This video is intended just to give you a super brief overview of what emotion regulation skills are and why we teach them.
So first of all, let's just define what emotion regulation is. So this is the ability to control or influence which emotions you have, when you have them, how intensely you experienced them, and whether or not or how you express them.
One thing that's important to know is that emotions can can be automatic, and therefore regulating them can also be automatic, it can also be consciously controlled. So our goal, as we work through this module is that at first, you're going to have to put probably a fair bit of effort into practicing these skills, and that over time, implementation of these skills will become more automatic.
So let's talk for a moment about what the goals of this particular module are. So if you look at handout one, you will see that there are four main areas that this particular module helps with.
The first thing, the big thing that we're going to even get into today is understanding how emotions work and being able to identify them when they're happening.
Just the act of naming your emotions can have a regulating effect, because it's pretty, it's pretty hard to know what to do or how to respond when you just feel so overwhelmed by emotions that you don't actually know what you're feeling.
The next big goal is to actually decrease the frequency and intensity with which you experience unwanted emotions. And so one of the things that I'll point out here is that certain folks have struggles with emotions across the board, every emotion that there is they experienced it really intensely, and like they're on a constant roller coaster.
Others of you might have one or two or three main emotions that you struggle with. Whereas maybe you can deal with sadness and fear like nobody's business, but put some shame on deck and you don't know what to do. And it becomes really overwhelming for you.
So as we go through this, I want you to also consider if there's any particular emotions that you find yourself really struggling to either understand or manage when they show up.
We also want you to be able to change painful emotions, when they start without suppressing them, because we know that suppression doesn't work, and actually tends to make them worse. All right, next step is decreasing your emotional vulnerability.
All of us have factors that makes us more likely to experience emotion strongly and quickly. For example, if I've had a terrible night of sleep, didn't eat breakfast and sat in a traffic jam all morning, chances are I'm going to be a pretty irritable for the first couple hours of my day, right? And so we want to figure out what factors make it more likely for you to go into emotion mind so that we can serve problem solve in attend to those.
Last but not least, we want to generally decrease emotional suffering. So specifically, when emotions either feel like they overcome you, and ensuring that you're managing those extremes so that the situation doesn't get worse.
Alright, my sort of ending point here is that this does take a lot of work initially, all of these skills, at least many of these skills, you'll be at least a little bit familiar with, but implementing them on the regular is difficult.
You will also get better the more that you do this.
