Transcript
Speaker: I used to think the goal of emotional maturity was to stop having intense feelings altogether. Spoiler alert. That's not actually possible unless you are a rock. In which case, you wouldn't be listening to this.
Speaker: Welcome back to Friendless Sweet Bees. I'm your host, James Avramenko, and this is episode five. We are moving into a new module in our DBT exploration. We're looking at emotional regulation.
Speaker: And um right out the hop, I want to be really clear about what we mean by regulation, because I think that This word gets really misunderstood.
Speaker: um Emotional regulation doesn't mean having fewer emotions. It doesn't mean being calmer. It doesn't mean achieving some state where difficult emotions stop arriving.
Speaker: It means understanding what your emotions are doing and having the tools to work with them instead of being completely at their mercy. So for the last couple episodes, we were kind of in survival mode. and Distress tolerance is about, you know, really getting through that storm, using stop and tip and just making sure that, you know, that whole sort of disaster scenario just doesn't get worse.
Speaker: Self-soothing, radical acceptance, you know, these are these are being used for um repairing and sort of surviving what we might call the aftermath of it, right? Emotional regulation is going to be different.
Speaker: ah To keep the metaphor going, let's say it's about understanding the weather patterns. So, you know, why do storms happen in the first place? What are they made of? What makes some days more vulnerable than others?
Speaker: And what can I actually do, not just in crisis, but before and after to have a different relationship with my emotional life?
Speaker: So today we're going to be covering a couple different things. What emotions actually do, because like, they are tools, they have a function, and they're not just there to ruin your day.
Speaker: um We're going to look at how to name emotions accurately, because things like I feel bad just doesn't tend to be specific enough to be useful.
Speaker: We're gonna talk about checking the facts, um which is a skill for investigating whether your emotion fits what's actually happening or if it fits the story that you're telling yourself. And then we're gonna look at the PLEASE skill acronym, which um is,
Speaker: unglamorous, but genuinely important sort of daily maintenance checklists for emotional resilience. and It is also one of the most comedic acronyms in the in the program, so but we will get there.
Speaker: So I wanna start with something that I think um a lot of us have in common for a long time. And I mean a long time, um most of my life,
Speaker: I treated my emotions like problems to be fixed, you know, especially the really uncomfortable ones, you know, anxiety, um anger, things like that. um But, you know, if I was anxious, my job was to figure out how to stop being anxious, you know, just got logic it away, distract myself out of it power through it until it passed.
Speaker: And the implicit belief underneath all of that was having this emotion means something is wrong. Either something is wrong with the situation or something is wrong with me.
Speaker: um Let me be a little bit more specific about about another example of emotion. um When I first started therapy with my boy, Scott, um I came to recognize that I was terrified of being angry.
Speaker: um And I don't mean i was afraid of other people's anger. um If anything, I thought that anger towards me was a demonstration of love, but that's a different can of worms.
Speaker: um I mean, i was i was terrified of my own anger, of even acknowledging that I was angry um because I had had it repeatedly reinforced um that I was not allowed to be angry about whatever it was that had happened to me.
Speaker: ah Because i had been told that and and shown that to be angry meant that I was now the dangerous one. I was now the three. um Even if I was just expressing my feelings of anger and nothing else, no yelling, no aggression, just just saying I'm angry.
Speaker: Now I became treated as a problem and I completely internalized that. I decided, okay to survive this relationship, I need to never show my feelings. I i would just become that, you know, that happy-go-lucky, always laughing, nothing's problem. I'm so easy to get along with, you know, that that that facade.
Speaker: And, you know, I didn't want to be the problem. So I just made sure that I never was. So what did I do with the anger? i just pushed it down.
Speaker: but i just, you know, pretended I was actually feeling something else. You know, I'm not angry. I'm i'm tired. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. I'm i'm not angry. Everything's fine.
Speaker: Right? I just told myself, it's all fine over and over. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.
Speaker: But the anger didn't go away. It just built up and it came out in other ways. I would get pedantic and argumentative about things that didn't matter. I'd be really overly critical of myself, of other people, of of everything.
