DBT Skills Emotion Regulation | Counselor Toolbox Podcast with Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes

This episode is pre-recorded as part of a live, on-demand continuing education webinar. CEUs are still available for this presentation by registering at allCEUs.com/

counselor

toolbox

I would like to welcome everyone to today's presentation dialectical behavior therapy techniques

emotion

regulation

We will begin by reviewing the basic premises of DBT and why The one we do is we're going to do it first because our

emotion

al

regulation

obviously starts from the beginning, but we want to see what the theory is for a lot of what we're going to talk about, we're going to learn about the HPA axis, and it's not something that that Linehan talks about in DBT, but it is important to understand what will define our physiological responses to stress, emotional regulation. identify why emotion regulation is important and how it can help clients themselves, yada-yada, and finally we will explore some techniques for emotion regulation, there are things besides just pr.

By offering vulnerabilities, we can offer clients help regulating their emotions before moving on to stress tolerance

skills

and activities, so the basic premises of DBT come together when you wake up in the morning when you're having a bad day. you are not sleeping well your back hurts now you are in a bad mood you have a lot of things to do it is raining outside you know yadda yadda yadda you notice everything negative your thoughts may be more negative you are more likely to notice the negative, it is more likely that what we usually call bad attitude, if you start to have a better attitude, what happens to what you observe, and we will talk about this shortly, while reality is not static, which is now true in the present. currently possibly not true;

You know the future was what the present was half a second ago, so reality changes when we look at a situation when we look at an event, how do I look at myself and how do I react? How I feel about the situation right now, you know we can learn to change where we are, but with the information I currently have, an ever-evolving truth can be found by synthesizing different points of view because most of the time, as humans, It's just a part of being human, we don't have the whole picture, and I did the best with this little graph, think about this if you want to see some of PJ's experiments when egocentrism wanted to demonstrate when we look at this yin and yang type of model the girls keep the figure, what do you see?

If you ask him what color this orb is, he'll probably say black because we assume he sees the black side when we see this little chunky one. He asks the figure model here what color the orb is. she sees on the white side so he would say white now if we see a slightly confused guy standing on the third side or the south side he sees both and hears a stick figure girl say he's black go to a stick figure boy says he's white and okay; It's good that you can put both perspectives together and find out that it is an orb that has various colors, although she can't necessarily see the colors and he can't necessarily see the colors, so BBT says: let's try to see if there are blind spots, if there are things that we don't see or things we haven't met the basic assumptions of DBT, and people do the best we can if we didn't think we probably wouldn't be in this profession. for people to do the best with the tools they have and the knowledge they have at any given time, and of course I added that more people want to get better and most are happy people who don't want to be miserable if it looks like they're not doing it. t If we don't want to get better, then we have to ask ourselves what is the benefit of staying miserable, why is it scarier, more threatening and worse to get better or be happy? and that is one of the motivations.

I'm not going to go into that today, but in general people are going to choose the most rewarding option if it turns out that several options are good, this is one area where I disagree: the official statement is that clients have to work harder and be more motivated to make changes in their lives. I've had many clients that have finished their head but they may not have the right tools, it's like unscrewing something from a Phillips head with the butter knife, they work really hard but it doesn't get anywhere because they don't get traction, so I've put more pressure on work and I tend to replace it with smarter work, clients need to work smarter, they need to have more tools, more effective tools and some of the tools they have can be really great if we just adjust them. a little, sharpen oil and put everything you need and they are more motivated to make changes in their life and say that they are in treatment.

We got here for a reason, so why aren't they motivated to make changes again? Well, back to motivation, which is the most rewarding option if they've tried to make changes before and it didn't work, and they were told it was their fault for resisting, or you know they were somehow to blame, or they were just taken off the hook. power, which would motivate them to try again, please let me run the gauntlet again, most people don't want to do it. So we need to help customers work smarter, understand that they work hard and what they need to continue doing that, and we'll help them get more effective tools and we need to help them get more motivated, we need to help them.

I see this time it will be different, maybe a little different, but this time we try something new, it may be different, even if people haven't solved their problems, they still have to solve them, yes, if you grew up. Being in a dysfunctional home you did not create the problem, but today it affects you negatively, so you will have to fix it if you want to be happy, which of course is the goal of the lives of suicidal or addicted people, they are unbearable and when Speaking of DBT, Generally we are talking about people who are very emotionally reactive and suicidal.

