In the last two sessions, you were introduced to the attention regulation skills of orienting and allowing. We introduced you to these skills to help you achieve focused, flexible, and sustained attention on all parts of your emotional experience—the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and motivations that are present in any given moment. These skills are essential and foundational to achieving effective mindful regulation skills. It’s important to keep practicing and growing this attention regulation “muscle” you have been developing.
Now, we will introduce the next set of mindful regulation skills, further building upon on the attention regulation skills you’ve learned so far, to help you relate to the content of what pops up in your mind in a new way. We call these skills metacognitive regulation and they build upon the attention regulation skills that you’ve been practicing.
Now, we will introduce the next set of mindful regulation skills, further building upon on the attention regulation skills you’ve learned so far, to help you relate to the content of what pops up in your mind in a new way. We call these skills metacognitive regulation and they build upon the attention regulation skills that you’ve been practicing.
As you become more familiar with the ERT metacognitive skills you will notice how they invite you to imagine, visualize, and talk to ourselves about the experiences that unfold in our lives. In this way, the metacognitive skills are more “elaborative”—which essentially means that they rely on language and words to help us relate better to the situations in our lives.
Reactive responses like worry, rumination, and self-criticism are also forms of cognitive elaboration that often provide temporary control and predictability over intense emotions, which is one reason they become our “go to” way of responding when difficult feelings arise. However, as we’ve discussed, over the long run, reactive responses 1) produce and worsen our distress, 2) cloud the motivational information provided to us by our emotions, and 3) can become obstacles to taking effective actions.
The meta-cognitive skills that you will learn in ERT provide an alternative to these unhelpful forms of cognitive elaboration that pop up in our minds in later stages of the unfolding of an emotion, when the snowball is rolling down the hill. Specifically, the skills can help us detect emotions and underlying motivational pulls and can give us a way to create healthy mental distance and gain perspective to increase our emotional clarity, reducing the chances of emotional reactivity.
Just as allowing follows orienting, the distancing skill builds upon these two attention regulation skills.
Often times, when we’re in emotional distress, we struggle to gain distance from our emotions and motivations. If you picture all the intense emotions you are feeling as a big lake, it’s as if you are fully immersed under the surface of the water. It’s as if “My emotions have me!” Instead, when we can gain distance and perspective from the intensity of our emotions, we can tell ourselves “I have my emotions”. It’s as if we can sit by the side of the lake without getting engulfed by the deep water. One goal of this first meta-cognitive regulation skill, distancing, is noticing that we are not synonymous with our emotions and motivational pulls.
Distancing reflects our ability to observe items that come up in our minds (e.g., thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.) from a healthy distance, with greater self-awareness and perspective-taking to recognize that our thoughts, feelings, and urges are subjective, temporary internal events, instead of accurate and permanent aspects of ourselves.
We can use the distancing skill in two ways; Distancing in time and in space. Gaining distance in time refers to the ability to see mental events as an experience or a moment in time, like a passing storm. Gaining distance in space refers to the capacity to observe the parts of our emotional experience from a distance—where we can see that they are a part of us but that we are more than these experiences.
In the distancing practice, you will have the opportunity to cultivate the capacity to gain a perspective in both time and space. You are encouraged to visualize an ancient redwood tree and then, as best as you can, become this tree to provide a stable base from which you can gain perspective. You are invited to gain a wider perspective on the emotional storms and crises of your life as one moment in time…in one place, where you are. In the practice you will also be asked to give all aspects of your emotional experience—powerful emotions, motivational pulls, upsetting worrisome or ruminative thoughts, physical sensations, and self-criticisms—physical forms by “placing” them out on the tree’s branches. Treating these aspects of your inner world as objects in the physical world, from which you can get an observer’s distance that is not “too close” and not “too far.”
As you gain familiarity with this practice and visualizing yourself as a tree and the products of your minds as objects on your branches, you will see how it helps you are better able to sustain your attention upon your emotional experience thereby making it easier for you to break patterns of responding reactively. Distancing also helps us see that we are not synonymous with our emotions, but rather, that emotions make up one part of ourselves and our experiences.
The Tree Meditation, the formal, off line distancing practice will help you use the on-the-spot skill of distancing, which helps you harness the stillness and rootedness you discovered when you became the tree, in your mind’s eye especially in moments when you need to find your clarity for action. Seeing, in-the-moment, how your thoughts, feelings, and emotional storms and crises are like the weather in the forest—creating a healthy distance in time. In-the-moment, you can place thoughts, sensations, and emotions on the branches of your tree—or on other imagined scenes such as passengers in a car or colors of paint thrown on a wall—creating a healthy distance in space.
As you gain familiarity with this practice and visualizing yourself as a tree and the products of your minds as objects on your branches, you will see how it helps you are better able to sustain your attention upon your emotional experience thereby making it easier for you to break patterns of responding reactively. Distancing also helps us see that we are not synonymous with our emotions, but rather, that emotions make up one part of ourselves and our experiences.
The Tree Meditation, the formal, off line distancing practice will help you use the on-the-spot skill of distancing, which helps you harness the stillness and rootedness you discovered when you became the tree, in your mind’s eye especially in moments when you need to find your clarity for action. Seeing, in-the-moment, how your thoughts, feelings, and emotional storms and crises are like the weather in the forest—creating a healthy distance in time. In-the-moment, you can place thoughts, sensations, and emotions on the branches of your tree—or on other imagined scenes such as passengers in a car or colors of paint thrown on a wall—creating a healthy distance in space.