#30: What Happens When You Have an Emotion
Today, Marielle and Ed unpack what happens in the body and mind when an emotion occurs. There’s actually a lot going on! If you are sensitive to or are confused by your emotions, it can be helpful to have an understanding of the different components that make up an emotional experience.
DBT’s Model for Describing Emotions breaks down emotions into ten parts: the prompting event, awareness, interpretation, vulnerability factors, biological changes, nervous system changes, expressions, actions, emotion names, and after-effects. This episode explores all these parts as well as skills to intervene at different points during the emotional experience.
Show Highlights:
- The prompting event can be internal or external
- Attention, or awareness of, the prompting event is required to have a response
- Distraction skills divert attention away from the prompting event
- Painful emotions can be the result of how we interpret an event
- The work of changing the emotion is often in the interpretation of the prompting event
- Check the Facts helps with challenging interpretations of the promoting event
- Vulnerability factors are things in the recent or distant past that make you more vulnerable to having a distressing emotion
- Present-day events may trigger painful memories
- Knowing your own story is important so you can know what your unique sensitive spots are
- The nervous system response to emotions
- Awareness of bodily changes is an important part of learning to regulate your emotions
- Shifting from living in your head to connecting with your body
- Emotions have action urges
- Expressions accompany emotions
- Naming your emotion can bring down its intensity
- Strong emotions have after-effects
- Emotions love themselves
- You may have an emotion about an emotion
Links & Resources
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition
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Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.
#30: What Happens When You Have an Emotion Transcript
Marielle Berg
Hello and welcome to The Skillful Podcast, where we explore DBT and RO-DBT skills to help you reduce emotional suffering, improve your relationships, and become more present in your life. I’m your host, Marielle Berg, a psychotherapist at the Bay Area DBT and Couples Counseling Center.
Marielle Berg
Welcome to Episode 30. Today Ed and I break down, step by step, all the different things that happen when we have an emotion. We recorded this episode earlier this year, pre pandemic, we just didn’t have a chance to air it until now. Everything we talk about is still applicable to understanding emotions, and we hope you find it helpful. Just a bit of a warning, the audio is a bit wonky in some parts of this recording, and hopefully it’s not too distracting as you listen.
Marielle Berg
So today, we’re going to be talking about what happens when you have an emotion. And we’ll be delving into DBT is a model for describing emotions. Because when we have an emotion, we are usually just in it. We’re feeling, the joy, the anger, the sadness, whatever it is. But there’s actually a whole bunch of different components that constitute that emotion.
Ed Fowler
One of the things I appreciate about the DBT model for describing emotions is the ability to really slow down and break down what’s happening when we have emotions, which is so important as a foundation for all of our work on emotion regulation, is having an understanding of what’s happening. And even though when we’re in an emotion, we’re mostly just feeling it, I think it can be really helpful, especially after the fact, to go back and really slow it down and see that having emotions is actually really multiple stages of things going on at one time.
Ed Fowler
So rather than oh my god, I was so overwhelmed. It’s like, oh, no, this happened, this happened, this happened, which gives us a lot more ability to figure out what we might do to manage that emotion more effectively in the future.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and that sort of intellectual understanding of all the different parts that go into making up our emotion, I think, can give us a sense of control, even if we can’t do it right in the moment. But if we do this for, we go through the sort of model of describing emotions, enough times when we’re in an emotion, we might be able to reflect, oh, yes, my heart’s beating fast, or I’m having this kind of change in my system, or I’m having this interpretation. Andthat’s, that can be so helpful in bringing down some of these really distressing emotions that a lot of us struggle with.
Marielle Berg
So as we said, a lot of things are happening when we have emotions. And emotions are responses to what’s happening around us. And the language we use in DBT is a prompting event. So this can be anything. Suppose we read a news article, and we have an emotion, maybe we feel anger or fear. Or we walk into work Monday morning, and a co worker doesn’t greet us, and we have an emotional response to that. So those are things that sort of happen outside of us.
Marielle Berg
But things can also happen more internally. So maybe we remember something from the past, that brings up an emotion, that maybe brings up happiness or grief. Or we have a body sensation that can bring up an emotion. I know often when I’m getting sick, I can feel really sad. And I can get the two confused because it can feel so similar in me and if I am getting sick or I’m coming down with something I think oh no, am I getting depressed? Because they can feel so similar. So it can be, a prompting event can be anything that’s happening outside of us or inside of us.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
And I feel like if you really pay attention, you’re likely having a lot of emotions all day every day, especially if you’re more emotionally sensitive, which we’ve talked about in an earlier episode.