Speaker: you know um I would get into these depressive states, these really avoidant states. I drank, I smoked, I played video games for hours. I basically, I would just do anything I could to distract myself from the feeling that I wasn't allowed to have.
Speaker: And did it work? Of course it didn't.
Speaker: I think in hindsight, I needed to listen to that anger more because we have to realize anger is incredibly useful tool when applied properly.
Speaker: It's a really motivating emotion. It gets you moving, it gets you into action. It's telling you something matters. And it's telling you that a boundary has been crossed or broken.
Speaker: But instead of doing that, I would freeze and and I would remain frozen and and I had remained frozen for for for years of my life that I now can't get back. And you know yeah, I know, time passes regardless, um but you know I wanted to do so much and I couldn't because I was spending all of my energy pretending that I wasn't angry.
Speaker: And when I started to listen to that emotion, and when I started to listen to what the emotion was trying to say, that it's okay to be angry, that I could let the anger help me change things, that's when I actually did.
Speaker: um Because here's what I know now that I didn't then. Emotions aren't malfunctions. They're not glitches in an otherwise functional system. They're not evidence that something is wrong with you.
Speaker: They're signals, information. they it's It's data about what's happening inside you and around you. the yeah the There's a smoke alarm analogy that's really useful here. you know Sometimes the smoke alarm is going off because the house is on fire and that's genuinely useful information.
Speaker: You need to act on that. And sometimes the smoke alarm is going off because you made toast. But the alarm is still going off. It's still doing its job.
Speaker: It's detected something that might be dangerous. It's just, um you know, it's it's just wrong in this particular case. There's no fire. There's just toast. But either way, you you don't rip the smoke alarm out of the ceiling.
Speaker: You don't curse the alarm for going off. You just figure out whether there's actually a fire. And that's what we're doing with emotions. We're figuring out whether there's a fire. um you know What is the emotion responding to?
Speaker: Whether it it fits the situation or whether it's just toast. And you can only really do that if you stop treating the emotion as an enemy. um you know This brings me back to something that I wanna say really clearly, um because I think it's really important. you know anger um is is an emotion that often gets a really bad rap, right?
Speaker: um But anger isn't dangerous. Danger is dangerous. um What we do with anger is where things change.
Speaker: You know, you can be dysregulated and still be safe. You can be angry and still be safe. The emotion itself isn't the threat. It's just information.
Speaker: And I know I spent far too long treating it like an enemy that I kind of lost access to one of the most important emotions that we have.
Speaker: So what are emotions actually for? What do they do? A myriad of things, but three that I've identified. um that may or may not come as a surprise or maybe a reminder, you know.
Speaker: First thing is that emotions motivate action. um Every emotion comes with what DBT calls an action urge. It's a push towards doing something um or away.
Speaker: um So for instance, Fear says, you know, run, freeze, hide. Anger says, fight back, push, set a limit. um Joy says, stay, do more of this, share this with someone. You know, sadness says, slow down, withdraw, process, grieve, whatever it might be.
Speaker: um Now, the thing to remember is that the action urge isn't always the most effective action.
Speaker: Fear of an email is not the same as fear of a physical threat, um even if your nervous system treats them the same.
Speaker: But the urge is information. um It's telling you what the system wants, what it thinks it needs. And you can then choose what to do with this information.
Speaker: But first, you have to actually receive it, which means not immediately trying to suppress the emotion before it's told you what it came to say. Second, um emotions communicate to other people.
Speaker: You know, your face, your body language, your tone. All of it communicates your emotional state. And it does this whether you want it to or not. Tears signal distress or vulnerability.
Speaker: They tell the people around you that you're in pain and potentially need support. Laughter signals safety, connection, ease. It's an invitation. Anger signals that something feels like a violation.
Speaker: You know, a limit has been crossed. And even when we try to hide our emotions, and we all try to, to some degree or another, they will inevitably leak because they've been designed to be seen.
