DBT For Dummies. Gillian Galen

Chapter 5

      Understanding Your Emotions

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      Being able to identify and label your emotions is the first step in understanding and making sense of your experience. This is really the first piece of the puzzle of integrating DBT into your life. It isn’t uncommon for people to readily be able to identify the general state they are in, such as feeling overwhelmed, stressed, upset, good, or bad; however, for you to better understand your emotions, your description of how you feel must be much more precise. Furthermore, a precise description of your emotions will help you identify which DBT skills will be most effective in achieving your goal of increasing, decreasing, changing, or tolerating and accepting your emotions.

      Many people come to DBT troubled by the intensity of their emotions. We have been asked by patients if we could simply make their emotions go away because the impact of their emotional sensitivity or reactivity has been so destructive to their lives that they believe living without emotions would solve the problem. If you’ve suffered this way, it’s an obvious conclusion to draw; however, living without emotions would be hugely problematic. Emotions have functions, and when they are effectively regulated, they provide us with critical information. It’s generally understood that emotions have three functions: to communicate to yourself, communicate to others, and motivate action. Think about how many interactions, decisions, and even thoughts are impacted by how you feel in a single moment.

In this chapter, you discover the value of increasing your emotional vocabulary. You find out how to identify and label your emotions, turn up and down the intensity of your emotions, and begin to pay specific attention to particular emotions that you may find challenging. Learning all of this will help you suffer less. Our hope is that in time and with practice, you can learn to love your emotions, even the ones that cause you pain.

Recognizing How You’re Feeling

      The first step to recognize how you’re feeling is to pay attention. However, for people who struggle with intense emotions, the urge is to do just the opposite. Instead of paying attention, they tend to do things to avoid their emotions. Emotional avoidance can take many forms, from distracting yourself and never returning to the feeling, to telling yourself you should not or cannot feel that way, to using alcohol or drugs, sex, reckless behaviors, self-injury, or even suicide.

      In the following sections, you begin to see how paying attention and using mindfulness will help you get to know your emotions and give you the power to control them. Recognizing your emotions takes practice, but once you’re familiar with the process, you’ll find that you can easily integrate it into your life in a way that will support your use of all of the other DBT skills in this book.

      Distinguishing between primary and secondary emotions

      One of the most frequent questions we get when we ask people to begin to pay attention to their emotions is how to do that. It does sounds daunting and abstract, especially if we are asking you to pay attention to something that you experience as aversive. Before you can pay attention to what you feel, you first need to know what you are looking for and how you would label it. The following sections discuss how to identify both primary and secondary emotions.

      Primary emotions