Managing Strong Emotions Therapy Groups
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Accepting Clients for Our September Group!
8 Week Skills Group
Emotion efficacy is about how a person can experience and respond to a full range of emotions in a contextually adaptive, values-consistent manner. As such, emotion efficacy encompasses both the beliefs people have about their ability to navigate their emotional life, as well as their ability to do so. The more people can effectively experience difficult emotions, regulate their emotions through coping, and express their values, the higher their emotion efficacy.
By teaching individuals that pain can be faced - that it will not destroy or overwhelm them, and that it doesn't have to lead to more suffering or destructive behaviors - their motivation to tolerate distress will increase, opening the door to expanded choices for action. Through psychoeducation and skills training in an activated state, clients learn new ways of responding to difficult emotions.
Emotion efficacy is about how a person can experience and respond to a full range of emotions in a contextually adaptive, values-consistent manner. As such, emotion efficacy encompasses both the beliefs people have about their ability to navigate their emotional life, as well as their ability to do so. The more people can effectively experience difficult emotions, regulate their emotions through coping, and express their values, the higher their emotion efficacy.
By teaching individuals that pain can be faced - that it will not destroy or overwhelm them, and that it doesn't have to lead to more suffering or destructive behaviors - their motivation to tolerate distress will increase, opening the door to expanded choices for action. Through psychoeducation and skills training in an activated state, clients learn new ways of responding to difficult emotions.
In the moment of choice, clients are able to choose to mindfully accept the present emotional experience, enact a values-based action, and/or downregulate their emotions. Using EET skills, clients are able to effectively experience difficult emotions, recover more quickly from being emotionally dysregulated, break out of patterns of responding that are maladaptive, and express what they value in the face of distress - moment to moment.
As clients practice EET skills when they get triggered by painful emotions, new choices become easier and easier. In a brief time, they can develop a new relationship with their emotions, giving them increased emotion efficacy in significant ways:
- Power to experience themselves as distinct from their emotions
- Power to experience intense emotions, instead of reacting and avoiding
- Power to choose values-based action, even when emotionally triggered
- Power to choose strategies to downregulate emotion and keep from making difficult situations worse