Speaker: they're They're literally part of how we communicate as social animals. um Before we ever had words, we had faces, right? You know? um I wish I had looked up the statistic, but i it's something like 75% of communication is non-verbal.
Speaker: So this is where, you know, emotions come into play. The third element here is emotions communicate to yourself. um And I think this one is actually probably the most interesting for me at least, right?
Speaker: Because emotions are telling you what matters to you. um If something genuinely doesn't matter, if you have no investment in the outcome, you don't have big feelings about it.
Speaker: The presence of a strong emotion means this thing is important to you somehow. What this means is when you're having an intense emotional reaction to something, that intensity is information.
Speaker: Not necessarily accurate information about what's happening outside of you, but accurate information about what's happening inside of you, about what you care about, what you're afraid of losing, what you're protecting.
Speaker: And that, that's worth paying attention to in my box. The takeaway here, and I wanna make sure this lands before we move on, your emotions are functional.
Speaker: Even the uncomfortable one, even the ones that feel disproportionate or embarrassing or that you wish you weren't having, they're doing something. They're not just evidence that you're broken.
Speaker: Okay, so skill one, Naming emotions accurately. Sounds easy. It's not. In fact, we are remarkably bad at it.
Speaker: Most of us will default to a handful of vague labels. I feel bad. i feel weird. I feel off. I'm fine. but Which almost always means I'm not fine, but I just i don't know what else to say.
Speaker: um But the problem with vague labels is that they're not actionable. I feel bad doesn't tell you anything that you can work with.
Speaker: What kind bad? Bad like you're overwhelmed? Bad like you're scared? Bad like you're angry at someone specific? Bad like you're grieving something? All of those feel completely different.
Speaker: All of them have totally different action urges, and all of them need something slightly different from you. So the more specific the name, the more useful the information.
Speaker: So bad might actually be anxious, overwhelmed, ashamed, frustrated, lonely, numb, scared, disappointed, hurt, resentful. you know Fine might be numb, resigned, cautiously okay, avoiding, managing.
Speaker: Upset might be angry, hurt, betrayed, disappointed, frightened. These distinctions matter, and here's why. When you name an emotion accurately, you separate it from yourself.
Speaker: You move from, i am a mess to, I am experiencing overwhelm right now. One of those is a statement about your identity. The other is a statement about your current state.
Speaker: And your current state is not permanent. Your current state changes, but your identity feels a lot harder to change. So naming accurately keeps it in the realm of something that you're moving through, not something that you are.
Speaker: An example for me um of trying to kind of name more specifically. I am a sporadic texter at best. I will be the very first to admit this um from from the long list of people I have texted.
Speaker: but but i I often don't know what to say right away. um So I'll usually, you know, I'll read a text, I'll think about a response, but by then the no notifications disappeared. So I forget that there's a text waiting. You know, it's, this is not a new story and this is not a unique story to me, but I still, despite myself, find that I get deeply annoyed when other people don't text me back.
Speaker: um which i I know, I know. ah You know, what example, recently, i reached out to a friend to just see how they're doing, to invite them out for a coffee, you know, just simple, how you doing? Want to grab a tea sometime, right?
Speaker: And I never heard back from them. And it annoyed the ever-loving shit out of me. i i I was angry. I i was insulted. you know, i I was hot, right? I was hot about it.
Speaker: You know, how they yeah how dare they not respond? You know I reached out, I make the effort, and they can't even be bothered to text me back.
Speaker: But then I sat with the feeling a bit, and I looked at the facts around the story that I was telling. And I realized that the feeling that was trying to speak wasn't actually anger.
Speaker: it was It was actually, it was concern, and it was also a little bit of shame.
Speaker: You know, there was concern about them. You know, are they okay? You know, ah hopefully they're not in their own funk and just not being responsive because they're struggling.
Speaker: Concern that just, you know, they're safe. And then shame. Shame of feeling ignored. um Feeling kind of, you know, small, replaceable. That feeling, that feeling of shame was actually just pretending to be anger.