The behavior disappears at this point where they are trying to figure out what an intolerable situation is like in their primary addiction. It gives them some relief from something that they feel they have no control over people, learning to live skillfully in all areas of their life, yes, because each area is interconnected, if you are really stressed at work, you just leave work. at home and you are no longer stressed, it doesn't work that way; It would be great if it were, but it simply isn't, even if you don't take all the stress home, it has had a huge impact on your energy, so when you get home you are more susceptible to emotional distress. or just falling asleep on the couch at 6:00, whatever, so we need to help people learn to live competently in each area, so that tiredness or negativity or whatever comes from a area and does not flow into the other. another area, so we have to learn to juggle tension in all of our areas to prevent vulnerabilities, and people cannot fail treatment if someone relapses like someone you know, whatever word they say, even if you don't want to return. use I consider this a learning opportunity.

Well, I mean, you made a different decision than what we wanted, you made a different decision than what you expected. about your treatment plan, the goal you are working towards, why, what happened, what made you more vulnerable, why you didn't choose the newer behavior because it wasn't as available, let's use this as a learning opportunity to find out what is happening, it is not a failure, it is a learning moment or a teaching moment, so what is emotional regulation? Emotional dysregulation will start there due to a combination of high emotional vulnerability, so it takes longer for someone who is reactive to return. to begin with, so if they get upset, it takes them longer to escalate and get back to baseline and I can't regulate or modulate your own emotions, so I want you to think about a time when you've been driving down the road and just you're driving down a road and God forgive me, if it happened I hope not, but if it did happen a semi truck will probably come there and run you off the road on the shoulder.

Just to get in like this, you can't even step on the gas pedal because you're so tight that your knuckles are white to grip the steering wheel, so tight that your heart is racing that you're breathing fast. You're back in full fight or flight mode, so you're past 1 on the stress meter, which you know you have to navigate, but you're aware that you need to be aware of the dangers of a5 or oh shit, that could have It's been really bad, so you take a few deep breaths, you take a few breaths, you're at the point where you can really press the gas pedal and you're back on the highway, now you're back to the baseline and like la-dee, stop cut like before, probably not a little more on the edge and look at your batting mirror more often, look back and make sure nothing in your blood drop is no longer surprising. , so you don't go back to the same level of less tension Tunisia, if you will stay a little elevated because your brain is gone, you know I thought it was a safe situation, but now I realize that not so many maintain it. you are on higher alert and it will take you longer if you have to go back to square one because you are looking for the threats and you are much more aware that this can happen than people from invalid backgrounds where people come who are often chronically stressed , they are constantly looking for something else to threaten them, anything else to stress them out, so they don't go from a 1 to a 5 and then to a 1; they go from 1 to 5, back to 2 and then to 5 again and then we just go to 3, it's that the tension is increasing, so we have to figure out how we can help people get back to the one and realize. which I understood well, it was a very unpleasant situation, but now I refer to emotional vulnerability to the situation in which an individual is more sensitive or emotionally reactive than others, or if they normally would be, you know some people, it is And when We talk about personality disorders, it's widespread when...

I'm talking again. As someone who has been under stress for six months, it's possibly a situation we need help figuring out, but it's still not something that is completely and utterly omnipresent. When you're stressed, you know you're already on edge and something happens, you react. in the normal way that you normally would if you sit there and say, "Okay, let's figure out how to deal with it or throw it away." If you are almost in the stratosphere and for many people with emotional dysregulation their relaxation is on the verge of chaos, then they stand there and flounder and it's okay, I can't breathe anymore, or it will push me away and then they call them wet, they get upset and they are in free fall for a while, but they regain their balance, but then they continue on that precipice, they never completely come off, so what we want to see is what happens with these people that makes them more reactive, that makes them more alert and more alert to stress and stressors?

Some of these may be due to differences in the HPA axis, which plays a role in making people more vulnerable or reactive, and we're talking about the HPA axis in a tiny environment of people who are more emotionally reactive or who often invalidate themselves. , and what does it mean that Jane Jane had a period of two years, do you know that there was only one job after death? She lost her house, she lives in an apartment right now, but she's not happy, and you know, yeah, you can do things right, so James is really struggling, she's hanging in there and really trying to do the next thing she's trying to do. of doing. breaking each other down and trying to do the right thing for our kids, just because they're really stressed, and then something happens that most of us would react to, but we know it's annoying, but it won't completely kill us.