Ed Fowler
So that, when we tend to experience our emotions strongly, then we are going to really relate to this idea of of like, emotions that just kind of well up. And if we break them down, we can see what’s exactly going on and give it a little bit more, what we call in DBT the Reasonable Mind balance to that emotion.
Marielle Berg
Yes, solet’s break down because there’s, or let’s break it down because there’s 10 parts to this model for describing emotions, or 10 components.
Marielle Berg
For the first one, which I talked about a moment ago, it is a prompting event. So the prompting event is anything, anything that happens anything outside of you, anything inside of you. Just this morning, I smelled coffee brewing, and that makes me feel happy. That’s a prompting event. I was out this weekend. And this is something I don’t smell very often in the Bay Area of California, but someone was smoking. And I had I don’t know if this is an emotion, really. But I had an emotion of nostalgia or longing. Like a memory, and it was very positive.
Ed Fowler
Yeah.
Marielle Berg
And then right after that, we’ll talk about this because there’s secondary emotions, I had shame. Yeah, like, I’m not supposed to be having a positive emotion. Okay, a cigarette, right? If any of my friends knew they would judge. We’ll go into secondary emotions. Are you, are you a former smoker?
Ed Fowler
I am. And I know exactly what you’re talking about. Because again, in 2020, it’s like, so rare, but like, I do have the same like, ah, and then you know, like, immediately, like, Oh, my God.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, it can be really strong. So these, these things happen really automatically. And often without a lot of conscious thought that you’ll – something will happen. And you’ll have, you’ll have a response.
Ed Fowler
So maybe to talk a little bit about the idea of secondary emotions, which is an emotion that is a response to the original emotion. So noticing the cigarette smell and having an emotion of happiness, maybe or nostalgia, and then noticing that emotion and having an emotion of shame that follows it. S
Ed Fowler
o, you know, sometimes it can become confusing, because we can have secondary emotions so quickly after the original, that we don’t even notice the original. But that it is, you know, like something that can happen is a cascade of emotions in a way.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. And I think that’s when we wind up saying, or hearing people talk about, like, I just feel bad. And you can’t really explain what it is, because things happen quickly. So maybe you got angry at someone and then, right after you have a secondary emotion of shame. I shouldn’t have gotten so angry at them. Or sadness, this anger means I’m maybe going to lose this relationship. And that’s when we can hear people just feeling overwhelmed. And I just saying things like, I just feel bad. And I don’t know what’s going on.
Ed Fowler
And that’s where I think that this opportunity to really try to observe and describe our emotions, and break them down is so valuable. So that rather than I just feel bad, which what are you supposed to do with that? We can notice, like, Oh, I feel shame. Oh, the shame is from feeling happy about smelling cigarette smoke. Okay, let me break all of this down. And that can be so much more helpful than just kind of like experiencing emotions and being overwhelmed.
Marielle Berg
Yes. Do you want to talk about the second component of an emotion?
Ed Fowler
Yes. So the first part of observing emotions is noticing the prompting event, whatever it is, internally or externally, that prompted that emotion. And the second part is to actually bring our attention and awareness to the emotion so that we’re noticing that we’re having an emotion.
Marielle Berg
And the reason why, it might seem sort of obvious, you know. If something happens, and we’re not aware of it, obviously, we’re not going to have a response. And I think the reason why we talk about this in DBT is because some of the Distress Tolerance skills can come in at the stage. So a thing happens that brings up an emotion, let’s say it’s a distressing emotion. You can use distraction, for example, to shift your awareness or attention away from the thing that’s upsetting you.
Ed Fowler
And with Emotion Regulation, we are actually trying to shift our awareness to that emotion, to that prompting event, to all of this, because we want to be working with the emotion. With Distress Tolerance, the emotion could be too overwhelming, and we don’t want to risk becoming overwhelmed. So we do things to kind of take our mind off of it. With Emotion Regulation, we are trying to really focus on that second part, which is awareness, noticing, observing, using kind of our Mindfulness skills of Observing and Describing. So nonjudgmentally just being aware of what is the emotion, what am I experiencing?
