What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

The healthiest and happiest relationships tend to have one thing in common: Both people are emotionally available to each other.  So, I think it's worthwhile to define what it means to be emotionally available and contrast it with being emotionally unavailable in this first article about this topic (see my articles: Emotional Vulnerability as a Pathway to Greater Intimacy in a Relationship).

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

Basically, being emotionally available means allowing yourself to be open, honest and emotionally vulnerable with a loved one (see my article: Emotional Vulnerability as a Strength in a Relationship).

Being emotionally available means you're able to share your deeper feelings with another person who is close to you and you also make room for their feelings.

When you're emotionally available you're able to:

• Have deeper, more meaningful conversations with loved ones about yourself where you make yourself emotionally vulnerable.

• Allow yourself to get emotionally close to your loved ones.

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

• Take in your loved ones' experiences and be empathetic to their emotions, even if their experiences and emotions are different from your own.

• Allow your loved ones to comfort you when you're going through a difficult time.

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

• Comfort your loved ones when they're going through a difficult time.

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Unavailable?

Let's contrast emotional availability with emotional unavailability.

When you're emotionally unavailable you tend to:

• Be uncomfortable with deeper, more meaningful conversations with your loved ones about yourself because you want to avoid feeling vulnerable. Emotional vulnerability scares you and you want to distance yourself from it (see my article: Fear of Emotional Vulnerability).

• Limit how close you allow yourself to get to loved ones. This is often an unconscious defense mechanism (see my article: Understanding Emotional Withdrawers).

• Be unable to take in your loved ones' experiences or be open and empathetic to their emotions, especially if their emotions or experiences are different from your own.

• Get defensive if your loved ones want to comfort you when you're having a difficult time because it makes you uncomfortable. You might even deny to them (and yourself) that you're going through a difficult time because being emotionally vulnerable feels unsafe for you (see my article: Pretending to Feel Strong to Avoid Feeling Your Unmet Emotional Needs).

• Have difficulty comforting your loved ones when they're going through a difficult time. You might minimize or dismiss their feelings because you're uncomfortable with difficult emotions.

Why Do People Become Emotionally Unavailable?

There are many factors that contribute to a person's emotional availability or unavailability, including experiences in their family of origin as well as experiences in prior relationships.

If a person is raised in a family where family members are encouraged to feel and express their emotions, all other things being equal, they tend to go into relationships being more emotionally available.  

But if they were discouraged from having and expressing more vulnerable emotions, they learned that difficult emotions are "bad" and if they express these feelings, they're burdening others and they won't be supported emotionally.

Even worse, they might be shunned or punished physically or emotionally for having and expressing vulnerable emotions, so they learned to suppress these emotions.

These experiences are psychologically traumatic (see my article: Understanding the Impact of Trauma on Emotionally Unavailable People).

In many families boys are especially discouraged from expressing their emotions or for even having emotions.  From an early age they're told they need to "be a man" or "boys don't cry."  So they are shamed for their emotions (see my article: Shame is at the Root of Most Emotional Problems).

As adults, they might not even know what they feel--with the exception of anger because in these families boys are sometimes allowed to feel anger, which is the one emotion they might recognize in themselves as adults.

Next Article

I'll continue to discuss this topic in my next article where I'll discuss how to become more emotionally available with loved ones: How to Become More Emotionally Available.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and people in relationships.

I have helped many clients to learn to be more emotionally available in their relationships (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Somatic Experiencing: A Mind-Body Oriented Therapy

Somatic Experiencing is a mind-body oriented psychotherapy that was developed by psychologist, Peter Levine, Ph.D. 

One of the basic premises of Somatic Experiencing is that people have a natural ability to heal emotionally if they are provided with the tools. Somatic Experiencing recognizes that there is a mind-body connection, and traumatic memories are not just stored in the mind--they're also stored in our bodies as well.

Mind-Body Oriented Psychotherapy: Somatic Experiencing

Experiences of Being Retraumatized in Regular Talk Therapy:
When traumatic memories are triggered, they're often overwhelming for people. Regular talk therapy is often inadequate for dealing with trauma.

Years ago, therapists used to think that all clients needed to do was to "vent" about their traumas and they would experience an emotional release that would be curative. However, now that we know more about the mind-body connection, trauma experts know that not only is it not helpful to just have someone venting about their trauma--it can actually be a retraumatizing experience.

