Emotion Regulation for Trauma
United States Department of Homeland Security
Key Points
- Emotion regulation involves identifying and labeling specific emotions and understanding their purposes.
- The purpose of emotion regulation is to increase awareness and acceptance of emotions and manage them effectively.
- The main goal of emotion regulation from a trauma-focused DBT perspective is to treat our emotions like a garden of flowers.
Materials Downloads
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Transcript
Greetings, and welcome to the fifth video in this review of TF-DBT. In this video we will do a quick review of emotion regulation. So let’s get started.
So as you recall, the main goals of emotion regulation are to identify and label specific emotions as well as understand the purpose of emotions. So Emotion regulation involves a lot of psychoeducation, right? So what, What are emotions in the first place? What are some examples of emotions? What are these emotions called? And what’s the purpose of them? But another major goal of emotion regulation is to provide the right conditions for emotions to stabilize.
Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.,Reutter, K. (2019). The dialectical behavior therapy skills workbook for PTSD: Practical exercises for overcoming trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. New Harbinger Publications.
So what are the purposes of emotions? Well, From a DBT perspective, emotions provide the following functions: they communicate, connect, motivate, and influence. And the amazing thing about emotions is that they perform these functions both intrapersonally and interpersonally, as well as both verbally and nonverbally. So In other words, emotions help us communicate, connect, motivate, and influence ourselves as well as other people, and they do that sometimes with words but oftentimes without words. So emotions, as you can see, are pretty amazing things.
Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.,Reutter, K. (2019). The dialectical behavior therapy skills workbook for PTSD: Practical exercises for overcoming trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. New Harbinger Publications.