Marielle Berg
Yes. And then the next step, or step three is, and this is the part where I feel all the intense, painful stuff comes up. Or this is the part that really trips myself, and I feel like many other people, up. It’s the interpretation of the event.
Marielle Berg
So something happens we’re aware of it, clearly, and then we have some kind of interpretation. Which means we have thoughts or beliefs, some kind of response to the thing that happened. So we make meaning of the event, we make assumptions, we make judgments. And this is where a lot of the painful stuff comes up. And this relates to a skill that we’ve talked about previously called, Check the Facts. Because very often some of our most intractable, painful emotions are about the interpretation of the thing that happens.
Ed Fowler
Right. And being able to recognize that we’re always having emotions, like it’s just happening constantly, without us even noticing it. We’re also having interpretations immediately. Like this is just how our brains are built. So we’re noticing, something we’re having an interpretation. Sometimes that interpretation is based on what’s actually happening in the situation.
Ed Fowler
Oftentimes, it’s based on past experiences, our own model of how the world works,our sense of self, that can sometimes be not really based in the facts of the situation. So being able to examine and notice: what are my interpretations of this emotion? Can help us to see if there’s something we need to maybe work with a little bit more.
Marielle Berg
So I think what you’re talking about here Ed, leads us into step four, which is looking at vulnerability factors. So the thing happens, we have some kind of interpretation, and then we want to look at things in our life that might might make us more vulnerable, particularly if you’re feeling some of the more painful emotions.
Marielle Berg
So it can be things in our recent past, or things from our distant past. So things maybe from the more recent past, that can make us more vulnerable to feeling or getting really stuck in a painful emotion might have to do with our physical well-being. Likeyou’re tired, or sick, or in pain. Maybe you’re hungover or you haven’t eaten in a while. So those are maybe more recent kind of physical things. But also things from our distant past. So from our childhoods, from our family of origin, that might make us very vulnerable to having a more negative interpretation of a an event that happened.
Marielle Berg
So for example, often events that happen in our present day lives can really push buttons from our past. So we interpret or read through things through those past experiences. So for example, if you’re going through a breakup, which is very painful for almost everyone, but you came from a family where there are multiple divorces, this or that breakup might impact you in a different way, it might hit a particularly painful nerve for you.
Ed Fowler
And, you know, another example for me that I’ve talked before on the podcast is like, if I’m feeling kind of frustrated or worried, and I’m having a strong response, and someone says to me, calm down, like my anger is going to shoot up immediately. And I may not even notice that my anger has shot up.
Ed Fowler
Because when people used to tell me to calm down when I was young, that would make me so angry, because if I, if I could calm down, I would. So the words calm down are a huge trigger for me, still to this day. And so you know, like, I may not even notice that all of a sudden, I’m furious. And it’s because I got kind of thrown back into being an overwhelmed child who was being given unhelpful suggestions.
Marielle Berg
And this is where knowing our own stories, and our own vulnerability factors is so important. So getting familiar with the things that, you know, push our buttons from the past, and we each have unique stories around this. So you hear someone say, calm down, and that’s going to set off a whole cascade of secondary emotions and responses, that it wouldn’t necessarily in someone else. And I think this points to, you know, the value of really delving into some of our past history.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Ed Fowler
because the more we can understand about those vulnerability factors, again, for me, if I’m sick, I am going to be so much more vulnerable to really strong emotions. And so when I am sick, because I know that if I, all of a sudden I’m feeling like really, really, really frustrated, I’m like, okay, you’re sick, like, hold on, slow this down, rather than being just diving into it and saying, yes, I should be frustrated. And so I think that being able to understand ourselves, understand our vulnerability factors to strong emotion, both short term in and from our distant past can be so helpful.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. And as you as we’re talking, I’m feeling like we didn’t do interpretation justice. And I feel like I want us to just tease that apart. So if we could jump back to what was that, step three, the interpretation. Because I, for me, I don’t know if you feel the same way, and I feel like this is like the area where we really can get some traction, where we can start teasing apart people’s interpretations of prompting events.
Ed Fowler
Yeah. I think that so much of where emotions are painful is in the interpretations. Being able to slow things down and notice all these other factors is really important and valuable. Oftentimes, the work of changing the emotion is in examining the interpretation.
Marielle Berg
And I want to give an example here to help illustrate what we’re talking about. So pretty commonplace one, say you text a friend to get together and several days go by and you don’t hear back from them. And different people could go in a lot of different directions with what kind of meaning they make of this or what kind of interpretation they make.