Why is this? When a someone recounts their traumatic experience, if he has not developed coping mechanisms (called "resources" in Somatic Experiencing) to deal with the trauma, he's just reexperiencing the same emotions and physical body sensations that he experienced at the time of the trauma. 

This assumes that the client is not completely cut off from his feelings, which is another type of traumatic reaction called dissociation. 

In effect, he is reliving the trauma and going around and around in the same trauma "vortex," so to speak. There is usually no healing going on in this situation.

Titrating Trauma Experiences in Somatic Experiencing:
Somatic Experiencing (SE) techniques allow the SE therapist to help the client titrate the traumatic experience into manageable pieces. 

The Somatic Experiencing therapist doesn't go directly for the most traumatic aspect of the experience immediately. As previously mentioned, the SE therapist makes sure that the client has adequate internal and external resources to call on before doing the trauma work.

Mind-Body Oriented Psychotherapy: Somatic Experiencing

Once the SE therapist and client begin processing the trauma, the experience is dealt with in manageable parts, often starting with what might have been happening that was positive just before the trauma. 

So for instance, to give a simple example, if someone was in a car accident, she might have been enjoying her favorite song on the radio just before impact.

Why is this significant?

The SE therapist helps the client to recognize where she is holding onto emotions in the body. Often, these traumatic emotions are "frozen," so to speak, in the body, without the client even realizing it.

So, to help clients to deal with the difficult emotions that are stored in the body, it helps to access internal resources.

So, in the above example, this client has also stored in her body the pleasant experience of listening to her favorite song. In effect, this is a positive resource that the client can use. Connecting to these pleasant feelings is one part, of many, that would help to fortify the client to deal with the trauma.

As part of processing traumatic experiences, in addition to helping clients to use both internal and external sources, the Somatic Experiencing therapist also helps clients to develop a greater emotional capacity to deal with the trauma before the worst part of the trauma is processed. In SE, this is called, metaphorically, developing a larger "container" for the experience.

What does this mean?

Well, if we think of pouring a lot of water into a small container, we know what will happen--the container will be flooded and the water will spill all over the place.

Similarly, Somatic Experiencing therapists recognize that people have "emotional containers" of various sizes.

Some people have larger "emotional containers" than others and they can absorb more emotional content. 

However, people who have been traumatized, by definition, have been "flooded" by emotional experiences that are too overwhelming for them and their "emotional containers" were not large enough. This is not a negative comment about the client. It is a recognition that we all have our limits.

It's the Somatic Experiencing therapist's job to help clients develop a larger "emotional container" in order for the client not to be flooded while processing the trauma in therapy. 

In doing so, Somatic Experiencing therapists help clients to become more resilient and better able to process the trauma without becoming retraumatized.

In Somatic Experiencing, after a client has been prepared by developing resources and a larger "emotional container," the therapist helps the client to titrate the experience through a process called "pendulation."

Somatic Experiencing and the Process of Pendulation
An example of this might be that the client has already learned to visualize a "relaxing place" in his mind's eye prior to processing the trauma.

Not only has the client learned to visualize this place, but he has also learned how to shift his emotional and physical state from one of high emotional activation, which would be too uncomfortable, to a relative state of calm.

Usually, after clients have experienced some degree of calm, they're willing to go back to processing the trauma, knowing that if they experience a degree of emotional activation that is too high again, they can go back to accessing the relaxing place.

The Somatic Experiencing pendulation process allows clients to be in control. Somatic Experiencing assumes that clients know innately what's best under these circumstances. The Somatic Experiencing therapist is there to teach and facilitate the process.

Does this mean that Somatic Experiencing is effortless and there is no discomfort? No, it doesn't. But it does mean that, as opposed to regular talk therapy, the Somatic Experiencing therapist works to ensure that the client is not overwhelmed and not retraumatized.

One blog post is not sufficient to cover Somatic Experiencing. To learn more about Somatic Experiencing, I suggest that you read Peter Levine's books, each of which are written in an accessible way for the general public. His first book is called Waking the Tiger, and his latest book is called In An Unspoken Voice.

About Me
I am a licensed psychotherapist, Somatic Experiencing therapist, hypnotherapist, and EMDR therapist in NYC.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Managing Your Emotions While Working Through Psychological Trauma

I have been discussing managing emotions and emotional intelligence in my last several articles:  

How to Develop Emotional Intelligence, How to Manage Emotions Without Suppressing Them

Developing Skills to Manage Emotions

Developing Emotional Management Skills With Experiential Therapy).