Speaker: Because if I got angry, then I could get righteous. you know I could make it their fault. I could be the one who was wronged. I could you know get all the way into that story, right? But if I accepted that I was actually just feeling embarrassed, that I felt vulnerable for reaching out and not hearing back, I could then just soothe myself out of that pit and I could move on.
Speaker: And like, sure yeah, like i' I was still annoyed, but nothing like that initial reaction. And it came from this far deeper empathy for them that I had but before.
Speaker: Because I could see that maybe they were doing the exact same thing that I do all the time. Maybe they read the text, meant to respond, forgot. Maybe they were struggling. Maybe they just didn't see it. um But when I changed how I was identifying my emotions, the way I engaged with them changed.
Speaker: The anger kept me stuck in, this is about me being wrong. The concern and the shame let me see the whole situation more clearly.
Speaker: It let me be a little gent, you know both with them and with myself.
Speaker: Check the facts. This is a skill that investigates your emotion. Specifically, does this emotion fit the actual situation or does it fit the story I'm telling about the situation?
Speaker: And we talked about this a little in the mindfulness episodes, the difference between facts and stories. But check the facts brings it specifically into emotional regulation territory.
Speaker: So here's the process. There's sort of three core questions to it. Question one is, what are the actual facts? Not the interpretation. Not the story, just what literally happened.
Speaker: Not, oh, they hate me. What happened? They didn't text me back for three hours. It's not, I'm failing at everything.
Speaker: What happened? I didn't finish the task I planned to finish today. It's not, um everyone thinks I'm incompetent. Because what happened was, one person asked me a clarifying question about my work.
Speaker: Just the facts. The observable, verifiable things, not the meaning that you've put on top of them. Question two, what story am I telling?
Speaker: This is where your brain adds meaning and your brain is so good at adding meaning very, very quickly and often even without you noticing. The story on top of they didn't text me back for three hours might be they're annoyed with me. They probably don't want to be friends anymore. i said something wrong. i always do this. You know, the story on top of I didn't finish the task I planned to finish today might be I'm lazy.
Speaker: I never follow through. I'm just going to keep failing forever. This is why nothing ever works out for me. You know, these are stories and they might be true, but they might not be.
Speaker: At the end of the day, they're interpretations. They're not facts. And your emotional response is often responding to that story, not the facts. Question three, does my emotion match the facts or the story?
Speaker: So if your emotion matches the actual facts, if the facts genuinely warrant this feeling, then the emotion is justified. Validate it, you deal with it. If your emotion matches the story, but the facts are neutral or ambiguous,
Speaker: then you have an opportunity to look at whether the story is accurate and whether a different interpretation might actually fit the facts equally well.
Speaker: And to be totally clear here, this is not about invalidating your feelings. Feelings are real regardless. but understanding whether they're responding to facts or stories will help you figure out what to do next, right?
Speaker: This isn't all about just ignore it, repress it. This is about figuring out what to do with it. So example for me. You know, as you've probably become aware, I spend a lot of time in my head.
Speaker: You know, I'm a storyteller. so so So it's very easy for me to spin a little tale for myself. And then, of course, you add in the ransom note of diagnosed letters that I have, and I have a real predilection for escalating.
Speaker: More often than not, I have let the story get away from me. This can be as simple as a text message being misread and then suddenly I'm off to the races, right?
Speaker: Maybe I read it too quickly and miss a word or two. So now I've suddenly decided on some brand new context that doesn't even exist. um or or Or maybe, you know, because tone can be so god awful over text, I totally misread the intention behind the message.
Speaker: I mistake a joke for something literal or I read sarcasm where there wasn't any or I interpret shortness as anger when really they were just busy. And suddenly I am catastrophizing.
Speaker: You know, they said this, which means that, which means they're annoyed with me, which means they don't want to be friends anymore, which means I ruined everything.
Speaker: But if I take a step back, if I just look at the basics that I can observe, I can bring myself down. Instead of saying, oh, they said this means that means they hate me.
Speaker: I just say, okay, they said this. Now what? What are the actual facts? They sent a short text. That's it.