Marielle Berg
So if you perhaps have a history or have a vulnerability factor of feeling abandoned or not loved, well, you might go to sadness or hurt. Like, they don’t care about me. If you have a vulnerability factor that’s more around conflict, where conflict has been a scary or dangerous thing, you might think, Oh, they’re clearly mad at me, I must have done something to upset them.
Ed Fowler
And there would be a really different response. If your interpretation is oh, they’re just really busy. So maybe you might be frustrated, they didn’t get back. But there’s a big difference between they’re really busy, and they hate me. And so like, you know, like, that’s another interpretation, which you don’t know. We’re making it up. We don’t know what happened. We just know they didn’t respond to the text. So there’s a range of what our response might be.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and the reason why I wanted to just emphasize this point more is because we spend a lot of time talking about checking the facts with folks in our DBT skills group, because this is the area where people run into trouble and experience so many painful emotions, and then I feel like can start a whole cascade of events that could be avoided, because the thing happened.
Marielle Berg
So those are the facts. That’s why we have the skill called Check the Facts. Like I texted my friend, I didn’t hear back from them. And if you make these assumptions or interpretations, and you run with it, like they clearly don’t care about me, maybe you send a text even though you haven’t heard from them, like, I guess our friendship is over or right, like you could, you could really escalate.
Ed Fowler
Right? Right. One of the things that often people will say is like, oh, you know, I’m really working on my emotion regulation. So when I noticed that I’m having uncomfortable emotions, I try to find a positive interpretation. But that’s also an interpretation. So they hate me would be a negative interpretation. They’re just really busy is maybe more positive. But what if they’re actually mad at me? And they’re not saying it, right? They didn’t respond to my text, that’s all I know. And making the assumption of like, oh, you’re just really busy, is actually, may not be any more effective than making the assumption of like, I guess our friendship is over.
Marielle Berg
Right. That’s a great point that it’s not. Positive interpretations feel better in the moment, but we don’t really know. And that’s where we really want to stay with the facts that we do know, and to watch some of those stories that we can spit out until we have until we have the information.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
And so we talked about the prompting event, about being aware of it, that’s step one and two, or component one and two of this model for describing emotion. Three was our interpretation. And then four, which we already did was our vulnerability factors. And then five is our biological changes.
Ed Fowler
I think it’s helpful in the process of kind of slowing things down. And really examining what’s happening, when we have any kind of strong emotion is to notice all of the subtle changes within us when we are experiencing an emotion. So and the emotion is going to have a biological component to it.
Ed Fowler
You know, our emotions really hit lots of parts of our brains and our nervous systems. You know, like, we want to kind of notice what is the physiological response to this emotion? Am I noticing tension in my shoulders? Am I noticing heaviness in my heart? Am I noticing desire, like tears kind of welling up? Just noticing what are those biological changes.
Marielle Berg
Yes, because when we’re having emotions, it impacts many parts of our brains and our nervous system. So, you know, our Sympathetic Nervous System, which is the part of our nervous system which has the, like our ability to act under times of high stress. So this is the fight, flight, and freeze response
Ed Fowler
Very good. We sometimes struggle with the fight flight, flight, flight.
Marielle Berg
What is it? So, we wanna fight, we wanna run.
Ed Fowler
Yes,
Marielle Berg
Or we freeze.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
And even we freeze, like our, you know, our heart rate is up or blood pressure is high, we might be sweating, we probably breathe more shallowly and rapidly. So we sort of have this bolt of energy for action.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Ed Fowler
And again, that’s where, for instance, if that sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and we have this like, momentum physically for some sort of action, even if it’s freezing, but with like real tension, that’s where oftentimes people will turn to target behaviors to escape that intensity of emotion.
Ed Fowler
So using substances to numb out that kind of emotion, self harm, totally just checking out. All of those are things that could be a response to that really strong nervous system response.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. That so much is happening in our bodies when we have an emotion, that it makes sense for folks to go towards something that alters the body in some way, or alters the body chemistry, so you can feel something different, for a little bit. And we also know that there are ways that we can do that that are helpful to us and harmful to us.
