This course provides an introduction to: 1. Basic concepts of The Strategies and Skills Learning and Development System (SSLD), their relevance for every day relationships and provide advanced concepts for participants who work in fields of social work and health care . 2. Basic practice principles and methods of SSLD, illustrated by relationship management case studies. 3. The SSLD framework for relationship management assessment; N3C (needs, circumstances, characteristics, capacity) and problem translation. 4. Core competencies in the relationship management application of the SSLD system: Observation learning, simulation, real life implementation, review and monitoring.
Emotional work vs. Emotional Regulation
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From the course by University of Toronto
The Arts and Science of Relationships: Understanding Human Needs
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From the lesson
Module 3 - Communication
This module covers topics on how to build and manage your relationships through effective communication skills such as listening, understanding, reception, and expression.
Meet the Instructors
A. Ka Tat TsangFounder of the SSLD System; Professor and Factor-Inwentash Chair in Social Work in the Global Community
Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
Hello and welcome to the presentation on the SSLD or strategies and
skills, learning and development approach to emotional work.
So, I would like to start off just by introducing myself.
My name is Ilona Larionova and I'm a recent graduate of
the Master of Social Work Program at the University of Toronto,
and I specialized in Health and Mental Health.
You may also remember me from other parts of this course in my
role as an anchoring teaching assistant, as well as one of the actors in this course.
Let's make a start.
So, I would like to begin by drawing your attention to these four situations and
thinking about the commonality between all of them.
We have a paramedic who is experiencing what sounds like symptoms of trauma or
even PTSD following a car accident,
including intrusive flashbacks of the event and nightmares. Then there's a women
who is having some commitment problems with long-term relationships.
A teenager who is experiencing panic attacks
every time that he has to present something in front of a crowd of people.
And finally, we have a daughter who has not spoken to her father in three years.
On the surface, it seems like each person is dealing with very different problems.
But I would like you to think about what is underlying each of these problems.
The commonality is that each of these individuals have likely not had their
emotional needs properly met in the past.
The emotions they were feeling were not expressed appropriately and
as a result have become dysregulated in some way.
For example, the paramedic may have witnessed a horrific car accident and
he didn't get a chance to debrief with his peers afterwards.
As a result, he didn't properly express the fear and
sadness and distress that he was feeling and
these feelings have continued to affect him both physically and emotionally.
Perhaps the woman who has difficulty committing to long-term relationships
has been cheated on in the past and she internalized all the anger,
and hurt she felt.
Now, maybe she feels like she can't trust others not to
hurt her the way she was hurt before and maybe the teenager was
raised by highly critical parents that always demanded perfectionism.
All the unprocessed frustration of not being able to meet the high
standards set out for him have resulted in a fear of being in situations
where he feels judged by others.
And finally, maybe the daughter has never forgiven her father for
leaving her mother.
She doesn't know how to express her anger.
So instead, she just avoids him.
Such chronic dysregulation of emotions is actually quite common and
may effect each of us to some extent.
So, what can we do about it?
How do we fix chronically dysregulated emotions?
One effective solution may be emotional work.
This is a process of dealing with long-term emotional issues
in order to stop them from bothering us and compromising our life.
During this process, we learned to identify the emotions we're feeling，
get in touch with them and own them.
Emotional work can take many different forms.
For instance,
the paramedic from the earlier example might need to work through the emotions
connected to his past trauma in order to prevent them from affecting his life now.
The woman who is afraid of commitment may need to work through her
long-term experience of poor self-esteem and internalization of blame for
past relationship failures.
The teenager afraid of public speaking might need to work through past feelings
of shame and conflict with his family. And the daughter who hasn't spoken to
her father may need to work on resolving this long-term conflict.
So, why is there a need to do emotional work?
Why do these issues affect us to this extent?
Well, emotions are socially regulated.
We've already learned about how society encourages the expression of
certain emotions and discourages others.
Even when people are allowed to feel certain emotions,
there are often social rules or cues about how they must be expressed.
For example, sometimes you can express friendship with a hug,
but perhaps not a kiss.
Or you can express happiness with a laughter, but
maybe not with dancing on your desk.
I actually have a personal example of one of the times that I realized the extend to
which my own emotional experience is socially regulated.
When I received my acceptance letter to grad school, I was so happy.
