Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship With Experiential Trauma Therapy

The focus of my last two articles has been on emotional availability (What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available? and How to Become More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship). The current article focuses on how experiential trauma therapy can help you overcome unresolved trauma so you can become more emotionally available (see my articles: How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect How You Feel About Yourself and How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect Relationships).

Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect Your Ability to Be Emotionally Available

In my last article I discussed how being emotionally available in a relationship can be more challenging when you have unresolved trauma. 

Emotional survival strategies that were adaptive during childhood trauma, including emotional numbing and suppression of emotions, are no longer adaptive in adult relationships (see my article: Changing Maladaptive Coping Strategies That No Longer Work For You: Avoidance).

How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect Emotional Availability

In addition, emotional triggers, which are part of unresolved trauma, add to the difficulty of letting go of these maladaptive strategies.  When triggers occur, it's difficult to know if your reaction is from the past or the present (see my article: When the Traumatic Past Lives on in the Present).

Self help strategies are temporarily helpful in the moment to manage triggers, but these strategies don't help you to overcome trauma.

Experiential trauma therapies are mind-body oriented therapies which include EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy, Somatic Experiencing, AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), Parts Work, and hypnotherapy (see my articles: Experiential Therapy and the Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind and Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy).

A Clinical Vignette: Becoming More Emotionally Available With Experiential Trauma Therapy

The following clinical vignette is a composite of many different cases with all identifying information removed:

Ted

After his girlfriend, Sara, gave Ted an ultimatum that either he get help in therapy or she would leave him, Ted sought help reluctantly in experiential trauma therapy.

In the past, Ted attended cognitive-behavioral therapy to deal with emotional triggers that often overwhelmed him, and he learned strategies to use when he was triggered.  

But even though Ted had these strategies, the triggers continued to occur, and when he was triggered, he withdrew emotionally from Sara, which was upsetting to her (see my article: Understanding a Partner Who Withdraws Emotionally).

Sara was working on her own unresolved trauma in experiential therapy and Ted's emotional withdrawal triggered her own history of early childhood emotional neglect.  

Sara told Ted that she felt hurt and angry when he became emotionally distant and she couldn't remain with him if he didn't get help.  

Initially, Ted believed he could overcome his trauma on his own, but since his attempts continued to be unsuccessful, he knew he needed help.  

Ted's therapist got a detailed family history to understand the origin of his psychological trauma, which included a long history of childhood emotional neglect.

Working Through Trauma in Experiential Therapy

At first, Ted felt defensive about his childhood history.  He knew his parents were also highly traumatized people themselves because of their own family backgrounds, and he felt disloyal talking about them in therapy.  

But his therapist helped Ted to understand that therapy isn't about blaming parents, especially parents who were struggling to do the best they could (see my article: Moving Beyond Blaming Your Parents in Therapy).

Ted also learned about intergenerational trauma, which is trauma that affects one generation after the next in the same family.  Until then, Ted didn't know about intergenerational trauma, and it made him think of his maternal and paternal grandparents and their own psychological struggles. 

Ted didn't want to keep hurting Sara, and he didn't want to lose her.  He also thought about his future. He thought about the children he hoped to have with Sara after they got married.  He told his therapist he didn't want to pass on his trauma symptoms to his children.  He wanted these symptoms to end with him, which increased Ted's motivation in therapy.

As a first step, his therapist helped Ted to expand his internal resources and coping strategies.  

She also helped him to expand his emotional window of tolerance so that, over time, he developed a greater emotional capacity to handle his triggers when they came up.  

With increased emotional capacity, Ted decreased his emotional avoidance strategies.

Since Ted was a perfectionist, like his father, who demanded perfection from Ted and shamed him when he couldn't live up to his father's expectations, his therapist also helped Ted to see the connection between perfectionism and shame.  

At that point Ted had developed sufficient coping strategies and expanded his emotional window of tolerance enough so that his therapist knew he was now ready to process his childhood trauma using experiential trauma therapy.

They began by doing Parts Work (also known as Ego States therapy or Internal Family Systems therapy or IFS).  Through Parts Work, Ted developed a sense of empathy and compassion for his younger self.  

He imagined being able to nurture his younger self, who was emotionally neglected.  Even though Ted was using his imagination, he had a genuine felt sense of healing. He also meditated on his younger self between therapy sessions and journaled about his experiences (see my article: What is the Felt Sense in Experiential Therapy?).

The next stage of his therapy involved EMDR therapy (see my article: How EMDR Therapy Works: EMDR and the Brain).

Using EMDR, over time, Ted and his therapist processed his childhood trauma.  Although EMDR and the other forms of experiential therapy tend to work faster than regular talk therapy, Ted and his therapist worked for over a year to complete his treatment. 

Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

Along the way, Ted saw improvements in his ability to be more emotionally available to Sara.  Sara was also happy that Ted was more emotionally present with her.  Instead of numbing himself whenever difficult emotions came up, Ted now dealt directly with uncomfortable emotions and remained present. He was also more outwardly affectionate and emotionally attuned to Sara.

Conclusion

Self help strategies can help when you're trying to be more emotionally available in your relationship, but they're not enough to overcome psychological trauma, especially unresolved childhood trauma.

In order to cope with trauma, people develop emotional survival strategies that were adaptive at the time of trauma to keep them from becoming even more traumatized.  The problem is that those survival strategies also create their own problems, especially in adulthood when people enter into relationships.