Yes, James on the Cliff Jane is already at a four, maybe four and a half, depending on the day, and when that happened, he also put her on a scale of one to five, which puts her at a six and a half in free fall. , but people may not understand that they don't understand what's going on in Jane's life and it's no big deal, why do you just completely react, making Jane feel guilty? Phil, self-conscious and feeling misunderstood, then she sits down. isolated and rejected, and we talk about basic fears that isolate rejection, lack of control and the unknown.

Well, James is now experiencing everything and the people around her instead of asserting herself and doing well. She was already stressed. I can see that was just the last straw. What is your problem? So she doesn't feel like she has social support. She is an island unto herself. So we want to help Jane with emotional regulation because we know she's on top and we know she doesn't like to free fall, but how can we help her? Emotion regulation is the ability to control or influence the emotions you have when you have them and how you experience or express them.

This is a quote from the Linda book for emotion regulation to prevent unwanted emotions by reducing vulnerabilities so you can go through life but experience stress, butInstead of feeling overwhelmed or angry, you may feel a little irritated. Second, and then choosing to engage in emotion regulation, help people learn to change painful emotions once they start so that they don't harbor the emotion or feed it and become angry at themselves for being angry about something they has no control. teaches that emotions in themselves are neither good nor bad, they are just that your brain is programmed to react based on waiting for the light.

If you have it at this particular moment, it's spiders, if you're afraid of spiders, it's your brain. way you see a spider and feel like it's your brain that must threaten because spiders can be a big poisonous threat so you want to escape it's your body's way of letting go your brain we survive we want to do it now you can find out you can learn more about spiders, so that in the future you realize that you don't know that 99% of them are not a threat to people, but right now your brain is telling you that right now you should stay away, you probably want to do it . do it, so he learns that emotions on the Internet only encourage us to do something, it is a survival response and he suppresses it, which makes the situation worse.

I don't need to be afraid, does it help if your child comes up to you and tells you that he knows I'm having a really bad day or that I hate him? It usually helps to tell him that he shouldn't do it. Feel that way, feel better, you know, just be glad that the work. I've never had an experience where that has now worked. It may work for some people, but we want to help people identify their emotions, but we don't have to be consumed by them. effective when being in the emotion is the best for you, so sometimes expressing your emotion is the best for you, it brings you closer to your end goals, sometimes your emotion brings you closer to your short term goals, like stopping the Pain and real pain are unpleasant, but in the grand scheme of 15 minutes from now and 3 hours from now, will it get you closer to the goals you really want to achieve or was it just a stopgap to express your emotions, influence others in a way that will help you if you want to influence others. positive ways that will help you, then the emotions can be much kinder, which can be very useful. s advocate Friends, well, I can think of one client.

You leave, anger is a great emotion and you express it too. It's the best for me? Yes, getting people to leave me alone means it gets me closer to my ultimate goals. Yes, it reduces my stress. people let me rest, it will affect others in ways that will help you, yes it makes them go away and sends these emotions an important message, but it is irritating to tell myself that these people, like everyone else, are a threat to me. In the short term it may be difficult to see, but we want to help people overcome this immediate threat and say where they want to be, what happiness looks like for them or how they want to define that end goal. and once you were tolerant of distress, your talk on Thursday was about how to tolerate unpleasant emotions so now you don't stop at our favorite HPA axis, but the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is our central stress response system.

And let's not get too caught up, and the whole psychological biology of this, I think it's good to keep this in mind, but obviously we don't prescribe to the hypothalamus in the brain's release, a compound called corticotropin-releasing factor or CRF that causes the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone from the pituitary gland, which causes the adrenal glands to release stress hormones, especially cortisol and adrenaline. Now your adrenal glands are actually in your kidneys and why is this so important. I want you to see it or understand it. Are there many systems? involved there are a lot of hormones involved there are a lot of things involved it's not just a box, you know, you release a lot of chemicals in your body that change the neurochemicals and the other hormones to prepare you for the spiders, the adrenal glands control the chemical reactions it goes through large parts of your body, including the fight or flight response, and it produces even more hormones than the pituitary gland, so these adrenal glands are kind of a stress area, if you want, they will produce steroid hormones like cortisol, which is a glut corticolated, meaning it causes your body to release glucose.