Marielle Berg
And I think a big piece of learning to regulate your emotions more, is becoming more aware of and skilled at sensing all those changes in your body that come with different emotions. And this is very challenging, if you spent a lifetime of not living in your body and shutting off information from it. But this might be that, this might mean that you live in your head more and you’ve kind of tried to dissociate from your body due to trauma or other, other things that have happened that have made living in your body feel not safe.
Marielle Berg
And I think on this note, telling yourself or someone else to just stop feeling an emotion is kind of useless. Because we can’t will ourselves to not feel something. We certainly can use different kinds of skills. Like I talked about earlier, like we can distract our attention away from something. Or with Check the Facts, we can challenge our interpretation or judgments of an event. These are all ways to change what you’re feeling. But you can’t, through sheer willpower, not feel what you’re feeling. And this is I think, also ties back in with what you said earlier with your trigger Ed, when you were told to calm down when you were young, like you couldn’t just do that.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
On command.
Ed Fowler
And even as a child I knew, even though I couldn’t put words to it. And, but you know, like, I think that this is such a common response to emotion, is just stop having it. And it’s if it was that easy, we would just do that and there would be no Skillful Podcast.
Marielle Berg
I don’t know if I’ve shared the story on the podcast before and forgive me if I have, but I remember when my niece was really little. And I don’t know what she did. But my she got in trouble, and she was in her room. And she was really upset. She was in her bed and I was in the room somehow too. Or I came in there. I think sister, my sister’s like you can come out when you calm down. And she sat on the edge of her bed, and like her face was bright red, and her hands were in fist. And she screamed at the top of her lungs “I’M CALM!” Poor thing. She couldn’t helpcalming her system down.
Ed Fowler
Right, right. Yeah.
Marielle Berg
Okay, so should we talk about our next component after biological changes. So these are all the things happening in your nervous system and your neurons firing in your brain. So then we have the actual experience, which is what we talked about, the body sensation or the feeling. And I realized we’ve been using the word emotion and feeling interchangeably, which is probably not entirely accurate.
Marielle Berg
So here I would say the emotion is the actual emotion that happened. And the feeling is the thing that happens in your body, the thing that you sense that accompanies the emotion.
Marielle Berg
And with that, we also often have action urges, which we’d also mentioned, if it’s a trauma response. Maybe it is to, maybe it’s to fight back or to run away or to freeze or hide, or a whole myriad of other action urges that come with the biological changes. Like with shame, I feel like that’s an emotion that really wants to get us to hide.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
And kind of retreat into ourselves. Sadness also has action urges and bodily sensations, often of low energy or withdrawal.
Ed Fowler
So when we notice in the kind of the fifth component, the biological changes, and then in the sixth component, kind of what that action urge might be, or the experience of those biological changes in the emotion.
Ed Fowler
The seventh component would be the expression of all of that. So our facial expression. Our body language. Because when we talk about emotions, we recognize that emotions are meant biologically to communicate information to ourselves and to others.
Ed Fowler
So for all emotions, there are like a biological component about communicating outward. What emotion we’re experiencing. So noticing the expression of whatever that emotion is. What’s my facial expression? What’s my body language? If I’m really angry, I probably have a really furrowed brow. And fists might be really tight. If I’m afraid I might have really wide eyes and be quieter or actually physically retreating. Kind of noticing, how is this emotion being expressed outward?
Marielle Berg
Yes, and this is also a pretty important place to intervene to change your emotion, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Because if you can change your facial expression, and how you’re holding your body, you might be able to change how you feel.
Ed Fowler
So one of the skills that we talk about for Distress Tolerance is the Half Smile Willing Hands, which is all about physically changing our posture in a way that’s going to promote more acceptance and openness.
Ed Fowler
So if I’m feeling really angry, and I have tight fists, opening up my hands into like that kind of open, willing hands, posture, will communicate like it’s okay to be open. And that can change that emotional response.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, so if you’re feeling sort of dejected or bad about yourself, and I know I’ve experienced this, and I’ve seen it, and others, and maybe we’re lumping kind of, you know, holding our heads down a little bit, and sometimes just sitting up straight, and holding your head up and kind of looking around that can shift things.
Ed Fowler
Right. So, and we’ve kind of continuing with looking at all the different components of an emotional experience, following up those kind of body expressions is our action. So like we said, there’s an action urge that comes with emotions. So part eight would be what actions do we take? Are we you know, kind of like, jumping up and down for joy, if we’re really happy? Are we starting to run away, like literally like hustling away if we’re scared? Noticing, what action urges do we have and what actions do we take.
