By Nahoma Presberg, MS BCBA NYS-LBA
If you’ve ever reviewed an ABA treatment plan, you’ve probably seen a program about emotion identification…and for good reason! Understanding our emotions and the emotions of other people is an incredibly important aspect of navigating the world around us. But not all emotion ID programming is created equal. Let’s talk a little bit about the specific benefits that emotion identification can serve when navigating stressful situations and how to make your programming specifically address these elements.
- In order to identify your emotions, you first have to pause and assess what’s going on for you. By doing this, have to step outside of the feeling long enough to observe it. This step is the first step to regulating those emotions! Remember– emotions are value neutral. It’s important to let people label a wide variety of emotions without judgement. We can be quick to redirect or focus more on positive emotions but practice facing more challenging emotions without judgement.
- When you can effectively name what you’re feeling, it gives the people around you more information about how to help you. Labeling emotions can be a first step in accessing co-regulation.
- Once we’ve placed a label on our emotion, we can start to assess the strategies we might need to take to regulate it. We can map emotions onto various coping strategies so that once you label your emotions, you can quickly assess for what to do next.
- Learning to identify your emotions is also the first step in building resilience skills. As we mentioned before, in order to label an emotion, we have to step out of it for a moment. This can also be a helpful moment in identifying and remembering that feelings are temporary. It is a lot easier to cope with a difficult emotion knowing that it will end. Sometimes in stressful situations it can feel like the things we are experiencing are going to last forever. Once we label it and take a step back, we are more able to remind ourselves that this isn’t true.
- Accurately identifying how you’re feeling also helps people to make better decisions. Since we make so many decisions based on feelings, when we are clear about how we’re feeling, we are less likely to make impulsive choices that we are later going to regret once that emotion settles down.
Remember, when teaching emotion identification skills, keep the utility at the forefront of your mind. Build in mindfulness and compassion into the process. It’s difficult to face negative emotions but getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is a super power that will support our clients for the long-haul.
About the Author
Nahoma Presberg, MS BCBA NYS-LBA, is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Nahoma obtained their master’s degree at the University of Rochester in Human Development. They have been working with clients in their homes for the past 6 years but has over a decade of experience supporting children with developmental disabilities. Nahoma is passionate about neurodiversity affirming care and thoughtful programming that helps every client thrive.
For more information about Nahoma, you can visit their website at https://www.nahomapresberg.com/.
The post 5 Steps to Emotion Identification (And Why It Matters) appeared first on Different Roads to Learning Blog.
