“It’s an Emotional Rollercoaster”: Handling Those Intense Emotions
Jordana sent the following text to her mother, Abby: “My boyfriend is leaving and I don’t know what I am going to do. I’m afraid I’m going to cut—not just once but multiple times, and I don’t want you to stop me. I’m not ready to give up the only tool that helps me to handle my pain.”
Abby, read the text, breathed deeply, and felt a knot in her stomach. A wave of hopelessness washed over her. She breathed again and quickly texted back to Jordana: “It’s very selfish of you to tell me you’re going to cut now, after all the money I spent in therapy on you; it’s not fair and not a smart decision. How come you cannot be the strong kid you were before? I don’t understand.” While typing that text, her heart was beating fast, her body temperature was rising, and anger started taking over. Abby didn’t get any reply from Jordana, even though she was often checking her messages while experiencing ongoing levels of stress. As the afternoon progressed, she started feeling shame for sending her last text to Jordana and then found herself crying about it.
Up to this point, we have focused on different types of thoughts—stories, past and future thoughts, judgments, and rules—that you may struggle with in your parenting role. But other times your experience can be dominated by intense emotions, such as what Abby was feeling upon reading her daughter’s text. Just to clarify, the terms feelings and emotions are used interchangeably in this chapter. When you are parenting a highly sensitive teen, sometimes you know what is likely to set your teen off; other times, you don’t know what just happened and are surprised to see your teen’s strong reaction. If you pay attention to your own experience, you will discover that at times you go through a similar process, like Abby who experienced a significant amount of hopelessness after receiving a text from her daughter Jordana informing her of her intention to cut.
Noticing the Emotional Rollercoaster
The experience of going through several intense and different emotions is like being on an emotional rollercoaster; you are simply swept up in the emotion with no sense of control over where it’s taking you. The emotional experience may be so intense that you cannot imagine another way of behaving except for doing exactly what the emotion pushes you to do. Parenting is a very rewarding task, and simultaneously it is extremely hard; parents of teens suffering with emotional vulnerability often feel stressed out, impatient, angry, frustrated, powerless, or disappointed at their teens’ reactivity; all these emotional experiences are completely natural, given that as humans we are wired to experience all of them. As one of my friends said, we are “emotional beings.” The tricky part of this emotional reality is that our feelings play tricks on us; if we don’t pay attention, we won’t even realize we are experiencing them until we just react to them, and then we may be swamped by an even greater sense of sadness, anger, hurt, distrust, resentment, guilt, and shame. It’s as if our emotions were dictating everything we do in those moments.
Traditionally, psychological literature distinguished “positive” versus “negative” feelings and encouraged us to do everything possible to experience only positive emotions and to avoid, at all costs, negative emotions. We were taught that if an uncomfortable emotion showed up, we should replace it with a positive one. Within the ACT model, however, we emphasize that all types of emotional reactions are simply emotional reactions, neither good nor bad. Seeing feelings as good or bad is simply another judgment thought. When we undergo an uncomfortable emotion, we do everything we can to run away from it, to get rid of it. However, the more we try to escape it, the more intense it becomes, because all strategies to suppress it simply magnify it. The more you don’t want to feel anxious, the more anxious you’re going to feel; the more you don’t want to feel stressed, the more stressed you’re going to feel. It’s far more useful to look at whether our response to a given emotion is helpful or not in the situation in which it arises.
When your teen is showing reactive behaviors, such as screaming, threatening, or lashing out, any parent will feel challenged, and a natural response is to do everything you can to immediately stop both your teen’s behavior and the emotional discomfort you’re going through. This is a very common dynamic for parents raising teens with intense emotional sensitivity, so let’s take a look at the most difficult emotions you encounter in your parenting job.
Exercise: Your Feelings
For a couple of moments, think about a difficult situation you had with your teen this past week. Close your eyes if that helps you remember. Do your best to imagine that particular memory as vividly as possible; notice the specifics of that moment between the two of you, and hold this image in your mind for a couple of minutes. Then do your best to answer the following questions in your parenting journal:
- Do you notice a particular bodily sensation? Take a couple of minutes to scan your body from head to toe and pay attention to some common areas, such as your tummy, chest, shoulders, throat, or jaws.
- How intense is this physical experience? Moderately, mildly, or severely intense?
- Can you name this emotion? You can name the emotion by simply saying Here is a feeling of… Naming the emotion like this is very important because telling yourself things like I’m angry, or I’m sad implies that your personal identity as a whole is defined by the emotion, which magnifies the experience. You’re certainly more than the emotion you’re working on.
- Can you notice what this feeling is asking you to do? Do your best to recognize any impulse or urge associated with this emotion. What do you feel like doing? Here is the caveat—it’s quite natural that in the process of recognizing these urges you may want to go along with them—but keep in mind that your task here is to simply describe your urges and then go back to focusing on the emotion. This is a fundamental step, to distinguish the difference between being the emotion and having the emotion. Being the emotion is automatically doing anything the emotion asks you to do, and having the emotion is simply acknowledging its existence.