Marielle Berg
Yes, and then the ninth component, as we’re going through all this, following actions is the emotion name, or this would be the place where we would want to think about naming the emotion. Which has to do again, with awareness. And sometimes just naming your emotion can be helpful in changing what you’re feeling. Because it requires you to access a different part of your brain, and to become really aware of what’s going on with you. And that in and of itself can sometimes shift things and bring down the intensity of emotion. If instead of just being in it, and maybe in a blind rage, say, Oh, I’m really angry right now.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
That can be really helpful.
Ed Fowler
So often, when we are experiencing strong emotions, we can have this shorthand of like, oh, I feel upset, or I feel miserable, or feel furious, or whatever. But being able to say, I actually feel guilt, that can help us. And again, it’s bringing in that Reasonable Mind side of our minds, to balance out the experience of the emotion because we need both, right? So being able to experience all of these physical sensations and everything that goes with the emotion, but then bringing in the Reasonable Mind to name it. This is anger, this is fear. This is sadness.
Marielle Berg
And then our final component, in our model for describing emotion, is the after effects. So strong emotions can have ripple effects on our memory, our ability to think clearly, how our bodies feel, and our behavior. We want to be aware of kind of the, you know, hangover, or the after effects of having a strong emotion,
Ed Fowler
Yeah. One of the things that people will talk about is that emotions love themselves. And so we can often have this like, you know, kind of repetitive experience of emotions. Because, you know, like, once the emotion is there, oftentimes, we just keep going back to it. And that can sometimes cause us difficulties. If we’re kind of getting paralyzed with grief. We need, if we’ve lost someone or something that’s important to us, we do need to grieve. But if we kind of notice that there’s like a really strong pull towards more grief, we can notice, maybe we need to mix things up a little bit in order to maintain a balance.
Marielle Berg
Yes, and coming on the heels of the after effects is also where the secondary emotions can come in. Where, with this example of grieving, maybe you feel like you can’t sort of move through the grief in a way you’d like to so then you start having a lot of shame, or self-judgment. Or maybe you get really angry at yourself or the person who died or left you. So there’s another emotion that can come on the heels of the primary emotion.
Ed Fowler
So to maybe bring this all together, all of these ways of observing and noticing and naming our emotions, using an example and walking through this 10 part reflection process might be helpful. So Marielle I think you have an example, a recent example of a strong emotion.
Marielle Berg
Yes. So I felt, should I start with what the emotion is?
Ed Fowler
Let’s start with the prompting event and kind of walk, I’ll walk you through it, maybe. So what was the prompting event?
Marielle Berg
I was driving and someone was on my trunk tailgating. They were like, right, like dangerously behind me, and then they honked.
Ed Fowler
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
So that was the prompting event. And what were you aware of?
Marielle Berg
I was aware of how close they were. And I looked in my rearview mirror, and I saw them sort of scowling. And then I heard the honk.
Ed Fowler
And what were you aware of kind of within you just in that first moment?
Marielle Berg
I felt fear. And I started to feel anger.
Ed Fowler
And then what were your, for part three? What were your interpretations of what was happening?
Marielle Berg
It happened so quickly, as often happens with emotions, that was, but if I tried to think back and break it down. I mean, it happened so fast. And I took an action, which I will tell you about, but my interpretation was kind of like this person is a threat.
Ed Fowler
Right? Right, which is a pretty strong interpretation.
Marielle Berg
Yes.
Ed Fowler
Were, now that you look back, are you aware of vulnerability factors?
Marielle Berg
Yes. So I was having a lot of things happen in my life that were making me vulnerable to be very reactive. And so there were two things. One was I was having this kind of intractable conflict in my relationship that was going on for a little while, that wasn’t easy to resolve, eventually, we did. But during when this happened in the car, it was not yet resolved. And so I had some anger that was building in me that didn’t really have an outlet. And then, at the same time that that was happening, I was having some chronic pain flare up, I was having such a hard time sleeping, so I hadn’t slept well, for quite a few days. So I would say both those things, were making me vulnerable to be more reactive.
Ed Fowler
So a lot of vulnerability factors that would definitely intensify emotion. What did you notice in terms of biological changes?
