DBT in Practice - Understanding What Emotions Do For You
Often when clients come to therapy, they come with goals about their emotions, and more often than not, I see clients who have a goal of trying to feel less of something (e.g. feel less anxious, less depressed), with clients often thinking that if they feel less emotions, their lives will improve and goals will be achieved. However, changing emotions is a really difficult task, and a good first step is instead trying to understand a little bit more about what emotions actually do for us, and from there we can think a little bit more about whether or not we actually want to get rid of these important emotions.
In DBT we use a module called Emotional Regulation to try and, as the name suggests, regulate our emotions, and in this blog post I want to talk through the first goal of this module – to understand and name your own emotions.
So what do emotions do for us anyway? There are three main things that emotions do:
1. Emotions motivate and organise us for action
Emotions are “hard-wired” into our biology to prepare us for action and motivate our behaviour, for example, when we see a tiger running towards us, our immediate reaction (hopefully) is fear, which then motivates us to run for the hills away from the tiger! If we didn’t have this “shortcut” in our biology, it would mean that it would take us too long to think things through and we might not get away from the tiger.
Emotions can also be helpful in overcoming obstacles. For example, imagine a mother seeing her toddler run towards the road, her initial reaction would be fear, to both the child getting hit and the cars on the road hitting her, and fear about her child getting hurt and love of her child overrides her fear of getting hurt herself to help her protect her child.
2. Emotions communicate to (and influence) others
Whether we like it or not often our body language, tone, and facial expression convey our emotions, and this can change other people’s behaviour for the good and the bad. For instance, imagine your Mum bringing out your least favourite meal, you might (accidentally) show some disgust or dissatisfaction with the meal, meaning she is less likely to make it in the future! Another example could be when we are talking to our partner about something we like, and we demonstrate excitement, often our partner gets excited too!
3. Emotions communicate to ourselves
Finally, our emotions communicate important information to ourselves, also known as a “gut instinct.” Our emotions can be key bits of data in telling us how we feel about someone or something, for instance if we get a “bad vibe” from a person, our emotions can communicate to us to keep our distance. However, a word of caution with this, sometimes we can treat emotions as if they are facts about the world, and it’s important that we keep ourselves in check by “checking the facts” in a situation, e.g. “If I feel unsure that must mean I’m incompetent”, we can “check the facts” by looking at whether or not other people would feel unsure in a situation, or looking at our own track record, have we been unsure and competent before?
Below I have attached a bit of a “cheat sheet” about feelings and their functions, have a look through the below table and see if any of these emotions and the problems associated with them ring true for you.
I hope you got something out of this post, and maybe next time when thinking “I never want to feel X again,” we can make some space for understanding why we have that feeling in the first place.
