DBT For Dummies. Gillian Galen

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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.

      

If you can pay attention to what you’re feeling and shine a light on the experience, as challenging as it may be, it will actually begin the process of decreasing the intensity of that feeling. It’s a big ask, we know. Sometimes your emotions will be too intense to start observing; when that is the case, you’ll start by using distress tolerance skills (discussed in Chapter 11) to decrease the intensity of the emotion before looking more closely at how you’re feeling. It can be tempting to stop after using a distress tolerance skill, but when you do, you’re providing a short-term solution to get you through, but not creating any enduring change in how you feel.

      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

      

As you may have guessed from their name, primary emotions are the ones that you feel first. You can think of them as the first emotion that your brain produces after a specific prompt, an internal or external experience that creates the need for an emotion. Primary emotions are hard-wired and often have associated facial expressions that you can see across many cultures. (Note that one of the functions of emotions is to communicate to yourself and others.) In the field of study of emotion regulation, there is much debate about the number of primary emotions; some researchers believe there are four, five, eight, or ten. Dr. Marsha Linehan, the creator and founder of DBT, believes there are ten primary emotions; these are the ten that we will want you to keep an eye out for:

       Joy: A feeling of pleasure, happiness, or contentment

       Love: An intense feeling of deep affection

       Sadness: A feeling of sorrow or unhappiness

       Anger: A strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility

       Fear: A strong feeling that something or someone is dangerous or likely to cause harm or threat

       Guilt: A feeling of having done wrong, failed an obligation, or crossed a personal value

       Shame: A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the awareness of foolish behavior or behavior that crosses societal norms and that leaves you feeling ostracized or different

       Envy: A feeling of discontentment due to the desire to have a possession, attribute, or quality that someone else has

       Jealousy: A feeling of uneasiness from suspicion or fear of rivalry, or fear of something deeply important to you being taken

       Disgust: A feeling of revulsion or strong disapproval aroused by something unpleasant or offensive

      

Many of these emotions may be very familiar to you. We encourage you to look closely at two sets of emotions that are often less familiar and are frequently used incorrectly in common language. Look closely at the definitions of guilt and shame, and jealousy and envy. Better understanding the definition of these emotions will help you know how to label your experience.

      Secondary emotions

      Understanding your emotions would be a little easier if not for secondary emotions. Secondary emotions are where you may get tripped up. These emotions are most commonly the result of thinking about your primary emotion. Your beliefs, judgments, and attitudes about emotions move you into secondary emotions — for example, getting sad and then thinking that sadness is weakness and so getting angry. Sadness is the primary emotion, the one that makes sense in the context of what you just experienced, and anger is the secondary emotion resulting from your beliefs and judgments about sadness.

      

A primary emotion lasts an average of 90 seconds if we don’t apply a chain of thinking that turns it into a secondary emotion. The problem with secondary emotions is they can last a long time — hours, days, weeks, months. You can get stuck in secondary emotions, and those emotions tend to perpetuate themselves with ease. Feeling miserable is a great example of getting stuck in a mix of secondary emotions. One tricky thing about secondary emotions is that a primary emotion can, in fact, also be a secondary emotion. If your beliefs, judgments, and attitudes about sadness lead you to feel

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