What is emotion?
The word emotion derives from the Latin Emotio, a name which in turn derives from the verb to the verb. This refers in turn to moving, moving to place, shake or even throw out.
An emotion is something that moves us, removes us, shakes us, takes us away from the place where we are. It is a mental but also physiological state that informs us about the meaning of the experience we are doing and moves us in a useful response to “survival”.
Emotions they inform us about our needshelp us to consider different alternatives. They motivated us to implement a change, they indicate what we want to do and help us relate to others.
Many emotions generate a negative feeling and in this way protect us (for example anger pushes us to argue with those who hurt us, fear to escape from what we feel as dangerous). Others are generated in social situations (for example we feel shame when we behave inappropriately compared to others). Still others accompany those we perceive as beautiful moments of our life.
And if the protection is priority for survival, pleasant sensations tell us where we are well and where we have to stay.
What do we do with our emotions?
Without emotions, our life would be without meaning, thickness, wealth. Emotions communicate our needs, they orient us, guide us.
However many people do not have one “Good relationship” with their emotional experiences: instead of “using” them constructively or tolerating them, they feel unable, frustrated and frightened because they fear them, because they consider them harmful, limiting, wrong or because they feel overwhelmed.
For example, in many people who suffer from anxiety disorders the problem often is not so much in trying anxiety, as in the ability to recognize it, accept it, use it effectively and possibly continue to work even in its presence.
We all experience emotions of various kinds and try to manage them more or less consciously and with more or less effective methods.
The importance of emotional regulation
Regulating emotions means knowing how to modify the components of the emotional experience in more or less conscious and intentional way.
It is a process of searching for balance that moderates the intensity of emotions in order to maintain them within a tolerable and manageable level.
This modulation work moves on multiple floors, precisely because of the fact that Emotion is a multidimensional phenomenon that concerns mind, body and behavior in the world and with others.
Then adjusting itself means knowing how to modulate body activation through relaxation or physical activity exercises. It means being aware of one’s thoughts and being able to make them more balanced and realistic. It means knowing how to distract, knowing how to implement problem solving procedures; Knowing how to accept yourself and what happens. It means knowing how to ask others for help effectively.
There emotional disregulation Instead, it corresponds to the difficulty of effectively elaborating one’s emotions. This leads to their excessive intensification or deactivation, thus creating “too hot” or “too cold” experiences.
Emotional discomfort is often the cause of pathology
When a person experiences an emotion as unwanted, intrusive or dangerous this emotion can intensify. A spiral of exasperation, panic, a sense of overpowering and loss of control is created.
At the opposite extreme, in the face of difficult situations and experiences, phenomena deactivation of emotion may occur. This is a possibility of which our body is endowed to avoid those same difficult experiences, through an emotional flattening mechanism and derealization and depersonalization phenomena.
The difficulties in emotional regulation can be the cause, symptom and consequence of traumatization. They are therefore frequent not only as a cause of pathology, but also make the same adaptive processing of information that we need to stimulate in therapy are difficult.
Adjustment strategies
Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema and Schweizer (2010) outline six fundamental emotional regulation strategies: acceptance, resolution of problems, avoidance, reformulation, rumination and suppression.
Some of these strategies have a positive influence: reformulation, problems resolution and acceptance.
Training for problems resolution is an important component of behavioral cognitive therapies for various disorders (Leahy, 2013).
In recent years the emphasis has also been placed on theacceptance as an adaptive regulation mechanismthrough Mindfulness -based intervention models. This promotes awareness and precisely acceptance of the emotional state, eliminating all the judgment and analysis, accepting the present moment as it is.
The use of the acceptance of the regulatory unrelatedness seems connected with better evolutions in therapy (Hayes, 2012).
Dysfunctional adjustment strategies make us get stuck in the malaise
Others are instead misconduct strategies and their presence brings a negative influence: avoidance, suppression and above all rumination.
Avoidance
Many authors have explored avoidance mechanisms and most focused on behavioral advancement (i.e. places or situations).
But when, for example, a person anxiety avoids the places where crises took place, tends internally to avoid anxiety itself. What really avoids is not that place but the feeling it has when it goes to that place.
For Avoid unpleasant emotions A person can also avoid looking inside, talking or thinking about unpleasant situations, of being in contact with himself.
This avoidance can be intentional or even automatic, involuntary and it is necessary to make it aware and identifiable to be able to modify it.
Without contact with experience, effective and adaptive processing is not possible and avoided experiences tend to amplify over time, creating or maintaining psychological discomfort.
Suppression and control
When a person intentionally avoids an unpleasant emotion we can speak of mechanisms of suppression and control.
People with a tendency to suppression tend to deny that certain experiences touch them, even if the opposite is evident. Or they say to themselves that there is no reason to feel how they feel they seek thus diminishing, invalidating and eliminating these sensations.
Rumination
Rumination is a form of hyperfocalization in which the person thinks recurring and repeatedly for their concerns, problems and past events that cannot be changed (Nolen -Hoeksema, 2000).
In fact, some people are badly wondering “how can I stay like this?” , “What could have happened?”.
Implement a mode of repetitive negative thinking Which turns constantly, in a sterile way, around what is going on or what happened in the past.
They believe they are really trying to understand what happens, to resolve doubts and malaise.
In reality, instead of being effective in self -observation, they are only torturing themselves and pressing pressure to feel good. However, avoiding a real understanding of the emotions that move.
Negative emotions are not accepted and the person wonders to continue working as always; He is guilty of not being able to feel good, the negative thoughts towards himself and the sense of guilt are amplified, feeding the malaise and making him last longer.
Mobble
The brooding is the tendency to anguish on the possibility of what ugly could happen in the future.
The person who mulls when he feels uncertainty, anxiety or malaise begins to worry, to imagine what the negative future scenarios could be, wondering how he could face them.
And it is precisely through the brood that he believes he can find a solution or prepare for the worst. So think you do something useful to keep control, protect yourself, prepare, prevent your fears from taking place.
The result of the brooding is instead, as for rumination, a spiral of thoughts and inevitably even more negative and persistent emotions.
Emotions and their regulation as protagonists of psychological work
Clinicians know that one of the most problematic experiences for patients is the feeling of being overwhelmed by emotions.
Some, not knowing how to regulate their intensity, use maladative coping strategies.
Alcohol or substances abuse, binged, mobble, rumination, avoidance of situations that could bring out problematic emotions, culpolizations, etc.
These are all ways in which people sometimes try to regulate their moods.
Emotions are the main protagonists in psychological work, both for their role in the onset and maintenance of mental disorders, and for the methods of intervention on them in psychotherapy.
Not infrequently it is important if it is not necessary to help the person to recognize these mechanisms, their only hypothetical utility and their real problematic role.
Teaching effective emotional regulation is the necessary condition for a work on cognitive, behavioral and emotional patterns in therapeutic work.
Bibliography
- Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema and Schweizer (2010). Emotion Regulation Strategies Across Psychopathology: in Meta – Analityc Review. Clinical Psychology Review, 30 (2), 217-237.
- Gonzalez, A. (2021). EMDR and emotional processing. Working with patients with severe discomfort. Mimesis ed.
- Leahy, Tirch, Napolitano. The regulation of emotions in psychotherapy. Eclipsi, 2013
- Nolen – HOEKSEMA, S. (2000). The Role of Rumination in Depressive Disorders and Mixed Anxiety/Depressive Sympoms. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116 (1), 198-207.