Speaker: That's the only fact. The story is everything I added on top of that. And the story might be wrong. So I get to decide how to respond. Maybe I just ask for clarity.
Speaker: Hey, I'm reading this as, google is that what you mean? Or you know maybe I just responded a more mindful way instead of reacting to the story I made up. Really, it's it's another way to make sure my emotions stay regulated and within that zone of tolerance. Because if I don't check the facts, I'm responding to a story.
Speaker: And stories can spiral. Facts are just facts. And facts I can work with.
Speaker: Last skill of the day. Please. but but After all that. We're gonna be talking about sleep and vegetables, but hear me up, okay?
Speaker: Please, P-L-E-A-S-E, is the daily maintenance checklist for emotional regulation. It's the boring stuff that actually prevents meltdowns.
Speaker: And I include this because we all know these things, and most of us are doing at least one of these really badly. but And the connection between doing them badly and being emotionally dysregulated is way more direct than I think we like to admit.
Speaker: So as I've said before, blessed Marsha Linehan loves acronyms and some of them are more ah forced than others.
Speaker: Please is admittedly one of the more forced ones, but we'll break down how it goes. So... yeah PL stands for treat physical illness.
Speaker: So if you're sick, you're in pain, or you know you're dealing with some kind of chronic condition, your emotional baseline is going to be lower. Your cap capacity is reduced, you're more vulnerable to big emotions and faster to dysregulate.
Speaker: Again, this is not a moral failing, it's biology. Your nervous system has less resources and ignoring a physical problem doesn't make you tougher.
Speaker: It just makes you more vulnerable. e stands for eat regularly. Blood sugar crashes lead to emotional crashes.
Speaker: When your blood sugar drops, your mood drops with it. You become irritable, more anxious, less able to tolerate frustration. Your brain literally doesn't have the fuel it needs. Hangry is real.
Speaker: yeah Eating regularly and eating enough, you know, not in some specific one diet fits all, just eating regularly and enough, that is foundational.
Speaker: It's way more foundational than we give it credit for. a avoid mood-altering substances. Alcohol, weed, excessive caffeine.
Speaker: These all have a cost on emotional regulation. Now, um you know look, I'm not saying never. and i'm I'm saying know the cost. Know what it does to your baseline the next day.
Speaker: Know what it does to your ah anxiety or your emotional stability and factor that in. S. S is for sleep enough. We all know this.
Speaker: We are all bad at this. Sleep deprivation is emotional vulnerability on hard mode. When you are sleep deprived, your amygdala, the emotional alarm system, becomes way more reactive.
Speaker: Your prefrontal cortex, the thinking reasoning part, becomes less active. So you are now running on a system that is literally better at having big emotional reactions and worse at regulating them.
Speaker: And yet, ah go to bed is what I'm saying, okay? oh E is for exercise.
Speaker: i know, I'm sorry. Movement. Gentle movement counts. You don't have to run a marathon. You don't have to go to the gym. Walking counts. Stretching counts.
Speaker: Dancing around your kitchen counts. Movement regulates your nervous system. It metabolizes stress hormones and it gives your body what fight or flight was gearing up for.
Speaker: Even 10 minutes of gentle movement makes a genuine measurable difference.
Speaker: Let me be the first to to admit my struggles around please. um You know, as I said before, we're all probably doing at least one of these poorly and and that's okay. Again, no moral failing.
Speaker: For me, exercise the bane of my existence. i i I get really rooted where I am. I get comfortable and then it becomes really easy to ignore.
Speaker: Um, and then I think, you know, oh, I should go for a walk, but because I've been so still and so rooted now I'm really sore. ha And if I get sore, then it feels like, oh, it would be a bad idea to exercise now because I'm really sore, which in case you tell yourself a similar story, it's total bullshit.
Speaker: That's a complete bullshit excuse story, but it is a story that I tell myself. and then it builds, you know, and then I get more irritable because I'm not letting off that energy.