Marielle Berg
Again, it happens really fast. But if I tried to break it down, I feel like my heart started to beat more quickly. You have the expression seeing red, I didn’t actually see red, but I had that sort of sensation where I was just sort of flooded with with anger. And I felt my muscles got really tense.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, so so a lot of like emotion, like biological changes, emotional experience, right?
Marielle Berg
Mhm.
Ed Fowler
And did you notice any action urges?
Marielle Berg
You know, I took an action, which I’m embarrassed, but I’m going to tell you about it. So. But you wanted me just say what they are. So there was probably an urge, but I didn’t, I just acted on it.
Ed Fowler
Okay, and what was your you know, what, if someone was looking at you, what would they have seen in terms of your your facial expression, your body language as an expression of this emotion?
Marielle Berg
I think I was kind of hunched over the wheel. I was definitely kind of scaled back. I think I slowed down.
Ed Fowler
Hmm, yeah.
Marielle Berg
And then in the rearview mirror, so he could see, I gave him the finger.
Ed Fowler
So your action was that you gave him the finger?
Marielle Berg
Yes.
Ed Fowler
Right. And so what what emotion would you say was the primary emotion there?
Marielle Berg
I was angry.
Ed Fowler
And were there secondary emotions as well?
Marielle Berg
They came later.
Ed Fowler
Okay, so the second
Marielle Berg
In that moment, I was just angry.
Ed Fowler
Okay. And then so number 10. What are the after effects?
Marielle Berg
The after, it actually turned out lovely, which I will tell you in a minute, but the after the after effects, which I think normally, if I did something like that, and I don’t do that that often, but I think I feel embarrassed and ashamed if I reacted so strongly. But so this, I just want to tell you the story, because then the after effect was something that I wouldn’t have anticipated. So the guy I think I switched lanes or somehow we wound up, instead of him behind me we were side by side on a not very busy street and stuck at a light.
Marielle Berg
So I saw him sort of pull up beside me and he rolled down his window and I was still angry and I was for a fight. Which is not like me, like I rolled down my window. I don’t know what I thought I was gonna do. He starts yelling at me. Why did you give me the finger? Why did you do that? Blah, blah. I said, You were behind me. You were honking at me. He was like, you’re going too slow. I said I was trying to switch lanes, I couldn’t get in. Like, we were going back and forth a long way. And he said, Well, you shouldn’t have flipped me off. I said you shouldn’t have honked at me. And then I said, this is unbelievable and it gives me faith in in strangers and humanity. I said, You know what, you’re right. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. And he said, You know, I’m sorry too. Have a good day. Like and not like obnoxiously. Like, he meant it. And like, we rolled up our windows and we drove away. And I was like, oh, that was really, that went well.
Ed Fowler
Yeah.
Marielle Berg
So, that this is a long way saying the after effect for me after was, like, oh, I was like, I think I need to go home and take a nap. I’m, I’m really kind of a bit fried. And I’m acting in ways that feel out of character and I don’t like.
Ed Fowler
Right, right. So all of that happened so quickly, in a matter of minutes, and had a big impact, luckily had positive after effects, but could have equally had negative ones. But by really breaking it down, you can notice so much. And in your case, be able to notice what you need, and what will be helpful, and how to respond to all of this intense emotion in a way that is going to move you in the direction you want to go, instead of just going wherever the emotions are going to take you.
Marielle Berg
Absolutely. And so if anyone is listening, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of having, especially with something like anger, but with many emotions, it happens really fast. So if you can lead yourself through this, step by step, with following the 10 different components that we laid out, or ideally even reading along in the DBT Skills Handouts and Worksheets that we’ll link to in the show notes. You can see it laid out there in a really nice way. You can start to feel some mastery and control over your emotional reactions.
Ed Fowler
And for me, I find it helpful if I’ve had a really strong emotional experience, to go through this and break it down for myself, because it does help me see things in a different way. It brings in more of the Reasonable Mind in order to balance out the emotion, because I’m really being inquisitive about what happened.
Ed Fowler
And I, you know, again, it’s so helpful to have an orientation to learning from our experiences. Instead of oh, I was so overly emotional, I’m just a bad person. It’s like, how can I learn from this in a way that helps me in the future?
Marielle Berg
Yes. All right. Thank you.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, thank you.
Marielle Berg
Thanks for listening to today’s episode. To learn more, or if you’re in the Bay Area and want to get started with therapy, you can find us online at bayareadbtcc.com. That’s bayareadbtcc.com.