How-to: Opposite to Emotion module
Quick Summary
- The Opposite to Emotion is designed to help you manage intense emotions and the urges that come with them.
- Sometimes strong emotions push us towards behaviour that can make the situation worse. For example, sadness can push us to withdraw, making us feel more isolated. Anger can push us to lash out, making us feel guilty or ashamed of our behaviour.
- The Concept: Opposite to Emotion is a skill from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) that helps you regulate intense emotions by acting in ways that counteract your emotions. This technique can help you break free from unhelpful patterns, reminding you that you have choice and agency about how you respond to emotional situations.
Here’s how it works:
Identify the emotion: start by recognising the intense emotion you’re experiencing. It could be anger, sadness, fear, or any other strong feeling.
Understand the urge: notice the urge that comes with the emotion. For example, if you’re feeling angry, you might have the urge to shout. If you’re feeling shame, you might want to hide the behaviour and lie to others about what’s going on.
Ask yourself some check-in questions: does acting on this urge make the situation worse? Does it create a different, still uncomfortable emotion, or does it make the emotion even more intense? If you answer yes to any of these questions, then acting on the urge is unlikely to be helpful.
Act opposite: instead of following the urge, choose to engage in a behaviour that is opposite to what you feel. If you’re angry, try doing something kind or calming. If you’re ashamed, try getting vulnerable with someone you trust. Think about it like balancing your emotional scales: if you have tipped strongly one way, you need to go all the way to the other end of the spectrum to find balance again.
Practice regularly: the more you practice acting opposite to your emotions, the easier it will become. Over time, this technique can help you develop healthier emotional responses and improve your overall well-being.
By practicing the Opposite to Emotion technique, you can manage your emotions more effectively and create more balanced reactions to challenging situations.
Don't forget, you can see your answers and print them out or save them when you're done - hold on to them and you can discuss with a support person, if you like.
Once you’re finished, you’ll be able to access your answers again through My Tools, so that you can refer back to them yourself later or share them with a support person.