Some recent posts include: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills that Help Women Survive Stress and Are You Highly Emotionally Sensitive?

What do you do to get focused?

What helps you feel centered and present in the moment?

When you’re in a bad mood, what works to change it?

When have you actively done something to help manage feeling angry, stressed, or anxious? What did you do?

What do you do to distract yourself when you’re upset? What do you do to take care of and soothe yourself?

What emotion is the most difficult for you to deal with?

What helps you calm down when you’re upset?

What is hardest for you 1) asking for things you want or need from people, 2) keeping calm when someone tells you ‘NO’, or 3) sticking to your values, even if it means someone will be upset with you.

What negative emotion do you have most often?

Are there aspects of your life that you are currently avoiding dealing with?

Changing emotions, managing crisis, handling conflict and improving awareness of the present require knowledge of how you cope with pain and negative feelings. Attending to what has worked and what is most difficult for you is a step towards better understanding yourself and your need for additional skills.

Emotions are triggered by events in our environments or in our bodies. Something happens that starts the process of an emotional experience. This could be anything from rain outside to feeling sore from exercise.

It is our thoughts about an event, not the event itself, that determines the emotion we will experience. If it is raining, you might think “I hate the rain” or you might think “At least it’s not snow.” Those two different thoughts will result in very different emotions.

You will feel the emotion as physical sensations in your body. A few examples are that sinking feeling in your stomach, your heart racing, a lack of energy or a burst of energy.

Verbal communication is the ability to name and label the emotion. What does that sinking feeling mean? How about sweaty palms and a racing heart? The ability to name and label your emotions adds a feeling of control and actually can decrease their intensity.

Finally there is an action urge with each emotion. Fear causes us to want to run or hide, anger causes an urge to approach and attack, happiness to reach out to others.

Prompting Event: Something happens
Interpretation: What do you think about he prompting event?
Body Response: What physical sensations do you feel? How does your face change?
Verbal Communication: Can you name the emotion? Can you communicate it verbally to others?
Action Urges: What do you feel

Understanding the story of emotions is an essential step in beginning to change how you feel. You can begin to change how you feel by finding ways to have more pleasant experiences or by changing how you think about the events that are already happening in your life.

As you breathe in, you say to yourself: “Mindfully breathing.” As you breathe out, you say to yourself: “Letting go of X …” (here you insert whatever you’d like to have less of such as anxiety, tension, anger, judgments, perfectionism, etc.). You can select one thing to let go of and say that recurrently or let go of a whole series that comes to mind. Eventually, the practice often reduces to: Mindfully breathing, Letting go.

This breathing exercise can be done alone or practiced in a group. In a group one can go around the room with each member saying aloud what he or she would like to let go of. Those who don’t want to participate can say, “pass.” This can be done with several rotations. This tends to build a sense of group cohesiveness in addition to teaching a mindful breathing skill.

Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation

NAMI Child and Adolescent Mental Health announces:

“We are very pleased to have special guest, Pat Harvey, LCSW-C, co-author of Parenting a Child Who Has Intense Emotions: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Help Your Child Regulate Emotional Outbursts and Aggressive Behaviors on our April Children’s Conference Call with Dr. Ken Duckworth , NAMI Medical Director and child and adolescent psychiatrist, to discuss how to use dialectical behavior therapy skills to parent a child who has intense emotions. Pat is a licensed clinical social worker and has extensive experience in using Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) skills with children and adolescents.

Friday Children’s Conference Calls with Dr. Duckworth take place on the third Friday of every month. The calls are toll free and are scheduled from 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. E.T. To access the toll-free call, please dial 1-888-858-6021; access number 309918#. We hope that you will join us!”

Here is a sample of a Mindfulness exercise used for kids ages 2 1/2 to five.
“KIDS SINGING:

My mind is a clear, blue sky, my mind is a clear blue sky.

And I breathe in, and I breathe out.

And my mind is a clear, blue sky.

My mind is a clear, blue sky. And the feelings come, and the feelings go.

And my mind is a clear, blue sky. My mind is a clear, blue sky.”

For more on this story, follow the link: Preschoolers Practice Meditation

The following is a breathing exercise. Focus on bringing our awareness to our breathing. Learning to focus on your breath can help to anchor you in the present moment. Focusing in breathing also generally has a calming effect.

You will begin the exercise by just tuning in to the feeling of your breath coming in and out of your body. Just focus on breathing and knowing your breathing. Today’s exercise will be an exercise on counting your breath.
1. get settled in a comfortable position
2. focus attention on breath
3. inhale, filling lungs
4. exhale-count on each exhale from one to ten. For example: Inhale, Exhale, “one,” Inhale, exhale, “two” inhale, exhale “three” up to ten.
5. When you reach 10 start over at 1
6. if you lose count at any time, start over at 1

The first few times you do breathing exercises can feel awkward. Your mind may wander from your breathing or you may have judgments about your ability to stay focused. It is normal to feel that way. If you do feel awkward, just notice that feeling, and let it pass. If you get fidgety, just notice the urge to fidget and let it pass. If you lose count or find you are distracted by sounds, gently bring your mind back to your breath and begin counting at one. Trust in this moment and allow it to unfold without analyzing, judging or doubting it.

Reference:
Thich Nhat Hahn. The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation.

In order to change your thinking, you must focus attention on your thoughts.  Notice them as clouds floating in the sky.  They change and pass with time.  Bring your awareness to the content of your thoughts.  Observe each time a judgmental word or thought crosses your mind.  At this point you can either simply allow the judgment to float by or you can begin to change your thinking. 

To change your thinking, try to describe the situation, rather than judge it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  You can acknowledge whether something was helpful or harmful for you, acknowledge how it made you feel or simply describe to yourself the observable parts of the situation, without placing a value on them.

It’s very hard to think in non-judgmental terms, but it’s an important skill to learn.  Judgments have a significant effect on the way we feel.  They also can cloud our perceptions and leave us responding not to a situation as it is, but to a situation as we’ve judged it to be.