The Life Cycle of a Feeling
Emotions can be experienced like a wave. Some waves are calm and gentle while others are rough and destabilizing. They can be brief or prolonged, they can be sudden or anticipated in advance. Regardless, they all have an onset, eventually dissipate and have a reason for showing up in the first place.
When paired with mindfulness, observing this wave has profound benefits because it allows individuals to both deepen their insight into what they’re feeling AND release emotional suffering by allowing their nervous system to feel its way through it.
In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), a skill called Mindfulness of Current Emotions outlines this practice in an accessible way:
Begin by observing your emotion(s) as fully as you can. Where do you feel sensations in your body? How quickly did they onset? How long does it take for the emotion to dissipate?
Try not to block or suppress the emotion. Try not to hold onto it or amplify it either.
Do your best to NOT judge your emotion. It is simply information.
Remember that you are not obligated to act on any emotion. In fact, sometimes the most effective response is to sit with it for a moment until you better understand why it’s there.
Please note that you don’t need to feel through everything in one sitting! Start with small/manageable intervals of time.
The inconvenient truth about emotions is the only way out is through. However, if you approach them with a baseline of self-compassion and curiosity, you may be surprised by the opportunities for healing that come as a result.
Want to learn more about Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)? Kim leads an online group called DBT Skills Training that meets on Tuesdays at 5pm. The next group starts tomorrow and it's almost full! Don't despair, we often offer this group and the next cohort is tentatively scheduled to start November 10th. Check out our website for more details.
Last month Looking Glass Counseling was proud to support Reliant Foundation. Reliant Foundation seeks to raise funds to support community grants for area nonprofits focused on mental health services for children and youth.
Kim Johnson, LMHC, MT-BC, is a licensed mental health counselor (LMHC) and board certified music therapist (MT-BC) who graduated with her master’s from Lesley University in 2017. She has experience with adults and adolescents in group private practice and community mental health settings. The levels of care she has worked in are outpatient, with both individual and group therapy and in partial hospital programs for mental health and substance use disorders. Additionally, she has had intensive training in dialectical behavioral therapy and cognitive processing therapy for PTSD.
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