What do we know? Glucose, blood sugar, is energy, so it increases the availability of glucose and fat for the long-term fight-or-flight reaction. It also produces sex hormones. like DHEA and estrogen, why is this important? Because we know that if you increase estrogen, you increase the availability of serotonin, so if the adrenal glands are busy doing something else, it can cause other hormonal imbalances and also produces stress hormones like adrenaline. which will increase, your breathing will increase, your heart rate will increase, so once you have the full response that we talked about and the perceived threat passes, the cortisol levels return to normal, which is what happens in the situation ideal, but what if the threat never goes away, what if we work with a client?

Because he terribly fears rejection and isolation, he needs external validation because he doesn't feel good enough, but he has no social support because his emotional reactivity has alienated everyone. , so they constantly feel the threat of rejection. control and the unknown are stopping, just like you hold on to the wheel after going off the road and go back to what you know you did because you wanted to get to your destination but you're scared, stupid, okay? You can see what is happening in the body, the amygdala and hippocampus are intertwined with the stress response, the amygdala modulates anger-fear or fight-flight and the hippocampus helps develop and store memories when you are under stress and think about a time when you are experiencing a lot of stress, have you been effective in learning and paying attention to the good and bad things, or are you just trying to let the pain stop, let the threat go away, the child or adolescent brain is especially vulnerable because of high plasticity, that's why we see people who are prone to personality disorders, a lot of their traumas and things started very early in their development and that's why it's widespread in all areas or in many areas. areas. of their lives, they learn bad things, they become emotionally upset, they prevent them from learning new positive things to counteract if they are in a bad mood, if they are afraid, if they are threatened. you are hungry, you are a homeless person, put everything there is, are you really paying attention to the blue birds that fly and sing beautiful songs or are you really paying attention to the fact that you have a test, maybe not, so we have to understand That people living in a chronic stressful environment may also have an overactive HPA axis, so they already have some adrenaline and cortisol.

Because of high vigilance, then something happens, and it's like through the roof, like when you scare a cat, what happens to the brain is a chronic security threat, and a constant underlying layer of anxiety is a constant undercurrent. , as he teaches. their brain to force synaptic connections from experience and pruned connections that are not used, people who feel a lack of control over their environment are particularly vulnerable to overstimulation of the stress response, that is, not just abused children but also abandoned children arise right there, but Abuse and Abandoned Adults Think about a client you have worked with who has been in an abusive relationship for years.

Do you have all happy connections or are you quite exhausted and stressed, mainly with adults with anxiety or depressive disorders? It should even be an abusive or neglectful situation if you have someone who has clinical anxiety or depressive symptoms forever, they are in a state of constant and constant threat from people, so to speak, so that they don't see that they can't do things. good things. They don't learn, so they get more bad things they pay attention to, more bad or unpleasant things, the synaptic connections that form the basis of people's schema about themselves in the world are biased in the direction of the traumatic event to expense of 'a synaptic network based on positive experiences and healthy relationships, so we had this client here and this.

These are her negative experiences, she has a lot and she has a lot of things going on in her head, and it's not just that they won't leave if she doesn't know anyone, and it's good that they leave me if something happens that she feels isolated and alone at the same time. that she can fear, so that she has a strong link with past memories and past experiences, and if you are in the middle of all this, there are not many happy things, and although she appears many times she makes mistakes, she does not see or remember all the happy things you just want.

To avoid the pain, another example I can give you is to think of an urban planner, but an urban planner only has a certain budget, just as we only have a certain amount of energy, the urban planner looks and says which roads, which The connections between cities They get the most traffic, and let's spend our resources and strengthen the connections, because we know that we have all kinds of traffic and roads that we really don't. If you drive on secondary roads, we don't have to. pay close attention to this now, because we have to make sure that the paths that are used the most are strong, but that's the best analogy I can give without putting strings and all that, but that's what active IDEs are like in a hypervigilant state. activated by the stress response which disrupts our ability to concentrate and learn that we are just trying not to die but we are trying not to be consumed by pain, it affects the body's ability to form new memories and remember information due to changes physiological changes in the hippocampus, now is not the time to study, process, and do all the things you once tried to study for an exam when you had 16 other things going on.

