others is an easy way to land in a secondary emotional experience. So, if you experience an emotion lasting more than 90 seconds (before something else prompts it), then you’re likely inadvertently making sadness stick around longer than it needs to. It’s actually a great clue! This is why it’s so critical to learn to pay attention and be able to identify, label, understand, and validate your emotions.
Paying attention to what you feel
Paying attention to what you’re feeling requires an openness and willingness to shine a light on your emotional experience. We know that when you look directly at an emotion, the intensity of it begins to decrease. If you’re doubtful, we encourage you to try this sooner rather than later. Identifying an emotion and validating it — recognizing how it makes sense and is valid — is a powerful and healing experience.
So, where do you start? In DBT we have a skill called mindfulness of current emotion, and we break it down into steps using the acronym SUN WAVE NO NOT. Using this skill will help you identify the primary emotion and label it. Follow the steps in this section to do so.
SUN
Sensations: All emotions have associated sensations. Your body holds important clues about how and what you’re feeling. Briefly scan your body, starting at your head and moving down to your toes. Do you feel a tightness or clenching of your jaw? Warmth in your cheeks? Throbbing in your head? Tears in your eyes? Tightness in your chest? Butterflies or a sinking feeling in your stomach? Tightness or clenching of your hands?
Urges: All emotions have associated action urges. This makes sense, as one of the functions of emotions is to motivate action. For example, when you feel fear, you may have the urge to run, fight, or freeze. When you’re sad, you may feel the urge to curl up, cry, or isolate. When you feel shame, you may want to hide. When you’re angry, you may have the urge to yell or hit or throw something; other people may cry when they are angry. We don’t all have the same action urges, but they tend to be similar.
Name the emotion: Once you have identified your body sensation and your urges, you typically have enough information to name the emotion. We know that once you can name the emotion, it begins to decrease in intensity. That often occurs because it gives you some space between your own experience and what you’re feeling. This also helps you find the primary emotions, which may have been hidden beneath a secondary emotion. (We discuss primary and secondary emotions earlier in this chapter.)
WAVE
Once you have named the emotion, your task is to ride it like a WAVE. When a primary emotion runs its course, you’ll experience it like a wave, first lower in intensity, building up to the peak or the crest of the wave, and then slowing, decreasing in intensity until you return to baseline, or the waves settle on the shore. The way to ride the wave is to use your mindfulness “Observe and Describe Skills,” which we cover in more depth in Chapter 9. What you’ll do is notice and describe your sensations and your urges, which you’ve already identified in the SUN part of this practice (see the previous section). Notice and describe without judgment the facts of your experience. For example, you may notice your thoughts moving quickly, a sensation of butterflies in your stomach, your face feeling red, and tears running down your cheeks.
You’ll notice that this is a somewhat boring process as there are no judgments or editorials about your experience that pull in the past or the future. This is what helps your emotions simply run their course. Repeat this process until the intensity of your emotions becomes more manageable.
NO NOT
The final phase consists of NO NOT:
NO: No suppressing your emotions. No enhancing your emotions. This means that you don’t tell yourself that you can’t feel something, and you don’t do things that increase the intensity of an unwanted emotion such as judging and invalidating it. You can think about this phase as consisting of things to avoid when you are riding the WAVE from the previous section.
NOT: As you ride the WAVE, remind yourself that you are not your emotions and that your emotions will not last forever. It may seem like a small semantic thing, but when you talk about your experience, it’s important to avoid saying “I am depressed” and instead say “I feel depressed.” When you indicate it as a feeling state, it signals to the brain that it’s something that changes. By definition, emotions change and fluctuate. The first statement communicates, “I am a person who is depressed; it is inherent to me and therefore is less likely to change.” It may seem small, but it makes a big difference when you’re working on experiencing emotions and allowing them to move through you. Sometimes when emotions are very intense, you may feel like they will never end. It’s important to note that primary emotions last an average of 90 seconds, which is far from forever, even if it feels like it.
Confronting Disproportionate Reactions
If you’re an emotionally sensitive person, by definition you feel things longer and deeper than the average person and you have a much slower return to baseline. This is simply your biology. You can think of it like the engine of a car. The engine in a Porsche and the engine in a Prius are very different in their capability to rapidly accelerate. What this means is that it isn’t uncommon for emotionally sensitive people to react more intensely and hold onto emotions longer. The problem with this is that it can increase your suffering and negatively impact your relationships.
People we work with have often said that they have been told that they are “too much” or that they always overreact. That kind of feedback can be very painful. If you struggle with this, the good news is that like a car with a fast engine, you can learn how to drive it; you can also learn to recognize when your reaction is too intense and regulate it. The following sections can help.
Realizing that your reaction may be overblown
If you’re an emotionally sensitive person, you need to accept, without judgment, that you may often have overblown reactions. Accepting this about some of your reactions will help you recognize when it happens, and that is the first step. In DBT, while we don’t love the term, we talk about two types of emotions, justified and unjustified. This may seem subjective, and in many ways it is. You’ll be the one who determines whether your emotions are justified or unjustified using a few guidelines from DBT. Again, this is not about judging your emotions, but about helping you cope when your emotions are leading to misery and suffering, and to then figure out what skills you can use.