Managing Your Emotions While Working Through Trauma

In the current article, I'll be discussing managing your emotions while working through psychological trauma in therapy.

What is Emotional Dysregulation?

Emotional dysregulation refers to problems controlling or regulating emotional responses.  

Common Symptoms of Adult Emotional Dysregulation 

Emotional dysregulation can include some of the following symptoms:

• Crying for seemingly no reason
• Abrupt shifts in mood
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Shame
• Anger
• Problems calming yourself
• Problems soothing yourself
• Intense emotional reactions that are out of proportion to the situation
• Feeling easily overwhelmed
• Problems coping with stress
• Conflict in interpersonal relationships
• Impulsive behavior
• Substance misuse
• Compulsive behavior, including gambling, overspending, eating

Unresolved Childhood Trauma 

As I mentioned in a prior article, when childhood development goes well, children learn to manage their emotions with the help of their caregivers.  

However, when there is childhood neglect or physical, emotional or sexual abuse, this is traumatic, and if children don't get help from their caregivers, they often experience difficulty managing their emotions.

How a History of Unresolved Childhood Trauma Affects Adults

Without assistance, traumatized children often grow up to be traumatized adults who have problems with emotional dysregulation.

When this occurs, these adults have problems dealing with adversity in their personal or work-related relationships because they feel easily overwhelmed.  

Some people become so overwhelmed that they experience a trauma response of either fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

Clinical Vignette: Managing Your Emotions While Working Through Trauma

The following vignette, which is a composite to preserve confidentiality, illustrates how clients in trauma therapy learn to prepare for processing trauma by developing coping skills and strategies beforehand:

Sara

When Sara began experiential therapy to work on unresolved childhood trauma, she was told by her therapist that there is a preparation phase for doing trauma work.

The preparation phase consisted of helping Sara to develop the necessary coping skills and strategies to help her with any uncomfortable emotions that might come up during a therapy session or between sessions (see my article: Developing Coping Strategies in Trauma Therapy Before Processing Trauma).

At first, Sara felt a little disappointed to hear that she and her trauma therapist wouldn't delve right into her traumatic memories.  She had waited a long time to come to trauma therapy for the unresolved trauma which affected her ability to trust in her partner.  She wanted to overcome her unresolved trauma as soon as possible. She didn't want to wait.

However, her therapist provided Sara with psychoeducation about emotional triggers that could come up during or between sessions and her therapist wanted Sara to be prepared to deal with those triggers if they came up.

Sara was familiar with triggers because she often found herself reacting to stories on TV or in movies where someone was being assaulted.  Those scenes brought back painful memories of being hit by her father.

The first resource her therapist helped Sara to develop was the Relaxing Place Meditation (also called the Safe Place meditation), which allowed Sara to shift her awareness from any difficult emotions to a calm place so her mind and body would be soothed and she could deescalate from anxiety or any other uncomfortable emotions.

Her therapist also helped Sara to develop a resource called imaginal interweaves, a concept from Attachment-Focused EMDR therapy, where Sara named people in her life that she felt close to whom she could imagine as nurturing, powerful and wise figures if she felt the need to imagine them during trauma processing.

Sara also developed other coping strategies on her own, including attending yoga regularly and working out at the gym for stress management.

When Sara began processing her childhood trauma with EMDR therapy, she was glad her therapist prepared her beforehand with resources because she used all of those coping strategies to manage her emotions between sessions.

She also found many of these coping strategies useful during her daily life when other everyday stressors came up.

Processing the trauma with EMDR went a lot smoother because of the preparation, and Sara learned valuable emotional regulation skills to use in her daily life.

When to Seek Help in Trauma Therapy

If you have attempted to deal with emotional dysregulation and unresolved trauma on your own and you haven't been able to overcome your problems, you could benefit from seeking help from a licensed mental health professional who is a trauma therapist.

Managing Your Emotions While Working Through Trauma

Remember: Your unresolved trauma and emotional dyregulation don't define who you are (see my article: You Are Not Defined By Your Psychological Trauma).

Working with a trauma therapist can help you to develop the necessary skills to manage your emotions and work through unresolved trauma (see my article: Experiential Therapy, Like EMDR, Helps to Achieve Emotional Breakthroughs).

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I am a trauma therapist who works with individual adults and couples (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

I have been focusing on managing emotions and emotional intelligence in my last three articles (see my articles: How to Develop Emotional Intelligence, How to Manage Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them and Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions).  Those previous articles include self help techniques.  