Emphasize how well you remembered these things here, sometimes people relate most things well to past experiences, so maybe they have had a lot of dysfunctional relationships and are starting a relationship, how will the result be that the memories negative memories are positive memories? and then you have someone who may have some positive relationships that she starts to find in a relationship, and she remembers some of the positive ones, because there were a lot of good relationships, but you know she has the negative ones too. remember, but they will most likely remember the positive more strongly, what will be your response if we want to help our clients develop a healthy support system? em what we need to help them address some of those pathways that lead to negative memories emotion regulation is transdiagnostic or useful with many disorders helps people increase their current focused emotional awareness tells here and now what their feelings are, your physical sensation, what are your thoughts and what are your impulses?

It helps people increase cognitive flexibility because it helps them step back and look and say, well, what are my options? I feel angry, what are my options here? What do I normally do? What do I want to do when I'm on autopilot? What are some other things I can do that can help me identify and prevent emotion avoidance patterns? and behavior driven by emotions we don't want, in the situation of constantly trying to avoid unpleasant emotions by lashing out by hurting ourselves or reactively doing things when I feel like this, I have to smoke a cigarette, I have to cut myself I have to fill in the blank , we want to help people find alternative ways and be able to come back and say this is an option. today choose to increase awareness and tolerance of physical sensations related to emotions, sometimes these physical sensations are so powerful and so overwhelming and sometimes the rush of adrenaline and the hazy, shaky feeling you get in your head when you just You have adrenaline running through your veins. . so overwhelming that people don't know what to do with it and are afraid it won't stop, let's help them increase their awareness and tolerance of this, help them understand what's happening and use emotion-oriented exposure procedures if they get angry, help them Think in group sessions that get you a little excited, you know we don't want to cause a full scale crisis or talk about something that happened last week that upset them and let's do these emotional behavioral procedures.

It is functional to the behavior, it is necessary to identify the functions and reinforcers of the behavior, so when they did it, you know, let's talk about cutting because you know that it is one of those behaviors to change, apply what we see, it is self-harm, this is the function of the behavior: cutting or self-harm is a way of causing physical pain where the person has control, they focus on it and feel a sense of mastery when things happen in their head it feels completely uncontrollable and unbearable, it is distracting them, and it is also something they can control how much pain they feel, this is how it worksnow: the best answer we want, but we can see why someone might engage in a behavior that the behavior is well reinforced when they do this, not only do they get a respite from this emotional turmoil that they feel they can't touch or control or do anything But their body also releases endorphins, it releases natural painkillers to kill the physical pain, making them feel a little bit better, so they get a double whammy with the boosters there, so we understand that now we have to find something else that they can do. and help them discover how upset emotions work, with others, communicate and influence and control their behavior, and serve as a warning or alarm to motivate their own behavior.

I communicate with a rat around me, the people around me through my emotions, what happens when I am angry, I lash out, I will influence people's behavior and they will probably back off when I am sad or crying. or you're afraid that it might bring them closer, and on a more supportive thing, you know again, you need to watch for behavior that causes self-harm but that can cause a loving response, but these emotions before someone really starts. If the behavior acts, it serves the emotions as an indication that Sally is ready to go into free fall, so that she can begin to respond sooner, and it serves as a warning or alarm for the person to motivate his own behavior if he knows that It's in the hallway. .

The abyss if you know that you are about to be vulnerable, to be very irritable during the day, it can motivate your own behavior to discover how to identify some of your vulnerabilities, what obstacles you can identify changing emotions. just be happy and all of a sudden someone says oh I don't know why I don't think I'm going to go ahead and be happy, that's not how it works, we want to look at the organic factors, do they have any effect? Long standing organic chemical imbalance of some kind and it may not be neurochemical, it may be hormonal.

They may have too much estrogen, too much testosterone, too little estrogen, too little testosterone, whatever, let's find out, you know, have them go see their doctor and find out. if there's something like fibroids or moaning, whatever might be affecting your mood, okay, once we identify something we can modify there, we can't measure the neurotransmitters, we're out of luck because they're in so many places in the body. There is no way to isolate how much serotonin is actually in the brain. I can not do it. Yes, we want to look at other factors that are biological imbalances.