- Are you having any thoughts along with this emotion?
- Can you simply describe those thoughts and images to yourself? You can say something along the lines of, I’m having the thoughts…
- Finally, switch the focus of your attention to your breathing, and slowly notice the quality of every breath as you draw it in and let it out.
After completing this exercise, you may have noticed that emotions have a life of their own, and by simply watching them, without trying to change them, you allow these feelings to follow their natural course.
The better you can handle your emotions, the better you will be able to handle your teen’s emotional responses. The starting point is always looking within and recognizing your own uncomfortable feelings to figure out how to respond to them and to your teens’ problematic behaviors; without looking inward, you’re at the mercy of the emotional rollercoaster.
Now let’s take a closer look at the most common strategies parents use when dealing with intense emotions.
Emotion Management Strategies
Parents, like any human beings, rely on all types of strategies to manage their emotions and their parental distress. These strategies take different forms, but all have a single purpose: to control your emotional struggle and avoid discomfort at all costs.
It’s useful to treat these go-to emotion management strategies in a lighthearted manner rather than judge them, because at the end, you’re doing the best you can raising your dysregulated teen. Notice if one or more of these strategies applies to you.
The Disconnector
If you’re using the disconnector emotion management strategy, it’s quite likely that when having an intense feeling, you leave the situation, either physically or emotionally, that is triggering it. For instance, when his daughter questioned him about the T-shirt he gave her for her birthday, George felt so hurt that without saying anything, he simply left his daughter in the living room and walked toward the backyard. He had to physically remove himself from that painful experience.
The Pusher
When your feelings are very strong, you try to push them away immediately using different substances, such as alcohol, food, or even prescription medications; you take these substances to tamp down the intense emotional reactions you are having. One of my clients said, “I better visit Xanax nation when dealing with my teen this afternoon because it’s going to be a rough conversation.”
The Distracter
If you use the distracter strategy, you will use any activity to distract yourself from the uncomfortable emotions you experience when dealing with your teen. For instance, Claire tends to spend hours watching television, working at the office, surfing the Internet, or doing online gambling to distract herself from the pain of learning her daughter has been cutting over the last six months.
The Externalizer
Using the externalizer strategy means that you explain your intense emotions by looking at your teen’s behaviors as the only cause of them. Focusing exclusively on your teen’s behavior or blaming her for how you feel is an indication that you are not looking at your own emotional experience and how that experience is driving your parenting behavior in a given moment.
The Surrenderer
If you “give in” to whatever the emotion tells you to do, you are relying on a surrender type of emotion management strategy. For instance, if you feel powerless, you may simply give in and go along with whatever your teen requests, says, or does. Or if you’re feeling angry, you simply act on that anger and perhaps scream at your teen, lash out, and even called her names. In both examples, you go along with the emotion without looking at the consequences of your parenting responses for you, your teen, or the relationship between the two of you. It’s as if you were reactively going with the flow of emotions, jumping from one point of the emotional chain to another point.
These emotion management strategies may be helpful at times. For instance, if you’re getting angry and you catch yourself getting ready to scream at your need, it’s more helpful to use a disconnector strategy than to act on anger. However, it’s a much different scenario if you rely on these strategies as a default mode when experiencing high emotionality and without looking at whether they’re improving or worsening the challenging moments you go through with your teen.
When using these strategies rigidly, they quickly transform into control and avoidance strategies that get activated at the maximum level any time you experience parental distress; they help you perform an escapist act the moment an uncomfortable emotion appears, and in the short term, they work. However, the consequence of rigidly using these strategies is that the emotions you are escaping from will not only reappear but also revisit you with more intensity.
The more you engage in an escapist act, it’s like the more you’re feeding a little tiger with a piece of steak; at some point the little tiger gets bigger, and instead of being satisfied with a single piece of steak, it will demand more pieces. Similarly, the uncomfortable emotion you’re trying to escape from, instead of pushing you to escape from a single uncomfortable situation, will demand you escape from all situations that trigger it; then the emotional rollercoaster has simply taken over and you lose the option to choose your parenting response.
Summary
The emotional rollercoaster will continue happening until you learn to handle all the uncomfortable emotions associated with parental distress without running away from them. Learning to notice your emotional experience and recognizing the different emotional strategies you use—pusher, disconnector, externalizer, surrenderer, distracter—are the first steps to choose your behavioral response when dealing with your highly sensitive teen.
Weekly Practice: Playing Emotion Detective
For the next couple of days, especially when feeling triggered by your teen’s behavior, see if you can carefully notice, as an emotion detective, the most intense emotion that you experience, the physical experience of it, the intensity of it, your go-to emotion management strategy, and finally, any impulses to act on it.