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

The current article focuses on how experiential therapy can help if self help techniques don't work for you (see my article: Experiential Therapy and the Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

What is Experiential Therapy?

Experiential therapy is a broad range of mind-body oriented therapies, which include:

• Somatic Experiencing (SE): Mind-Body Oriented Therapy: Somatic Experiencing

• EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): Experiential Therapy, Like EMDR, Can Achieve Emotional Breakthroughs

• Parts Work (also known as Internal Family Systems, Ego States Therapy): How Parts Work Can Empower You

• AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy): What is AEDP?

• Hypnotherapy (also known as clinical hypnosis, hypnosis): What is Clinical Hypnosis?

Each of these modalities work in a different way, but what they all have in common is that they use the mind-body connection.

Rather than just talking about your problems in an intellectual way (as is usually the case in regular talk therapy), experiential therapy helps you to make the connection between your mind with your body to get to emotions that are often unconscious (out of your awareness).  

In that way, experiential therapy tends to be more effective than regular talk therapy (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy).

Experiential therapy is also used to help clients to overcome emotional trauma, including shock trauma and developmental trauma.

How Does Experiential Therapy Help to Manage Emotions

Since all experiential therapy works with the mind-body connection, clients learn to identify and manage their emotions.

For instance, many people come to therapy with emotional blocks.  These blocks are often unconscious.  

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

Emotional blocks often occur due to past negative experiences and unresolved emotions, including emotional trauma.

Once they are uncovered, these blocks usually involve negative feelings about the self.  Common examples are "I'm not good enough" or "I'm not lovable" or other similar feelings.

But since the blocks are often unconscious at the start of experiential therapy, clients are unaware of them at the start of them at first.  When they come to therapy, these clients might only have a vague sense that something is wrong, but they don't know what it is.

An experiential therapist attunes to clients and listens for the underlying unconscious roots to the problem.  She will also help clients to develop a felt sense of the problem by asking clients to feel the sensations related to the problem in their body (see my article: What is the Felt Sense in Experiential Therapy?).

Many clients can sense into their bodies to identify emotions, but many others can't.  When clients can't sense emotions in their body, an experiential therapist knows that this is part of the block and works in an empathetic way to help clients to develop this skill.

Clients who are unable to identify emotions often sense a difficult or uncomfortable sensation.  From there, the experiential therapist starts where the clients are at that point and helps clients to differentiate sensations into specific emotions like anger, sadness, frustration, contempt, shame, and so on.

Being able to detect emotions on an experiential level is different from having intellectual insight into these emotions.  It means actually feeling it as opposed to just knowing it in a logical way. 

This is an important distinction between regular talk therapy and experiential therapy because change occurs with the combination of intellectual insight and emotional awareness.

Clinical Vignette: Developing Skills to Manage Emotions With Experiential Therapy

The following clinical vignette which, as always, is a composite of many cases to protect confidentiality is an example of how experiential therapy can help a client learn to identify and manage emotions as well as work through unresolved trauma:

Ed

After Ed's wife gave him an ultimatum to either get help in therapy or she would leave him and take their children with her, Ed began therapy with some ambivalence (see my article: Starting Therapy: It's Not Unusual to Feel Anxious or Ambivalent).

Ed told his therapist that he often yelled at their young children when he got upset and then regretted it later because it frightened them.  He said he tried various self help techniques, like trying to pause by taking a few breaths, but his emotions often overrode any attempts he made to keep from losing his temper.

Initially, Ed was unable to identify the emotions involved when he got upset. He just knew that he felt overwhelmed, but he couldn't identify the emotions involved.

His experiential therapist provided Ed with psychoeducation about experiential therapy and the mind-body connection.

Over time, she helped Ed to go back into a recent memory where he became upset with his children. She helped him to slow down so he could feel in his body what he was experiencing at the time.  

At first, Ed had difficulty detecting physical sensations or emotions in his body, so his therapist helped him to develop a felt sense of his experiences by using a technique known in hypnotherapy as the Affect Bridge (also known in EMDR therapy as the Float Back technique).

One of the emotional blocks they encountered occurred when Ed had a memory of himself at five years old when his father told him, "Big boys don't cry."  There were other times when his father scolded him when Ed got angry or when he made a mistake.  

As she listened to Ed's history with his father, his therapist realized that these experiences resulted in Ed numbing his emotions from an early age which was why he was having problems identifying his emotions.