Neurochemical imbalances caused by chronic stress caused by addiction. Lack of sleep and nutritional problems. And? What kind of chemical imbalances are we precipitating by maintaining stress and adrenaline by keeping the body revved up all the time? We want to observe the obstacles. Well, let me stay here with the biological factors very quickly, the organic things, if we can refer to the medical ones and we can find ways to address those that give the person a step forward so that they don't feel so depressed or they don't feel so reagent. People with hyperthyroidism know that when their thyroid is overactive they may have some anxiety problems or some other mood problems that can be addressed with medication, then we look at the situation because there are ways we can help them reduce their chronic stress.

Sometimes there are some easy solutions right now, other times, but chronic stress comes from problems that have been going on for a long time. -Standing is going to take a while, not that we can't do it, but it's going to be a process, so we go ahead and say "okay, addiction", we know that when people use stimulants, they go into overdrive and then crash. It makes them more emotional yo-yo caused by addictive substances or behaviors It also makes them more vulnerable to emotional reactivity Lack of sleep is all kinds of hormones out of control tends to make people more irritable, that's something that almost everyone can address right now. and nutritional problems if they don't eat well, they don't eat anything, encouraging them to see a nutritionist to make sure they're getting something balanced that they're really going to stick to, not something that they look at and say, yeah, that looks great. but in no way am I eating nuts ability factors what we can help them with we can identify cognitive responses that are obstacles, which is basically I can't do that I won't do that resistance somehow my response to that obstacle is established look at it and weigh the positive and the negative do a decision balancing exercise to address the cognitive responses and discover why the dysfunctional or unhelpful reaction is more rewarding why it is more rewarding to be angry or scared than to watch doing things and thinking things that will help you feel happier what is it disconnection and generally going back to previous failures, fear of failure because they've been down that road before and it's a huge disappointment when they feel really good for about three weeks and then Shocking behavioral responses that are obstacles to changing emotions .

If someone lashes out when they get angry, they lash out and throw things and then they feel guilty, so this behavioral response can make it harder for them to change emotions because we have to help them figure it out. Find out how to pause before the behavioral response so you don't escalate the situation with more negative emotions and environmental factors. People, places and things that are in environments where you are surrounded by people who suffer from negativity or let you know what they are. there with you they are talking about conspiracy theories, they are just negative about everything or they criticize you or they remind you of situations where you have been criticized before, so first we want to help people identify and label many emotions.

Our clients are relatively Alex Simon, you know they have a small repertoire. If they notice their emotions, they usually go from situation to reaction and labeling what they felt is kind of a mystery, so we want to help them and doing it retrospectively is fine. first because that's probably all you're going to be able to get from the event benefiting the emotion what were your thoughts your physical sensations and your impulses help me describe this in enough detail that if we were to give it to an actor or an actress they would be able to recreate the situation what expressive behaviors were associated with that emotion do you know? you cried, you threw things, you hit the wall, what were your interpretations of that event in the moment, not retrospectively, but in the moment, what were your interpretations of what was happening what story before the event increased your vulnerability to emotional dysregulation many words important what happened before that that already stressed you out or made you nervous and you know we went through a lot of different things and this is you know, behavior chaining, we're looking at what led up to the event, what made you more vulnerable and what you were feeling. at that moment and then what were the aftereffects of the emotion or the reaction on your other types of functioning like that after this event and you went into free fall and you got angry and you lashed out and you screamed and you threw things.

How did that affect your work? How did that affect your relationships with your family? How did that affect your mood and overall state of mind? feeling of being in yourself for the rest of the day changing unwanted emotions, then we start labeling them, we find out what we feel, we find out that yes, when we feel that way, we act in ways that you know make us feel worse later. What do we do about it? Let's change them. Well, we already talked about the obstacles and we are trying to address them, but in a moment check the facts.

Ask yourself what the facts are for and against my belief, if you think someone did something to Be antagonistic to you, okay? What was your motivation? What are the facts for and against? Also ask yourself if this is emotional or factual reasoning. Am I making a decision based on how I felt? I felt attacked, therefore I must have been being attacked or these are facts that you know. I felt attacked, yes, but that was because this person said ABCDE and all of those were very attacking and I felt like I needed to defend myself, so those are steps to verify the facts or you can continue with problem solving, so let's change the situation that It's called causing any unpleasant emotion like I said with spiders at the time you may not have enough information not to feel scared but maybe your spouse really loves hiking and camping and you want to go but you're afraid that Those aren't spiders.

