Key Deficits of Affect Regulation:

• Awareness of own emotional and/or arousal states

• Capacity to read cues of others

• Expression

• Capacity to safely express emotions

• Communication of emotional experience

Modulation

• Capacity to self-soothe, calm

• Lack of connection between emotional states

• Medical Intervention (SSRI’s, Mood stabilizers)

Goal:  Awareness of internal experience

• Integration of experience—affect, body experience, thoughts, behaviors

• Presentation

• Overly constricted—goal—ID feeling states

• Single emotional experience—goal—expand range of experience

• Labile affect—goal—accurate identification of triggers

• External to Internal

• Reflection of discomfort

• Reflective listening skills

• Normalize emotional experience

• Tools—Body drawings, level check-ins

Goal—Safe expression of affect and effective communication

• Normalize all emotions—distinguish between safe and unsafe expressions

Goal—build ability to regulate emotional experience—include self soothing and expanding to experience degrees of feelings.

• Soothing/calming

• Breathing (square)

• Progressive Muscle Relaxation

• Stretches

• Yoga

• Grounding skills

• Visualization

• Expanding

• Alternating states regulation

Attachment—Family Systems

• Time out for affect regulation

• Dyadic work—setting limits and boundaries, finding comfort from others, developing skills

• Optimal Arousal – Balancing—combining frontal cortex with arousal system

• Connecting hemispheres—EMDR

• Raising body connections

• Increasing attunement

• Resetting ANS