Balancing thoughts and feelings

In order to begin balancing your thoughts & emotions, it's necessary to examine the evidence that supports both sides of an emotion-stimulating event.

I have always thought in extremes. I have struggled to find the balance of the “gray area” between those two extremes. My thoughts wouldn’t be rational, and wouldn’t look for the middle ground. However; it’s important to note that your thoughts are NOT facts.

A skill I have learned through DBT Therapy is seeing the “bigger picture” and using “wise mind.”

Seeing the "big picture" is the opposite of filtering. This can be hard to do if you’ve spent your life narrowly focusing on just the negative evidence in your life. But you can learn to see the big picture by examining  evidence that goes against your distressing thoughts and feelings. These facts, which are often ignored by with overwhelming emotions, fill out the rest of the big picture and can often change how you feel about a situation. Then, with practice, you'll filter less of your experiences and become less overwhelmed by your emotions.

In order to see the big picture, use the following guidelines. Whenever you find yourself in a situation in you feel overwhelmed by your emotions, ask yourself these questions: 

1. What happened? 

2. As a result, what did you think and feel? (Be specific.) 

3. What evidence supports how you think and feel? 

4. What evidence contradicts how you think and feel? 

5. What's a more accurate and fair way to think and feel about this situation? 

6. What can you do to cope with this situation in a healthy way? 
   

Naturally, when you start to feel overwhelmed by a situation, first ask yourself what happened. This is the best place to start. Identify what it is that's making you feel upset. 

Second, identify your thoughts and feelings. Remember, your thoughts greatly influence how you feel.  But, if your thoughts about a situation are being filtered and you're not seeing the "big picture,” your thoughts are more likely to cause overwhelming, distressing emotions. 

Third, ask yourself what evidence supports how you're thinking and feeling about the situation. This is usually an easy question to answer. If you've spent your life filtering your experiences so that you only see the negative, distressing facts, it's easy to think of lots of reasons why you feel so distressed and overwhelmed. 

The fourth question, however, is usually new and challenging for people struggling with overwhelming emotions. Asking yourself to identify the evidence that contradicts how you think and feel about a situation requires that you view the situation in a new and deeper way. You need to examine more of the facts and evidence that affect your situation and make up your big picture. People often filter out the positive elements of their lives and ignore the facts that might change the way they feel about a situation. 

Keeping in mind the new evidence that contradicts the trigger thought, ask yourself whether there is a more accurate and fair way to think and feel about this situation. This is a good time to be mindful your emotions and to use radical acceptance. this exercise is designed to help you look at your emotional reactions in a new way; it is not designed to criticize you. Therefore, don't be critical of yourself. Try to be accepting of yourself and your emotions as you continue to see your emotions in a new way. 

In reality, this might not change how you feel right now, but it will help you notice how you could feel about this situation in the future. 

Finally you must ask yourself, “What can I do to cope with this situation in a healthy way?” Here is where you should draw from all the skills and techniques you've learned in this workbook REST strategy to help you relax, evaluate, set an intention, and take action.  For example, you could use some of the distress tolerance and self-soothing skills to calm her emotions, like talking to a friend or listening to some relaxing music. Also, one can use mindfulness skills here like mindful breathing or thought defusion. Or she could have used a coping thought, like "Nobody’s perfect; everyone makes mistakes." 

Obviously, using the questions in this exercise isn't going to magically change the way you feel right away. But, asking yourself these questions will help you recognize the facts that you'v been filtering out, and it will also show you the possibilities of how you might react to at similar situation in the future. Then, with practice, you'll start reacting to those similar situations in a new, healthier way. 

Seeing the big picture will also give you hope for your future.

Looking for evidence against overwhelming emotions is like taking off those dark sunglasses so that you can see the variety of colors in your life, and that's a hopeful experience. 

Increasing Positive Emotions 

Many people with overwhelming emotions discount their pleasurable emotions, filter them or never take the opportunity to experience them in the first place.  As a result, they focus only on their distressing emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, and they rarely notice their pleasurable emotions, such as happiness, surprise, and love. 

Maybe that's what you did before, but now you know that it's very important for you to begin noticing your pleasurable emotions.  As you continue to use dialectical behavior therapy to improve your life (which I definitely am), you'll want to find more ways of experiencing pleasurable emotions, if you don't have enough of them in your life already. This doesn't mean that you'll never experience another distressing feeling. That's impossible. We all have distressing emotions at different points in our lives. But your life doesn't have to be dominated by them. 

One very reliable way of focusing on pleasurable emotions is to create pleasurable experiences for yourself. 

FEELINGS-THREAT BALANCE (FTB-COPE) 

As you know, strong emotions usually carry an impulsive urge to do something. Anger and anxiety, in particular, make you want to do something to overcome a threat. Sometimes the threat actually requires action if there's a serious danger or if someone is trying to hurt you, but often your emotion is probably far bigger than the actual threat you face. FTB-Cope is a skill that can help you recognize the feeling-threat balance and then cope with the stressor appropriately. For example, on a scale of 1 to 10, is your fear and urge to avoid 10, is your fear and urge to avoid a 10 but the actual danger is only a 2? Or, is your anger and urge to attack a 9, while the provocation and threat only a 3? 

The FTB-Cope process will help you assess the actual level of threat versus the strength of your feelings. The bigger the gap between them, the more reason there is to cope rather than act on your emotions. The between a high intensity of emotion and a low level of actual threat is usually fueled by something called emotional reasoning—the human tendency to believe that strong emotions confirm some truth about a situation. 

For example, maybe you believe: 

• Intense anger means something really bad was done

• Intense anxiety means that you are facing something really dangerous.

• Intense shame means you have done something reprehensible. 

The problem with emotional reasoning is that emotions don't prove anything—they're just feelings. They are merely messages. Sometimes they are accurate, but sometimes they aren't. So how can you assess the actual level of threat versus what your emotions are telling you? 

Rather than acting on that impulse, do the following: 

1. Calculate the intensity of your feeling (0-10)

2. Calculate the actual threat level (0—10). 

3. If the feeling and threat level are in balance (the numbers are close), you may wish to take action based on values, wise mind, or problem solving.

However, if the intensity of the feeling is significantly higher than the threat, then don't act on your emotion. Choose a coping skill that you've learned to soothe your emotions.