DBT Emotion Regulation Skill: Observing the emotion

Observe your emotion:

NOTE its presence
Step BACK, Get UNSTUCK from the emotion
Experience your emotion....
As a WAVE, coming and going
Try not to BLOCK the emotion
Try not to SUPPRESS the emotion
Don’t try to GET RID of the emotion
Don’t PUSH it away
Don’t try to KEEP the emotion around
Don’t HOLD ON to it
Don’t INTENSIFY it.
Remember: you are not your emotion
Do not necessarily ACT on your emotion
(that is, let destructive ACTION URGES pass)
Remember times when you have felt DIFFERENT
Practice accepting your emotion
Do not JUDGE your emotion as wrong, bad, too painful, unfair, embarrassing...
Do not CRITICIZE yourself for feeling the emotion
ACCEPT your emotion as it is in the moment

One interesting thing about strong emotions is that by just observing what’s going on and noting
what is happening to you, you can sometimes begin to actually get a handle on your feelings. We
call this way of looking at things “being non-judgmental” or “practicing acceptance.”
One of the things that gets people into the kind of difficulties we have been talking about is
having strong feelings like anger or sadness and then saying, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I
am a bad person for having these kind of feelings.”

Let’s try a little experiment—imagine yourself being angry. Now try saying some of these kind
of critical thoughts to yourself. What happens to how you are feeling?
It is really interesting how we can sometimes take a bad problem, and make it even worse just by
how we think about what we are feeling!