Using Parts Work, his therapist helped Ed to develop compassion for his younger self.  He could look at his own five year old son and realize just how young he was when his father shamed him (see my article: Developing Curiosity and Self Compassion in Therapy).

Developing self compassion was an important part of Ed's therapy and, over time, feeling compassionate towards his younger self enabled Ed to get to the underlying emotions that had been numbed for many years.

Gradually, Ed was able to detect sadness when his throat felt constricted, anger when his hands were clenched and fear when his stomach was in knots (these are examples of how one particular person experiences these emotions and not universally true for every person).

As he continued to work in therapy on identifying and managing his emotions, Ed realized that when he got upset with his children, he was not only experiencing anger, he was also experiencing fear.  Fear was the underlying emotion at the root of his upset.

By then, Ed was curious enough to question why he felt fear when he was upset with his children. By sensing into his experience using the mind-body connection, Ed realized that fear was related to his childhood experiences with his father.  

He realized that he felt the same fear and sense of helplessness in the present that he experienced when he was a child (see my article: How Traumatic Childhood Fears of Being Helpless Can Get Triggered in Adults).

He realized that, although his father never said it directly, his father communicated to Ed that whenever Ed was sad or angry or made a mistake, Ed was allowing himself to be vulnerable to being ridiculed or worse.  

In other words, what was communicated to Ed was that so-called "negative emotions" or making a mistake was dangerous.  

This was a pivotal moment in Ed's therapy.  He realized that when his children made mistakes, which could mean making a mistake in their homework or getting an answer wrong, this sense of fear and vulnerability to danger were triggers that rose up in him without his awareness (see my article: Becoming Aware of Emotional Triggers).

Underneath his anger and fear, he sensed his intention to protect them, but instead of coming across as protective, he came across as harsh and critical, which was scaring them.

Once Ed learned to detect these emotions, he was able to stop himself from yelling at his children.  Having those physical cues he learned in experiential therapy allowed him to calm himself first so he could respond to his children more empathetically.

After he learned to manage his emotions, Ed worked on his unresolved childhood trauma with EMDR therapy so he was no longer triggered in this way.  

The work was neither quick nor easy, but once Ed worked through these issues, he no longer felt triggered.

Conclusion

Experiential therapy can help you to develop skills to manage your emotions.

Regular talk therapy can help you to develop intellectual insight into your problems, but problems often don't change with insight alone.  Change occurs on an emotional level.

This is an important distinction between talk therapy and and experiential therapy: With experiential therapy you can develop both insight as well as an emotional shift which enables you to make changes.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples, and I have helped many clients to manage their emotions and work through unresolved trauma (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions

In my last article, How to Manage Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them, I described the difference between managing emotions (also known as emotional regulation) and suppressing emotions.  The current article discusses skills that can help you to manage your emotions.  

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions

As I mentioned in my prior article, if you never learned how to regulate your emotions, you can learn emotional regulation skills with practice and patience.

The following skills can help you to self regulate your emotions:

• Practice Pausing and Taking a Breath: Emotions can come up in a fraction of a second. You don't choose your emotions, but you can learn to choose how you respond to them.  Practice taking a pause and taking a breath before you react.  This will give you time to consider how to respond instead of react (see my article: Learning to Relax: Square Breathing).

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions

• Practice Noticing What You're Feeling in Your Body: Emotions occur in the body.  Even when you can't identify what emotions you're experiencing at first, you can notice what's happening in your body: 

• Is your jaw tight? Are your hands clinched? 
• This could mean you're feeling angry. 

• Do you feel a tightness and a welling up in your throat? 
• Maybe you're feeling sad.

• Practice Staying With the Sensations in Your Body and See If You Can Identify Your Emotions:  If you slow down, be patient and stay with the physical sensations in your body, you can identify the emotions you're experiencing with practice.  This often takes time if you tend to be unaware of what emotions you're feeling (see my article: The Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

• Acknowledge Your Emotions: Whatever emotions you're experiencing, acknowledge them. By acknowledging them, it doesn't mean you like them or you want to feel this way. It just means that you are aware that this is what you're feeling in the moment (see my article: Learning to Experience Your Emotions).

• Make a Choice About How to Respond: Unlike reacting to emotions without thinking, when you respond, you're actively choosing what you want to do.  This might not happen immediately, especially if the emotions are strong.  You might need to pause and take several breaths until you feel calm enough to respond.  So, you might choose to wait until you're calmer before you respond (see my article: Responding Instead of Reacting).  