Speaker: I'm holding it in my body and it has nowhere to go. I start to struggle to sleep because I feel still really wired. You know, my brain is tired, but my body isn't. So I just kind of lie there. and The other tools then become harder to apply.
Speaker: Tip feels harder. Self-soothing doesn't land the same way. Everything is just a little bit harder when I'm not moving my body. And, of you know, I'm working on changing it. I've i started walking more consistently again. I i noticed that I had used the the bad weather as an excuse, you know, it's raining, I can't go out. But with spring coming, I'm hopeful that things are changing.
Speaker: But, you know, who knows? And The thing about all the please skills, you know what you need. You know it will help. And sometimes you still don't do it.
Speaker: And that's no failing on your part. It's just hard, especially, you know, when you're already struggling, the thing that will help is often the thing that feels the most impossible. So, you know, I'm trying one walk at a time, you know, and some weeks they're better than others. And that's just kind of where I'm at.
Speaker: it's made It's moments like this that I think are reminders that you know the core, the true DBT program that I am very much not running here is is built to be ah taken over the course of months and months and months of repeated small practice. you know You're not supposed to just one day flip the switch and all the please skills work for you. you You're expected to and apply them really, really gently one at a time. So I want to make sure that whenever you're doing any kind of reflection on yourself, you're not taking it as some massive problem that you can't get them all right away. You're supposed to go slow and gentle um with all of this. So just be where you are and build from there.
Speaker: Because when it when it boils down to to the real root, I think please skills can be tricky because they appear simple. You know, they're unglamorous. They can feel obvious. You know, they feel like, yeah, duh, I know I should eat regularly and sleep enough.
Speaker: But knowing that doesn't make doing it easier, especially, you know, when you're already struggling, especially when the very things that would help your emotional regulation are the things that tend to go first when you're dysregulated.
Speaker: So I'm not going to tell you just be better at please and you know you'll feel more regulated because i know that it is not that simple. But I am going to tell you when I notice my emotional regulation getting worse, one of the first things I check now is please. Which you know which one have I been neglected?
Speaker: And is there one small thing that I can do differently today? Not all of them, just one of them. That's where to start.
Speaker: So let's do a quick practice. We're just going to name and check.
Speaker: Think about one emotion you felt today. Just one. Name it as specifically as you can. Not bad or stressed.
Speaker: Get as precise as you can. Now, What are the facts of the situation you're responding to? Just the observable things.
Speaker: What actually happened?
Speaker: Then what story might be sitting on top of those facts? What meaning have you added? Does your emotion match the facts or the story?
Speaker: You don't have to solve anything. You don't have to feel differently. Just notice the gap or the lack of gap between what's actually happening and what your emotion is responding to.
Speaker: And that's it.
Speaker: One question for the Which Please skill, if you improved it even slightly, would make the biggest difference to your emotional baseline?
Speaker: Not all five, just one. Pick the lowest hanging fruit. The thing that if you did it even just a little bit, your nervous system would have a little bit more to work with.
Speaker: And then if you want, try it just for a few days. See if you notice anything.
Speaker: And that is part one of emotional regulation. Remember, emotions are signals, not malfunctions. Even the uncomfortable ones, even the disproportionate ones, even the ones you really, really wish you weren't having.
Speaker: They are doing something. The question is what? So name them accurately because specificity gives you something to work with. Remember, check the facts, figure out whether you're responding to what's actually happening or to the story, and keep up with pleas.
Speaker: Not perfectly, not all at once, just incrementally. Because your emotional battery starts lower when you're not taking care of the basics.
Speaker: um As always, if you have questions, if you have stories, if you have things you wanna share, please email me, friendlesspod at gmail.com. um You can also message me on Instagram or TikTok at friendlesspod.
Speaker: All the links are in the show notes. But um all that aside, Thank you so much for listening to the episode. And as always, I really hope I'm going to catch you at the next one, but I'm not going to worry about that right now. And neither should you, because as always, that is then, this is now.
Speaker: So for now, I'll just say I love you and I wish you well. Fun and safety, sweet peas.
Speaker: Amen.