In fact, to the point that I almost didn't know what to physically do with myself,
I was home alone and I started doing a little happy dance and
then I felt embarrassed about it even though there was nobody even there
to see and this acceptance was something to be really happy about.
And so unfortunately, a lot of us end up dealing with our emotions in ways that
aren't healthy, especially those difficult emotions like anger, fear,
anxiety, sadness, sexuality, loneliness and so on.
We deal with them by denying,
suppressing or repressing them.
Vulnerability is one emotion that I find many people can have a really
difficult time.
Being vulnerable themselves with their friends and
family, with acquaintances and strangers.
There's actually a really great TED Talk that illustrates one woman's struggle with
vulnerability and the emotional work that she had to do on herself
in order to open herself up to the experience of being vulnerable, and
just to understand vulnerability in general.
If you're interested, I've included a link to this TED Talk in this slide.
I highly recommend it.
So, how do we do emotional work?
Well, seeing as our positive and negative emotional experiences are typically
caused by relationships or happen in the context of relationships.
We also have to look to relationships to help us do emotional work.
In most cases, people turn to the secure and helpful relationships in their life
to help them work through difficult or challenging emotional experiences.
This can include family members and friends, but
it can also include professional relationships including counselling and
psychotherapy, spiritual guidance, life coaching and so on.
Professional help might be especially important if your family members or
friends are the main cause of your chronic emotional dysregulation, or
if you've tried to talk it through and it just hasn't helped.
Now, we're going to be taking a look at the specific process that emotional
work typically involves from the perspective of the SSLD approach.
Keep in mind that the process that's outlined here is sequential, but
it's very important to understand that it's going to look differently and
take a different path for each individual and
the steps won't necessarily be in the same sequence as is shown here.
This is just a general outline or guideline for what typically happens.
So the first step and the really important important prerequisite of
emotional work is to have a safe space that's characterized by trust,
openness and acceptance.
This is especially important to be able to open up and explore emotions, and
manage the feelings that come up without the underlying fear of being judged or
disliked.
This is basically like taking away some of the judgment that is always presented in
social settings that prevents us from being emotionally authentic.
The second step involves becoming aware of the emotions we are feeling and
being able to recognize them.
So, this may mean encouraging a person to focus on experiencing their emotions
instead of suppressing them.
This might involve locating where the emotion is felt in the body.
Is it in the chest?
Is it in the stomach?
This might also involve encouraging the spontaneous expression of emotions
through activities like journaling, drawing, dance, meditation and so on.
Once a person becomes more comfortable with feeling the emotion,
the next step is typically articulating or naming that emotion.
It can actually be surprisingly difficult to name the emotion you're feeling,
because this means accepting and acknowledging what you feel even if it's
one of those really difficult socially regulated emotions like anger, guilt,
shame, etc.
Although it's difficult by being able to accurately name the emotion that you feel,
we can actually begin to take ownership of that emotion.
This means that instead of telling yourself what this person did to me
was hurtful, you can be more accurate and tell yourself what this person did
to me was not only hurtful, but it also made me feel really angry.
So by being able to name and
to take ownership of the actual feeling, anger in this example,
one can move on to expressing the true emotion that they're feeling.
With the SSLD approach, there are a number of options that a person can choose for
expressing the emotion based on what they feel
the most comfortable with at that time.
So, this might entail privately expressing the emotion or
when the person is ready with the other party who is involved.
The expression can also involve verbal or nonverbal methods,
depending again on the individual's preference.
And for those who find it challenging to deal with the emotions on their own,
there is also an option to seek help from professionals, such as counselors.
Step six, involves channeling, ventilation or catharsis of emotions,
which basically means that the emotion is released without inhibition,
suppression or holding back.
It involves allowing oneself to really let go of that tight
control that we usually hold over our feelings in order to restore homeostasis.
Step seven is self-acceptance.
Of course, this can look differently for each person.
But ultimately, the goal for
everyone is to increase one's sense of agency and self-efficacy.
By engaging in this process, we can begin to understand our emotions and
become more accepting of them.
By accepting how we feel,
we also become more accepting of ourselves and who we are.
Transformation, reconstruction and resolution of our conflict, ambivalence,
trauma happens when we realize that the emotions that we're feeling
are not as dangerous and overwhelming as they felt in the beginning.
Because we understand and accept the feelings that we experience.
We can actually start to work on managing them when they do come up.
