This semester, I (Dr. Veilleux) am teaching a graduate level seminar on Emotion (Regulation) in Psychotherapy. In this course, we review the basic research on emotion and emotion regulation, much of which published by social psychologists, and talk about how the basic research “works” in the context of psychotherapy. All five of the current LEAP graduate students are in this course, and four weeks into the semester it’s proving to be a fun class. Well, fun for me at least (the grad students may have a different opinion!). As we move through the course topics, we are developing therapy activities based on our readings, including in-session activities, psycho educational materials, and homework assignments. The only real stipulation is that the activity must be able to be used in the context of therapy, and must relate to the topic we’re discussing that week. I hope that by the end of the semester we will have a real arsenal of materials to teach, discuss and process about emotions. Although there are plenty of treatments that explicitly address emotion (e.g., the Unified Protocol, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy) and plenty of therapy manuals and self-help books with great emotion-related handouts, some of the topics we are covering in this course I’ve never seen addressed in published therapy materials. Of course, it’s worth noting that some of these topics are covered in therapy manuals or workbooks and I’m not aware if it, though I do I tend to buy any emotion-related therapy manual I see on Amazon.
One of the topics we’ve covered is emotion regulation motives. What drives people to regulate their feelings? Yes, the standard way of dealing with emotions is to pursue up-regulation of positive emotions (e.g., “I want to feel good!”) or down-regulation of negative emotions (e.g., “I want to feel less bad”) but emotions are more complex than that. As a class, we read a great new article on this, “Why do people regulate their emotions? A taxonomy of motives in emotion regulation” by Maya Tamir. It’s a really thought-provoking paper talking about the myriad of reasons people regulate (or maintain) their emotions, going much deeper than the simple notion that we want to feel pleasure and avoid pain. Most of the time that’s true, of course, but the paper talks about how sometimes we might want to feel bad, or prolong a bad feeling we’re already experiencing. Why would we do this? Maybe because there is some pleasure in it (e.g., feeling scared at a horror movie is kind of fun sometimes!), or maybe because some types of feeling bad are less painful than other types of feeling bad. And maybe emotions also serve greater functions. Emotions can help us feel close to people; how many close relationships exist without some sharing of emotions? Emotions help us understand ourselves and understand the world. Sometimes we might even (probably unconsciously) choose to experience a negative emotion because it’s consistent with who we think we are. Emotions can also help us do things–being a little angry probably helps us assert our needs with an annoying customer service agent, or to ask for a raise. Similarly, the Yerkes-Dodson law suggests that being moderately anxious is probably advantageous in many performance situations. If we’re not anxious at all, we might lose focus and act lazily, but if we’re too anxious, we won’t be able to concentrate on the activity at hand (note: the difficulty of the task almost certainly matters in the anxiety-performance relationship). The point is that specific emotions help us do things better, even when those emotions aren’t necessarily fun to experience.
I can envision having some interesting conversations with clients about why we regulate our emotions, and both the conscious and unconscious motives that drive our behaviors in emotional situations. My students and I have developed some worksheets that try to translate the ideas from the academic article into a format that we hope is digestible and understandable to clients. So far, we haven’t used these worksheets with clients, though I suspect that will happen at some point (perhaps a year or more down the line when some of the younger graduate students start seeing therapy cases). Will they be useful for clients, or for clinicians to be able to better understand their client’s emotional needs? We don’t know yet, but we’re sure enjoying the process of figuring it out!
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