More about regulating emotions

Today I made a bit of an epiphany (refer to last post) where in order to regulate my emotions I need to be focusing more on the Emotion Regulation module of DBT - yeah I know, der! Because I have been having an extremely difficult time with my marriage I have been spending all of my energy on distress tolerance skills and not enough on regulating my up and down emotions. Doing distress tolerance skills is great and I am in no way going to stop doing them, however I am now aware that I need to be spending an equal amount of energy on emotion regulation skills. 

According to Dr Marsha Linehan, founder of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) in order to regulate your emotions the goals are to: 

understand the emotions, understand the function of the emotion, reduce vulnerability to negative emotions and decrease emotional suffering

To understand the emotions experienced it is recommended to observe and describe emotion/s by filling in a worksheet or mentally go through the model shown below:

I have seen some of these models with another section called 'Vulnerability Factors' which slots in after Prompting Event. I won't go into the model too much here but will post about it separately.

The list below helps to understand the functions of emotions:
1. Is the emotion to motivate/organise action?
2. Is the emotion to self validate?
3. Is the emotion to communicate to others or to influence others?

To reduce vulnerability to negative emotions the skills are PLEASE MASTER (an acronym) and increasing positive emotions.

PLEASE MASTER skills:
Treat PhysicaL illness
balance Eating
avoid mood Altering Drugs
balance Sleep
get Exercise
build MASTERy

To increase positive emotions:
1. do things in the short term that are pleasant and possible now
2. for the long term work towards goals, attend to relationships and avoid avoiding
3. be mindful of positive experiences
4. be unmindful of worries

Letting go of emotions through mindfulness and changing emotions by doing opposite action can assist to decrease emotional suffering.

Just briefly, to let go of emotions through mindfulness notice the presence of the emotion and step back from it, experience it, don't act on the emotion, don't judge it, practice willingness and radically accept it. 

To act opposite to the current emotion you do exactly that. If anxiety causes withdrawal then do the opposite and face it. If sadness creates curling up in a ball do the opposite by doing something that is opposite. 

Of course none of the above are easy to do but by learning about them through therapy or DBT classes and practice it can be done. I hope that with this new found epiphany I can make a new goal now to focus on doing more of my PLEASE MASTER skills and increase positive emotions.