So how can you change the situation so that spiders do not cause the same reaction? increase knowledge increase exposure there are many different ways but problem solving says well, what can I do so that my reaction, my correct reaction, is not one of threat or anger, but is one of at least mild acceptance, prevents vulnerabilities, which helps reduce reactivity, if you are one hundred percent, you know you wake up and you think this is going to be a good day to day, the things that come your way are probably going to happen. roll more like water off a duck's back and then hit you in the face like a mud pie, so we want to avoid vulnerabilities.

Reduce the stress response because when you're not when you're not up here anymore then you know you can fluctuate. a little bit more and they help the person be aware and able to learn and remember positive experiences, so that if you reject that vulnerability and someone is in a good place or a better place than they were, they will at least be able to realize it. and we're going to want to encourage them to notice the positive experiences that you know, instead of thinking that all the people are threatening me, all the people are going to hurt me, all the people are going to leave, they might give up. realize that you know that Sally is here, that she has worked.

Here for the 15 years I was with me and you know she's there, she sometimes she calls to say she's sick but then she comes back. She's usually in a good mood. You know that she's actually not that bad of a person and you start to notice some of the things that aren't self-satisfying. processes that develop mastery through activities that develop self-efficacy, self-control and competence, contraband. We don't mean no, you don't want to set a goal where someone has to go an entire week without having an emotionally reactive response. Let's say spending hours or even an entire day would be wonderful, but first we need to talk about how to reduce those vulnerabilities to set the person up for success, what things you can do well, and we'll get down here in a minute, what can you do?

What to do if you wake up and feel vulnerable? you know there are creepy crowds hanging around, they actually canceled classes for the entire week for school, the county school system, the kids are off for a whole week due to illness right now, but you wake up in the morning and you have a fever and a sore throat, you say: I really don't want to go to work and get out of bed today, what can you do to avoid it? being in a bad mood and being overly reactive during the mental rehearsal of the day and this can apply if you are preparing to do something scary or threatening, seeing yourself doing that and doing it successfully and this can even be during the day just imagining yourself getting up eating. your breakfast, driving to work, spending the day watching that person in the office who always has some kind of snarky comment to say or whatever irritates you, laughing about it or dealing with it really well, spending the whole day like would you like it. see how it happens, imagine it, look, look, see what you can do, rehearse it, rehearse how to handle negativity, you know, if you know, you're going to have to go to your annual review with your boss, okay, so mentally rehearse how it's going to go. . you are going to react to what is going to happen so you are prepared for it you have your answers and take some of the unknown out of the situation physical body care of the mind treatment of pain and illness and the acronym for this is please and change one From them to laughter it used to be a physical illness and that was NLP but I like laughter anyway we'll get there when you're in pain or when you're sick you're vulnerable to being a little grumpy you know that's just your body is already saying that you are weak, you know that back in the day when you had to defend yourself from predators, the sick and those in pain were the ones that were usually eliminated first as part of our brain that I still remember that for some reason, when we have pain or when we're sick, our body keeps that cortisol, keeps our cortisol levels higher and the stress response a little higher, so we want to deal with those things, but we know if we wake up. and we are in that situation right now that we were a little more vulnerable, so we have to carefully handle laughter, you can't be miserable and happy at the same time, laughter releases endorphins, laughter helps people feel a little better . something to laugh about and have on my phone.

I do comedy sketches from time to time. I only put one even if I'm not therehaving a bad day. Play it because I like to laugh. Eat two sports mentally and physically. Health Avoid addictive or mood-altering drugs or behaviors that will put you on that up-and-down roller coaster that goes up and down even more than when you started. Get adequate quality sleep and exercise. Exercise also helps increase serotonin. and release endorphins, which helps people be in a better mood. Mindfulness is a critical observation and description of current emotions. We're not going to delve into this right now.

