Anxiety, Depression, and Emotion Regulation

We express what we care about with more emotion.

Because our emotional lives are complex, we often use colorful language to help our experiences come to life since others can’t feel what we’re feeling. When emotions enhance the pleasure of our experience, we might use words like “sweet” and phrases like “walking on clouds.”

When our emotions get the best of us and we do things we later wish we hadn’t, we sometimes use expressions like “I got carried away” or say, “I didn’t feel like myself”– we’ve all been there.

But when we talk like that, everyone knows we don’t mean that we’re walking around on clouds thousands of feet in the air! Losing track of which parts of the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences are actually colorful language can cause some big problems. When we mistake our colorful language for what’s literally true, it seems so clear and obvious that everything else starts to get fuzzy.

Let me explain.

I once supervised a graduate student in a training clinic who asked his teen client during their first appointment to describe her experience of depression and anxiety so he could better understand why she came in for treatment. I don’t think I’ll ever forget what she said.

“It’s like being in the water, clinging to a dock near the shore by my fingernails. I’m all alone. I can’t pull myself up because chained to my ankles are massive weights – one ankle has the weight of depression chained to it, and the other is weighed down by anxiety. My hands and arms ache from hanging on, and there’s nothing I want more than the relief of letting go. But I know what will happen if I do. So, I keep my grip on the dock, calling for help.”

Her story painted a vivid and telling picture. She was in a lot of pain with no apparent end in sight, yet she decided not to let go. Why? Because her hope for a brighter tomorrow transformed her pain into crystal clear meaning and motivation in her mind – which said, hang on to the dock. At the same time, her colorful language highlighted some fuzziness about how well her strategy worked for her.

How we regulate our emotions is like how we color in our experiences.

Well, if it’s true that if you let go of your struggle with anxiety and depression, you will sink in the water and drown, then by all means, hang on as tight as you can, for as long as you can, and yell as loud as you can! When we color in our experience this way, it’s not brave to try something different – it’s reckless!

But if we can remember its colorful language for a moment, things could be different. How we color it doesn’t need to change – we can notice how we colored it. And if we did, we might see that as we tell this to the therapist, we are no longer alone on the dock.

Maybe we can look at other colored pages colored over time and see that the tide eventually goes back out. And remember that after the tide goes back, there will be dry land, and we can find a way down. We might even ask big, curious questions like “What if the struggle with our emotions is one of the things keeping us stuck right where we don’t want to be?”

Find ways to use what you have to get where you want to be.

Coloring in our experience in specific ways when we’re feeling anxious tells us stories about a scary version of what might happen that motivates us to run, fight, and hide from these outcomes to get some relief.

Over time, our life gets smaller as we become less willing to leave our comfort zone. Let’s find a way for you to make decisions for yourself, so it doesn’t feel like anxiety is making them for you!

When we’re depressed, sometimes we can’t stop returning to a version of the past that we wish we colored differently. And now we don’t feel like coloring much at all. It seems like if we can feel better; then we can do the things we want to do with our lives.

Let’s find a way to make moves toward a life you love today, allowing you to feel more hopeful and energized about tomorrow! Whatever the struggles with your emotions, there are many right ways to get unstuck.

Get in touch today and see how our work can help you make the changes you want!