And so the ninth and the final step is to leave the safe place where emotional
work has taken place and go back out into the real world bringing along the lessons,
and skills that we learned along the way.
Emotional work doesn't mean that the emotions have gone away or
are no longer problematic.
It just means that we have learned to understand how we're feeling and
then to employ useful skills and
strategies in managing our emotional expression in a healthy way.
One key idea of the SSLD approach to emotional work is
learning different ways of expressing emotions.
Here are some examples.
Verbalizing and naming our emotions is one important skill to have.
Some people who may experience difficulties in naming emotions
can use other tricks, like symbols or colour coded objects.
One example of using symbols is actually using emojis or
the little smiley faces that are used on your phone,
or with other social media platforms.
Sometimes to identify an emotion,
it might help to identify where in your body you feel it.
For example, some people associate grief or
heartbreak with the very real sensation of an aching heart.
For others, a fear of anxiety might involve butterflies in the tummy or
a tightness across the chest.
So when you feel these physical sensations and
you've already linked them to different emotions that they represent,
it might also be an easy way to recognize the emotion you're feeling.
Another strategy is being able to articulate how a person is feeling.
For instance, just providing a description of sensations,
like a fire in my chest and racing thoughts to describe anger.
In addition to naming or describing the emotion, expression can take so
many other forms.
It can include body postures, stories, pictures, music dance and so on.
Based, of course, on individual preferences and abilities and cultural context.
For example, many people might find it helpful to express grief privately by
doing things like scrapbooking,
but also as a community by doing things like storytelling and reminiscing.
So as we talk about emotional work and becoming more aware of our emotions and
being able to express them in a healthy way, some of you may be thinking,
well, what if a person isn't just dealing with one negative emotion or
one difficult emotion?
What if someone feels hurt and angry and ashamed,
but then they're also watching a funny movie and they're feeling happy?
This is actually a concept that's referred to as pluri-emotionality and
it means that we can experience many emotions at the same time.
Often, our mind can zero in on one particular emotion given on
the situation that we're in or needs at that moment.
Our personal characteristics, like gender, age, sexual orientation, etc.
And their capacity or our existing repertoire, or
toolbox of strategies and skills.
And keep in mind, no pun intended.
When we're focusing on one particular emotion at a time,
this doesn't mean that the rest of the emotions disappear.
They're still going on for us in the back of our minds,
even when we're not aware of this.
And just like the primary emotion on our mind,
these emotions are also having very real physical and psychological effects on us.
When we're having trouble with dealing with multiple difficult emotions,
how do we get in touch with what we're feeling and
also be able to get these emotions out or express them?
Well, start with one emotion first.
Usually, the emotion that a person chooses to begin with is the emotion that's
the most salient or that stands out the most.
Maybe the emotion that is affecting that person's life the most at that particular time
and the best thing to do is to start with where the person is at, and
what they're ready for.
As one emotion is dealt with within the process,
the other emotions can then be addressed once the person is ready to go there.
In order to make sense of the emotions that one is experiencing,
usually some kind of structure, frame or lens is needed.
Emotions can also be represented symbolically, either through language,
art, music, dance, action, craft, virtual or a signifying act.
So one example that comes to mind for me is classical music and
how often one piece can express so many different emotions, and
these emotions give us a better understanding of what each composer
might've been going through when the piece was written.
If you listen to Beethoven's Fur Elise, for instance,
which was meant to be a love song, you don't just hear romance or happiness.
You hear some wistfulness, maybe some melancholy.
turmoil and even sadness.
The benefits of emotional work.
Of course, the mean benefits that we've talked about so far is just being able to
understand and accept and express the emotions that we are experiencing.
There are also a number of other benefits to emotional work.
Some of which are listed here.
Emotional work gives us the ability to look back on emotional episodes and
understand what happened and why.
It gives us the ability to understand when we are feeling multiple emotions and
which ones are the most important to attend to in that moment.
It gets us the ability to make sense of our past, current and
future experiences by viewing them through this newly acquired emotional lens.
It also gives us greater insight and understanding, and
to people who have hurt us in the past,
and perhaps even an ability to feel empathy for your experiences.
It provides emotional support through being able to better
connect with our loved ones and reach out to them for support.
The experience is embodied, which means that when we heal emotionally,
we also heal physically as our emotions and bodily sensations are interconnected.
And finally, by being able to process and express emotions,
we are in a sense performing self-care by meeting our own emotional needs.
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