Mind and Emotions Read Online Free Page A

months to a year and identify three different events: one that triggered anger, one that triggered sadness, and one that caused anxiety. On a separate piece of paper, write a description of each situation, including where you were, whom you were with, and the basics of what happened.
    Decide which one you’d like to start with, then visualize the scene. Notice everything about the physical environment. If things are being said, listen to the tone of voice as well as the words. Notice any feelings in your body, and try to remember what you actually did (emotion-driven behaviors) in response to the situation. Now carefully watch the emotion that builds inside of you. Stay with your image of the scene until the emotion is strong and clear and you begin to have words for it. Record this experience on your Emotional Response Worksheet, including the thoughts, sensations, and emotion-driven urges. After you’ve finished writing about the first scene, set time aside to tackle the next two images.
    This exercise and the previous two have given you a lot of practice in observing and naming aspects of your emotional life and the parts of your emotional responses. This practice is essential in learning to recognize how emotions affect you and drive your behavior.
    How Emotional Problems Arise
    Emotional problems are often blamed on stress, trauma, early upbringing, interpersonal conflicts, hormones, and genetics. But surprisingly, research shows that another factor is much more responsible for emotional disorders: our coping behaviors (Hayes 2005). We each learn to deal with the stress of life using a repertoire of coping strategies designed to reduce pain. The trouble is, some coping strategies work better than others, and some are absolutely catastrophic in terms of their long-term impact on well-being.
    There are seven maladaptive coping strategies that drive most of our emotional distress and turn painful moments into chronic disorders. These coping strategies are called transdiagnostic factors because they are the underlying cause of symptoms across many diagnostic categories: anxiety, depression, chronic anger, borderline personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, to name a few. Let’s take a look at the transdiagnostic factors, or maladaptive coping strategies, that lie at the root of chronic emotional pain.
    Experiential avoidance. People who use this strategy automatically try to avoid painful emotions and thoughts. As soon as they feel something uncomfortable, they try to suppress, numb, or push away the experience. They attempt to put a lid on things so the pain is somehow muted. This coping strategy often backfires because avoidance not only fails to suppress painful feelings, it also makes the pain worse. An example is Harold, who withdrew socially and began drinking in an effort to avoid the sadness of losing his job. But his sadness just turned to depression as he sank into alcoholism and isolation.
    Rumination. In this strategy, people use obsessive thoughts to blunt the fear of uncertainty, and use judgments in the hope of forcing themselves or others to do better. In the form of worry, rumination tries to prepare you for every bad thing that might happen. In the form of good-bad evaluations, it tries to perfect a flawed self and a flawed world. But these efforts never work. Ultimately, rumination keeps you focused on what’s bothering you, so its net effect is that you feel more anxious, more angry, or a greater sense of loss and disappointment.
    Emotional masking. The aim of this coping strategy is to make sure no one ever sees your pain. It arises from a fear that if others saw your emotions, they might be contemptuous or judge you as weak, foolish, or crazy. So the mask must stay on and the feelings that burn in you must stay hidden. The price for this maladaptive strategy is that the real you remains invisible, lost in the effort to look good. You can’t show what you need or feel, so you remain