Emotional Regulation
Not feeling in control of your emotions, behaviours, and thoughts can be a frightening experience.
While on the other hand, not feeling any emotion and disengaging with them also impacts life. With the inability to regulate appropriately, your body's nervous system initiates a crisis mode with an activating event and unhealthy strategies to avoid the unpleasant are formed. This may appear as intrusive thoughts, impulsive behaviors, and distorted beliefs.
Throughout these mediums, if experienced on the higher spectrum, an individual’s life is consumed with chaos, lack of meaningful relationships, guilt & shame, and impulsivity; causing life to seem too intense to live through. The important aspect of these concerns is becoming aware of how to re-engage with your nervous system and developing healthier neuronal change. You are decreasing dysregulation and reactivating regulation. Meaning, when you experience an unpleasant emotion, your brain can support itself in a healthy way, decreasing the threat response and being able to feel a sense of safety in the uncomfortable. In becoming compassionate and aware of your emotions and behaviors through treatment, you're able to become the best version of you.
What Do Symptoms Look Like?
Feeling your emotions intensely and not being in control
Persistent painful emotions
Having difficulty connecting with and naming your emotions
Your relationships feel chaotic and impulsive
Experiencing impulsive behaviours
You have chronic feelings of suicide and or/self-injurious behaviour
Understanding and being in tune with your emotions are critical components of being able to live a balanced life. With compassion and curiosity, you can gain self-awareness of how your mind, body, and thoughts respond to triggers and tend to their needs in the present.
What is Emotion Dysregulation?
Developing a healthy perspective on emotions is a fundamental aspect of living a functional and meaningful life. When we ignore or are not connected to what our mind and body are trying to communicate with you, your nervous system becomes activated.
When this is triggered, your nervous system lives within a threat mode, creating physiological and psychological symptoms that are heightened causing us to experience extreme distress, losing the ability to regulate the intense emotional responses. This may be due to experiencing chronic invalidation in your environment as well as the bio-temperament you were born with that makes us more vulnerable to how you experience your emotions.
Living life in a constant threat mode is exhausting and can impair many facets of life, such as interpersonal relationships, self-esteem, self-worth, or be dangerous when harmful behaviors are impulsively experienced. Engaging in new change can be scary, however, you don’t need to go through it alone. I am here to help navigate the uncomfortable and together, you can restore a sense of control and balance in life.
Treatment For Emotion Dysregulation
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) Skills is the most prominent and effective evidence-based psychotherapy treatment for emotional dysregulated concerns. Through my extensive training in DBT skills, I am compassionate about how difficult it is to unlearn healthy perspectives on emotions while developing healthier behaviors. Although, through building these techniques you can experience a “brain pause”, allowing you to be present within your pleasant and unpleasant emotion while choosing healthy and effective behaviors and taking control of your life.
Together, you and I will engage in DBT skills, a DBT treatment that focuses on four components that will aid you in creating regulation skills, building resiliency and self-empowerment.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills
Mindfulness
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Emotion Regulation
Distress Tolerance