugged if that’s comforting for you. This is you tapping into your wise mind.

Don’t worry if you struggled with this – it can be a hard thing to do when you’ve spent so much of your life in the other states of mind, so sometimes it just takes practice. Or you could try a slightly different approach: rather than envisioning your wise person addressing you, you could imagine what you might say to someone you really care about in a crisis – and then see if you can turn those words back to yourself. It’s often much easier to be someone else’s wise mind.

Nonjudgmental stance

I’d like to leave you with the skill of nonjudgmental stance, which is really helpful for most humans, but especially for those struggling with intense emotions. This is a skill that’s about the language we use – whether we’re just thinking to ourselves or saying the words out loud – and how those words can actually cause us extra emotional pain.

Judgments are quite pervasive for many of us. Think about your thoughts for a moment: are you judging this Guide as ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Those are judgments. Right and wrong – judgments. Ridiculous, awful, crazy, mean, weird… we grow up hearing these judgments all around us, and most of us continue this cycle of judging – ourselves, others, and situations.

Here’s an exercise for you to try: I’m going to give you some words to say or think to yourself; don’t worry if this isn’t something you’d normally say to yourself, I’m just trying to help you get a sense of what this skill is about. So do your best to mean these words as you say them to yourself: ‘I’m lazy.’ Repeat it: ‘I’m lazy.’ Try to mean it (for some people, that won’t be hard, I know). Now, notice the emotion that goes along with that – can you name it? For instance, you might notice shame or guilt; perhaps disappointment or even anger toward yourself. If not, don’t worry, see if you can focus instead on how it feels in your body: is it heavy? Light? Hot or cold? Just pay attention for a moment.

The word ‘lazy’ is a judgment, and usually when we’re judging we’re creating more emotional pain for ourselves. The idea with being nonjudgmental is to take out the judgmental words and replace them with the facts of the situation (for example: ‘I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to do today’), and with our actual emotions (such as ‘… and I feel frustrated with myself’).

So try this: do the same exercise we just did, but using different, nonjudgmental words. Instead of ‘I’m lazy’ (the judgment), think the following words, filling in the blank with the emotion that fits best for you (note that emotions are not judgments, they’re how we feel about the situation): ‘I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to do today, and I feel ___________ (e.g., ‘guilty’ or ‘frustrated with myself’). Repeat it. Notice how this feels, labelling the emotion if you can, noticing it in your body. Was there a difference for you between the first, judgmental statement and the second, nonjudgmental one? If so, what was it? If there was no difference, it could be that the words really didn’t resonate for you; but hopefully you can see how this is different: most people experience a stronger emotional reaction with the judgmental statement ‘I’m lazy’. Being nonjudgmental, as in the second statement, doesn’t take the emotion away, but neither does it add fuel to the emotional fire. That’s the point of being nonjudgmental.

For most, this is a difficult skill to wrap our heads around. Judgments often happen very automatically and without our awareness, so it will take some practice just to start noticing and labelling them as they arise. Sometimes it’s hard to even figure out what’s a judgment and what’s not: one trick for this is to ask yourself if this is a word that you ever use in a neutral way. Once you notice the judgment, you might be able to just let it go (which is sometimes more doable with judgments that don’t trigger so much emotional pain); or you might choose to change the judgment to a nonjudgmental statement, as we did in the previous exercise. Over time, you’ll become more aware of those judgments, and be more able to change them, and this will help you manage your emotions more effectively. If you’d like to do some more work on this, check out some further reading and a worksheet that I use with clients.

My goal in this article was to give you a taste of DBT skills that will help you manage your emotions. If you’re interested in learning more, or perhaps feeling frustrated because other therapies haven’t been so helpful for you, take a look at the resources below. There are many ways to learn how to calm the emotional storm, no matter how long you’ve been struggling. I wish you the best of luck. (Concludes)

____________________

Sheri Van Dijkis a psychotherapist, author and international speaker. Her books include Calming the Emotional Storm (2012) and Don’t Let Your Emotions Run Your Life for Teens (2011). She has 14 years’ experience working in an outpatient mental health clinic in a community hospital, and now works full-time at her private practice in Newmarket, Ontario.

Courtesy: Psyche (Received through email on Dec 14, 2022)

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