Another class on mindfulness and you can also Google it remembering that primary emotions are. often adaptive and appropriate I know I said that six times more emotional distress is a result of your secondary responses shame for having them I shouldn't feel like this anxiety about being wrong you know maybe maybe this is the wrong way to respond or you Do you know what if Am I wrong or angry because I feel judged for feeling this way? I feel this way and you tell me I shouldn't, how dare you? So mindfulness is kind of an exposure technique because it helps people.

Identifying that yes, I feel this way, but it helps them learn to take a step back and figure out how not to judge that. And just go well, I feel this way, better, worse, whatever it is, this is how I feel, the Exposure to intense emotions without negative consequences, that nonjudgmental acceptance, everything is just fine, it is what it is, extinguishes the secondary emotional responses of feeling guilty about it or feeling ashamed or angry at yourself for being angry, so think about it this way and if you can't see this is the best image of Bruce Lee I can think of, scenario one is an unpleasant experience, the person has an unpleasant emotion and then feels guilt, shame or anger for feeling that emotion, so instead of having to deal with one emotion one on one, now you have to fight through different unpleasant emotions and you start to act to try to stop the avalanche of negativity in the absence of the right

skills

, now Bruce Lee.

I was able to take out four or five at a time, but most of us know that we would be defeated because all of these adversaries would come at us and we would be building on them in scenario two and this is where we want people to understand that they have an unpleasant experience which is part of life, they identify the unpleasant emotion again, part of life is horrible, but in part, but they have the ability to deal with an emotion, they say okay, I'm angry, what do I do about it instead of doing it? I'm angry, what do I do about it?

I'm guilty and you see how you know she has this emotion, so what we are helping people do is not complicated, this regulation is common to many people with disorders. People with dysregulated emotions have a stronger and longer-lasting response to stimuli. Yes, they are already a little stressed. They are already hypervigilant. If you mean, they're already a little nervous and then something happens that escalates for months. Now we have a scale from 1 to 5, if they are already at a 4 and it goes up 2 points, they have fallen off the scale, they are in free fall, so we must understand that what we perceive as an excessive emotional reaction may not be Whether they started from the same place as us, we started from a 1, if they start from a 4, you know, then their reaction to the same thing that seemed pretty reasonable to you, emotional dysregulation is often punished or invalidated and escalated. hopelessness and isolation emotional regulation means we help people use mindfulness to be aware and reduce their vulnerabilities, so we help them take it so they're not at a 4, it might be a 2, you know they're in therapy. for a reason.

We'll help you work through the other things and bring it down to 1, but now we're going to help you figure out ways that you can eliminate your stress response, eliminate underlying anxiety and so on, identify the function and reinforcers of the current emotions. when they happen is to understand where they come from because they are functional do that chaining worksheet check the facts okay now that I know how I feel I know what my reactions are I know what my thoughts are I know what my impulses are let's review There are facts in the situation pros and cons that force people to take a step back, allowing the momentum to come out a little and then solve the problem: what can I do now to improve the situation and what can I do in the future to not do it ? necessarily experience this exact same situation again, how can I break that mold?

Well, then emotion regulation doesn't give us many distress tolerance skills. Emotion regulation is really about preventing vulnerabilities and helping people figure it out. Well, this is where I am. How do I pause so I can choose between my problem-solving skills, distress tolerance, disgust, or interpersonal effectiveness? But it's a big step. How wonderful would it be if you could eliminate some of your vulnerabilities and think about it for just a minute or two? vulnerabilities you have right now and how many of the ones you know you could potentially over the next week or two address sleep eat maybe you have 16 things going on and you could narrow it down to eight, there's a lot of different things you could pull out of the rabbit hat, so so to speak, and what kind of difference would it make if you were talking about your staff.

Look around you, observe the organizational environment, what vulnerabilities exist. vulnerabilities physical vulnerabilities my best friend is working at a place right now where almost everyone has to work doubles because they are so short staffed that they are going to start becoming vulnerable very soon, so look around you, what can you do to moderate that to what can they? They model effective emotional regulation, but they also cannot be emotionally dysregulated by a client who has emotional dysregulation issues. This concludes our discussion today. If you have any questions, I'd love to hear them if you'd like to discuss them.

That's amazing if you want. Talk to your next client. You know, I completely understand that I want to wish everyone a happy Valentine's Day. I don't pay much attention to Valentine's Day, but it's the eve of half-price chocolates and that's my kind of my kind one day you you you you if you enjoyed this

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