Next Article:

In my next article, I'll discuss how Experiential Therapy can help you to manage your emotions.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples, and I have helped many clients to learn emotional regulation skills (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?)

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

How to Manage Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them

Everyone experiences emotions. They are a normal part of everyday life whether you feel sad, angry, frustrated, happy, disappointed or any other emotion.

Although everyone expects to feel emotions, some people have problems regulating their emotions.  

How to Manage Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them

Often this is because they never learned emotional regulation.  But the good news is that you can learn to regulate your emotions by developing emotional regulation skills and strategies.

What is Emotional Regulation?

As I mentioned in my article,  How to Develop Emotional Intelligence, emotional intelligence involves:

• Developing self awareness
• Managing emotions
• Picking up on social cues
• Maintaining relationship

Emotional regulation is the ability to control the intensity of emotions.  With emotional regulation, not only do control the intensity of your emotions, but you also know how to express your emotions.

For many people this can be especially challenging with difficult emotions.  

Emotional regulation doesn't mean avoiding or suppressing emotions.  On the contrary, avoiding or suppressing emotions often makes them even more intense.

Emotional regulation is the extent to which you stay calm and collected when you experience difficult emotions.

People who have a high degree of emotional intelligence are good at regulating their emotions. They are aware of their internal experience as well as the experience of others.  

These people experience distressing emotions just like everyone else but, over time, they have developed emotional regulation skills and strategies so they can regulate their emotions.

What is Emotional Suppression?

Emotional suppression occurs when someone pushes uncomfortable emotions out of their awareness.  Rather than dealing with these emotions, a person who uses emotional suppression either distracts themselves or pushes these emotions down.

Some people suppress emotions by distracting themselves by watching TV, participating in online activities, watching pornography or other distracting activities.  

Others numb themselves emotionally by drinking excessively, using illicit drugs, overeating, gambling compulsively, overspending, engaging in sex compulsively and so on (see my article: Changing Maladaptive Coping Strategies That No Longer Work For You: Avoidance).

Why Do People Suppress Emotions?

Many people suppress uncomfortable emotions like anger, sadness, fear, disgust and contempt because they don't know how to manage them.

It's often the case that these people never learned to experience uncomfortable emotions when they were growing up.  Usually this is because they grew up in a household where their family discouraged any signs of discomfort around difficult emotions.  

Under healthy conditions, children learn to tolerate uncomfortable emotions in an age-appropriate way with the help of their caregivers.  

For instance, a child, who has to leave the park with her mother when it's time to go home, feels upset, but she is soothed by her mother (or father) so that the child's emotions don't become overwhelming.

Over time, this same child learns how to soothe herself, which is called self soothing so that she develops this emotional regulation skill over time.

But a child who has no one to soothe her or, worse still, is told, "Don't be a baby!" or "Stop crying!" or "You have no reason to be upset" doesn't learn how to regulate emotions. 

This is a form of childhood emotional neglect which is traumatic for the child (see my articles: What is Childhood Emotional Neglect? and Overcoming Your Unresolved Childhood Trauma).

That child suppresses her emotions because she's being told that these emotions are uncomfortable for the parents. This is the only way for this child to survive in a dysfunctional family where uncomfortable emotions are suppressed, numbed or expressed in inappropriate ways.

Emotional suppression becomes the way this child continues to deal with uncomfortable emotions when she becomes an adult.  This often results in problems in personal relationships as well as problems at work when she can't deal with uncomfortable feelings.

What Are Some of the Consequences of Emotional Suppression?

As previously mentioned, emotional suppression can also result in emotional numbing with alcohol, drugs and other forms of abuse which creates its own problems.

Emotional suppression can also result in medical problems due to the mind-body connection. This is because, even though the difficult emotions might be out of someone's conscious awareness, they're not gone.  So, it's possible to develop headaches, stomach problems, elevated blood pressure and other related medical issues.

There have also been studies that reveal that over time emotional suppression can shorten a person's lifespan.

The Benefits of Managing Your Emotions

It's important for your own well-being, your personal and work-related relationships, and your health to learn to manage your emotions.

Whether you do this on your own or you seek help in therapy, most people can learn to manage their emotions.

