Treatment of Emotional Dysregulation. Which Strategies to Employ?

When do our emotions become misguided?

Emotions, such as happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, guilt and despair, become dysfunctional when they hinder our ability to act adaptively. Maladaptive emotional regulation can dramatically affect our interpersonal and intrapersonal functioning. Therefore, effective, adaptive emotion regulation is critical for our well-being. Problems with adaptive emotion regulation may lead to various psychopathologies, including anxiety disorders, depression and substance abuse. To manage overwhelming feelings, you can receive treatment for emotional dysregulation.

What is Emotion Regulation?

Emotion regulation is the ability to exert control over one’s own emotions. It involves a set of processes that manage our emotions’ manifestation, strength, and duration.

Misguided Regulation Strategies

maladaptive emotion regulation strategies are 

• rumination,
• avoidance,
• emotion suppression

More than a century ago, Freud stated that emotional inhibition is dysfunctional. Subsequently, a substantial body of research maintained that emotion suppression was a potent contributor to mental ill-health.

Emotion suppression refers to forcing out uncomfortable, unacceptable, unpleasant emotions. It often happens through distractions, substance-induced numbing or directing strong emotions into physical activity.

Emotion suppression may decrease external expression and reduce the subjective experience of emotions in the short run. However, in the longer run, suppression often leads to detrimental physical and emotional outcomes.

Likewise, avoidance-escaping from or avoiding unpleasant or painful emotions and thoughts-is maladaptive in the long term and may perpetuate depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Paradoxically, the attempt to escape from or avoid emotions preserves and even increases emotional distress and suffering in the long run. Above all, avoidance is the lack of recognising and processing emotions. 

Alternatively, some people engage in rumination, or perseverative and repetitive negative thinking about their concerns. Similarly, to suppression and avoidance, rumination has an inverse relationship with problem solving. Furthermore, it is a perpetuating mechanism and fundamental feature of depression.

It is essential for good mental health to learn how to manage overwhelming feelings. Psychologists can help with treatment for emotional dysregulation.

Adaptive Regulation Strategies

Conversely, adaptive emotion regulation techniques have the opposite effect on mental health and well-being. These strategies include

• attention control,
• reappraisal,
• acceptance,
• problem solving

Attention control 

Attention control plays an important role in decreasing the adverse impacts of stressful events on people’s life. The prominent attention control theory of Eysenck (2007) claims that anxiety manifests in dysfunctional attentional control. Specifically, in addition to reducing attentional control, anxiety boosts concentration on threat-related stimuli, known as attention bias. Thus, it is critical for individuals with anxiety to exercise attention refocusing. Above all, attention control is our ability to select voluntarily what to pay attention to and what to disregard. 

Attention control is highly relevant to executive functions, including planning, focusing, decision making, task switching, reasoning and conflict resolution. 

Problem solving

Problem solving aims at modifying the effects of a stressful event through adjusting to stressors or eliminating them. It essentially involves brainstorming possible solutions to an identified problem and evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of the brainstormed solutions.  Studies demonstrate that a lack of problem-solving abilities may lead to anxiety and depression. Moreover, deficient problem solving is associated with eating disorders and substance abuse. Problem-solving skill training is a component of cognitive-behavioural therapies (CBT) designed to treat these disorders.

Reappraisal 

Reappraisal involves benign interpretations, or appraisals, of adverse events to transform their meaning and reduce their unfavourable impact on emotions. Several models (e.g. Beck’s, 1976) showed that maladaptive appraisals are at the core of anxiety and depression. Therefore, CBT for anxiety and depression emphasises reappraisal skill learning.

Acceptance

The concept of mindfulness has been gaining increasing interest. Although researchers have not yet completely understood and defined the mechanisms of mindfulness, they agree on its non-judgmental healing nature. Consequently, the acceptance strategy aims at recognising and accepting emotions without judging or altering them.

Imagery rescripting

Imagery rescripting is another fascinating adaptive emotion regulation strategy. Rescripting aims at updating and correcting recollections of negative or traumatic experiences, as memories do not represent events in a static way.

All these adaptive strategies have a similar effect of reducing distress and enhancing our ability to act adaptively.

To sum up, adaptive strategies, such as attention control, acceptance, reappraisal, problem solving and rescripting, may reduce stress and improve mental health. On the other hand, rumination, avoidance, and suppression are maladaptive emotion regulation processes that perpetuate suffering and anguish. With the help of talk therapy for the treatment of emotional dysregulation you can manage difficult feelings

Bibliography

Boehme, S., Biehl, S., & Mühlberger, A. (2019). Effects of Differential Strategies of Emotion Regulation. Brain Sciences, 9(9), 225. doi: 10.3390/brainsci9090225

Eysenck, M., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory. Emotion, 7(2), 336-353. doi: 10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.336

Moyal, N. (2014). Cognitive strategies to regulate emotions—current evidence and future directions. Frontiers In Psychology, 4. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.201