Describing Emotions-An Essential Skill!

Many parents become frustrated when they ask their teen how to they feel about a situation or what do they feel and they get, “I dunno know” with a shrug. That is because teens often don’t know. They may have a general sense of being unhappy but they often don’t have an idea why so they numb out and try not to think about their feelings. 
 
Describing emotions can be tough. How do we know exactly how we feel? How can we put our thoughts into words and how can we make sense of it all? At Mindful Healing, we challenge teens to take a look at their patterns. This could mean avoidance, isolation, blame-shifting, self-harm, negative self-talk, even re-writing their childhood narrative to make sense of all their unhappiness. 
 
Let’s, for a moment, use the example of blame-shifting. DBT helps teens to first find the trigger that led to the cascade of emotions that led to the blaming attitude. Mom asks Jimmy to clean his room and Jimmy becomes angry. DBT helps Jimmy to figure out how he is interpreting the situation, “mom, nags and doesn’t trust me. This makes me not want to clean even if I was going to,” or “I shouldn’t have to clean it. It is MY room. Why should she care?!” The next step is to identify what they are physically experiencing in that situation: heartbeat, urges, tension in their chest, etc. Finally, they are asked to describe their reactions. Later, when they’ve mastered this skill, they can then learn to evaluate their reactions, come up with a more reasonable response and also develop skills to calm their body in the moment so they have time to respond in a more mature manner. 
 
Teens have a hard time describing these series of experiences, but helping them slow down to walk through the model of emotions may be helpful in acknowledging their narrative, their story, a story that was distorted and now can be seen in a clear light.