Next Article:

In my next article, I'll discuss useful strategies you can learn to manage your emotions.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

I have helped many clients to learn how to manage their emotions and overcome unresolved trauma (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

How to Develop Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, attune to, and manage your emotions in healthy ways. 

When you have emotional intelligence, you're able to recognize your own emotional state as well as the emotional states of others.

Developing Emotional Intelligence

In many ways, emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), is even more important than intelligence quotient (IQ) with regard to being attuned to yourself and others. When you're attuned to your own emotional state and the emotional states of those around you, you're more likely to build successful relationships in your personal life as well as in your career.

Emotional intelligence includes 

• Developing self awareness, 
• Managing emotions
• Picking up on social cues 
• Maintaining relationships

• Developing self awareness: When you're self aware, you recognize how your emotions affect your thoughts and behavior. You know your strengths and challenges and you feel confident.

• Managing your emotions: Part of emotional self management is being able to manage your emotions, thoughts and behaviors in a healthy way. You don't behave impulsively. You're able to take charge, when appropriate. You're able to keep your commitments. You're also able to adapt to changes in your environment, which is so important in our ever-changing world. 

• Picking up on social cues: Emotional intelligence enables you to pick up on social cues in your environment. You recognize your needs as well as the needs of those around you. You feel comfortable in most social situations. You also recognize the social dynamics in personal and work-related group settings.

• Developing and maintaining relationships: Emotional intelligence allows you to develop and maintain personal and work-related relationships, communicate well with others, influence people, manage conflict, and interact well in group settings. More than ever, businesses are now evaluating their employees on the basis of their emotional intelligence at work.

Ideally, emotional intelligence is a set of skills that you learn as you're growing up. However, depending upon your particular circumstances when you were growing up, you might not have learned to develop these skills. 

As a result, this could be causing significant problems in your personal and work-related relationships. 

But it's never too late to develop these skills, and many people come to therapy because they have had problems related to one or more areas where they lack emotional intelligence.

Clinical Vignette
The following scenario is a composite of many cases with all identifying information removed. This vignette illustrates how someone who has not developed emotional intelligence can learn to develop these skills in psychotherapy:

Bob:
Bob was a man in his early 30s. When he began psychotherapy, he had just received his annual performance review at his new company, and he was very disappointed to learn that his boss, Gregg, was not pleased with how Bob interacted with others at work. 

While Gregg praised Bob for his technical skills, he told Bob that he needed to improve how he interacted with his colleagues and senior management. He felt that Bob was too aloof and isolated at work, and he was not a "team player."

Gregg told Bob that this was not just his opinion--he had also received this feedback from Bob's peers and other managers at the company. He told Bob that his potential success at the company depended on Bob learning to develop emotional intelligence on the job. He recommended that Bob read Daniel Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence. 

Gregg also told Bob to consider getting emotional help to overcome whatever emotional barriers might be getting in Bob's way from forming good interpersonal relationships at work.

Bob was also experiencing difficulty forming personal relationships. He recognized that this was a lifelong problem, but he didn't know what to do about it. 

Whenever he tried to form personal relationships, whether they were friendships or romantic relationships, they never lasted beyond a brief period of time. This left Bob feeling very lonely and lacking in self confidence. He had a couple of buddies that he went with to sports events, but he didn't have any close relationships.

Bob often felt that there was "something missing" in him that caused him to have such difficulties in his relationships, but he didn't know what it was. 

Until his boss mentioned the term "emotional intelligence," Bob was completely unaware of this concept. But as he started reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, he realized that he lacked these interpersonal skills, and he very much wanted to develop them.

When Bob began psychotherapy, he had very little awareness of his emotional state at any given time. He grew up in a household where his parents demonstrated very little in terms of their own emotions, and they didn't talk about emotions at all. 

Education was very important to them, and they encouraged him to do well in school. When Bob's teachers told his parents that Bob had problems forming friendships, they dismissed this as unimportant. As long as Bob got excellent grades, they were happy and they told him not to be concerned about friendships.

Bob's therapist began by helping Bob to recognize his own emotions. When he started therapy, Bob had only the vaguest notion of his emotions. 

Generally, he recognized when he felt "good" or when he felt "bad," but he couldn't distinguish whether "good" meant that he felt content or elated or if "bad" meant that he felt sad or angry.

Bob's therapist helped Bob to distinguish his emotions based on what Bob was feeling in his body. 

