Emotion Regulation for Trauma: Overview
United States Department of Homeland Security
Key Points
- The main goals of emotion regulation are to identify and label specific emotions, understand the purpose of emotions, and provide the right conditions for emotions to stabilize.
- The purpose of emotion regulation is to increase awareness of emotions, increase acceptance of emotions, and effectively manage our emotions. Increasing awareness and acceptance of emotions is already a major component of managing them.
- The main goal of emotional regulation from a trauma-focused DBT perspective is to see and treat our emotions the same way you would treat a garden of flowers.
- Trauma-focused DBT has six specific interventions to nurture a garden of emotions. Each of these strategies is a metaphor for specific ways you would cultivate a real garden.
Materials Downloads
DBT for Trauma Online Training
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Transcript
So now let’s summarize five of the key points that we learned in this series on emotion regulation.
Point number one: the main goals of emotion regulation are to identify and label specific emotions, understand the purpose of emotions, and provide the right conditions for emotions to stabilize.
From a DBT perspective, emotions provide the following functions: communicate, connect, motivate, and influence. Emotions perform these functions both intrapersonally and interpersonally, as well as both verbally and nonverbally.