Experiential trauma therapy therapies are mind-body oriented therapies that provide a window into the unconscious mind.  This is one of the reasons why it tends to be more effective than regular talk therapy.  

Getting Help in Trauma Therapy

If you have attempted to deal with unresolved trauma on your own without success, you could benefit from working with an experiential trauma therapist.

Once your trauma is resolved, you can live a more fulfilling life and be more emotionally available to yourself and your partner.

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 overcome 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 Become More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

In my prior article, What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?, I began a discussion about emotional availability, defined the term and compared it to emotional unavailability.  In this article, I'm focusing on how to become more emotionally available (see my articles: Emotional Vulnerability as a Pathway to Greater Intimacy in a Relationship and Emotional Vulnerability is a Strength in a Relationship).

Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

As a brief recap: Emotional Availability includes being:

• Open
• Honest
• Emotionally vulnerable with each other

Being emotionally available looks like this:

• Having deep and meaningful conversations with your partner about your emotions where you allow yourself to be vulnerable.  

• Allowing yourself to get emotionally close to your partner.

• Listening and attuning to your partner's experiences and being empathetic to their emotions--even if their experiences are different from your own.

• Allowing your partner to comfort you when you're going through a difficult time.

• Comforting your partner when they're going through a difficult time. 

How to Become More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

As I mentioned in my prior article, the healthiest and happiest relationships are between partners who are emotionally available to each other.

Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

The reality is that emotionally availability isn't an all-or-nothing phenomenon.  

In other words, most people aren't either emotionally available or unavailable.  There might be situations where they're more open and other situations where they're not.  

No one is emotionally available 100% of the time, but a worthwhile goal for someone who tends to withdraw emotionally is to become more consistently open. 

Steps to Becoming More Emotionally Available

Here are some basic steps you can try:

• Become Aware of When You Distance Emotionally From Yourself: Emotional distancing or withdrawing often occurs within yourself before it occurs with your partner.  You can begin to recognize when this is happening when you feel cut off from your own emotions. You can practice checking in with yourself periodically throughout the day and asking yourself what you're feeling.  If you draw a blank or if what you sense is vague, you might be cutting yourself off from your emotions (see below: Learn to Identifying Your Emotions).

• Become Aware of When You Distance Yourself From Your Partner: Develop an awareness of when you tend to distance yourself emotionally from your partner.  Maybe it's when you feel criticized, ashamed, challenged, sad, angry, resentful or some other emotion.  Even if, at first, you don't recognize that you're withdrawing, think about it after an incident with your partner and be honest with yourself.  If you can do this by either journaling or meditating about it on a regular basis, you can eventually develop an awareness of when it's happening in the moment as a way to try to change your response.

• Learn to Identify Your Emotions: This can be challenging for someone who has spent most of their life suppressing or numbing their feelings.  Suppressing or numbing feelings might have been an adaptive survival strategy in a family that didn't tolerate the expression of emotions, but when you're an adult in a relationship, it's no longer adaptive.  By journaling or meditating, you can reflect on a recent memory of an uncomfortable emotion you felt.  Slow down and take your time. At first, you might only have a vague sense of the emotions in terms of feeling uncomfortable, but if you include bodily awareness (e.g., throat constricted or clenched fists), you can get a felt sense of what you were experiencing because you're tapping into the mind-body connection and possible unconscious feelings (The Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

• Communicate With Your Partner: As you become aware and develop insight into how you withdraw emotionally and the uncomfortable emotions you're experiencing, talk to your partner about what you have discovered about yourself. This takes courage, so start with something relatively small and work your way up to sharing more vulnerable feelings. This will help you to feel safer over time. Being open and honest in this way will bring you closer and you're practicing being vulnerable.  Although this might be difficult at first, it's possible to get better at it over time.  Also, let your partner know that you're not asking them to fix you (in reality, no one can fix anyone).  Let them know that you're talking about it as a way to learn how to open up so you can get closer to them, and you just want them to listen. When you're sharing, stick to your own experiences as opposed to blaming or criticizing your partner (How to Improve Communication in Your Relationship).

• Provide Time and Space For Your Partner to Share Their Emotions: Becoming more emotionally available is a two-way street. In addition to sharing your emotions, you want to strive to get comfortable with listening and being attuned to your partner.  Once again, apply the same ground rules as when you're communicating with your partner: Your partner is sticking to their own experiences and not blaming or criticizing you.

When to Seek Help in Therapy

Becoming more emotionally available can be challenging, especially if you have unresolved trauma.

Emotional triggers from the past come up in a fraction of a second, which occurs before the logical part of your brain can determine if what you're feeling is from the past or the present.  This is part of what makes triggers so difficult to manage.

In addition, if you spent your early years surviving in your family by shutting down emotionally, you might not feel safe enough to be more open emotionally--even with a partner that you love and trust (see my article: How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect How You Feel About Yourself and How Trauma Can Affect Relationships).

Also, if you have a traumatic relationship history, being vulnerable with your current partner can be too scary to do on your own.  

If you have tried to resolve these problems on your own and you keep coming up against the same emotional blocks, you could benefit from working with a trauma therapist who can help you to process the traumatic events that are creating obstacles for you.

Working through unresolved trauma with a trauma therapist can free you of your traumatic history so you can be more emotionally available to yourself as well as your partner.

Next Article

In my next article, I'll provide a clinical vignette to show how experiential therapy can help you to overcome trauma and open up emotionally.

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 am a trauma therapist who has helped many people 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.

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.