For instance, he learned to recognize that when his stomach was clinched, he often felt fearful. He also learned to identify other emotions based on what he was feeling physically. Gradually, he began to distinguish fear from anger or sadness. He also recognized that sometimes he felt more than one emotion at a time, which was confusing to him at first.

Bob's therapist also worked with him to begin to pick up on social cues in his work environment. Prior to this, Bob didn't pay attention at all to the emotional environment at work. 

He was emotionally disconnected from the environment and from how his colleagues were feeling at any given time. 

Over time, working with his therapist, Bob began to learn how to read "body language" with individuals and at staff meetings. This helped him to negotiate his relationships at work. It also alerted him with regard to the appropriateness of timing and others' receptivity with regard to introducing new ideas.

In addition, he learned to take an interest in his coworkers. Prior to starting therapy, it never would have occurred to Bob to ask a coworker about his or her weekend or a vacation. 

After he began working with his therapist on developing emotional intelligence, Bob began taking his first tentative steps by engaging in conversation with coworkers. 

To his amazement, his coworkers began to take more of an interest in him as well. He discovered that several of his coworkers would go out for lunch on Fridays, and they started inviting him to come along, which pleased Bob.

He recognized that his coworkers were beginning to like him. While this was gratifying to Bob, he also began to feel the sadness of so many years of not having this in his life, and he realized that this was an important missing piece for him.

Socializing in his personal life was more of a challenge. Even though Bob was very lonely, he felt very awkward in social situations, and he tended to avoid them. 

He would often turn down invitations from his sports buddies to attend parties where he could have, potentially, made other friends or met a woman that he could date.

Although he was very anxious about getting out more, Bob was determined to overcome his fear. So, when an opportunity presented itself for him to attend a party, he accepted the invitation. He and his therapist had several sessions to talk about his anxiety and to work on how he could improve his interpersonal skills in these types of social situations. 

Even though he was starting to feel more comfortable socially with his colleagues, he was anxious about socializing on a personal level. He felt that, at least in his work environment, he could talk to his colleagues about work. But with new people where he did not have this in common, he felt very unsure of himself.

Bob and his therapist worked on various role plays where he practiced how to start a conversation in a social setting. They talked about all different types of scenarios and what social cues Bob should notice among those around him with regard to people's relative openness to engaging socially. 

They decided that it would be easier for Bob to start by asking the hostess to introduce him to some of the people at the party. They also decided that, to start, Bob didn't have to stay for the entire party if he was too uncomfortable, so they talked about how he could negotiate this socially with the hostess.

Fortunately for Bob, the hostess at this party was an emotionally astute woman. She recognized that Bob was anxious in social settings, and she started by introducing him to other people in his particular field of work. 

Although Bob was very nervous at first, once he began talking to these people, he felt more comfortable. One person confided in Bob that he also felt anxious at parties, and Bob felt relieved to know that he wasn't the only one who experienced social anxiety.

Working diligently with his therapist, over time Bob was able to develop emotional intelligence in his work environment and in social situations. But 

Bob also felt proud when Gregg approached him one day and told him that he was pleased to see that Bob had improved his interpersonal skills at work. 

This positive feedback motivated Bob to continue working on this issue in his therapy. 

In addition, Bob was starting to date women, and he was surprised and pleased to realize that there were women who liked him.

What Can You Do to Develop Emotional Intelligence?

If you're experiencing a lack of emotional attunement to yourself and to others, you could benefit from developing or improving your emotional intelligence skills.

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist who has done a lot of research on the topic of emotional intelligence. I recommend that you read his book, Emotional Intelligence.

While reading a book about emotional intelligence is a good start in terms of acquainting yourself with basic concepts, reading alone won't help you to develop emotional intelligence. 

Very often, it's helpful to also develop these skills in the context of your own personal therapy with a licensed psychotherapist who helps clients to overcome this problem.

Contrary to what you might think, you'll discover that you're not alone, and many people, who struggle with this issue, are able to develop these important skills to become more emotionally attuned to themselves and to others. 

You'll also discover that developing emotional intelligence will contribute to the success of your personal relationships and your career.

Getting Help in Therapy

Emotional intelligence is critical to maintaining relationships in all areas of your life.

You can learn to develop emotional intelligence by working with a licensed mental health professional.

Life is much more fulfilling when you are self aware, you can manage your emotions, pick up on social cues and maintain relationships.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing, and Sex Therapist.  

I work with individual adults and couples.

I have helped many clients to develop emotional intelligence so that they can lead more fulfilling lives.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.