What are the emotions?
We have 6 basic emotions: the surprise, the happiness, the disgust, the wrath, the sadness and the fear. Like the fingers of a hand, they help us in different aspects in our life: they prepare us, activating different mechanisms in our organism; they motive us, giving us energy, to get closer or away of determined situations; and finally they help us relate with other people and beings (animals, plants…) therefore, our emotions are adaptive and help us in a lot of aspects of our life
Like other elements of our body, the emotions can be “hurt”. IJust like we can get hit, make us a fissure, a sprain, a fracture in our hand…, in occasions our emotions can be malfunctioning. Then we talk about emotional disorders, that is to say, a temporal alteration of some or several of your emotions affects you in your daily life.
We professionals in mental health know and count with tools, just like a doctor use an ointment, a bandage, a temporary immobilization of the hand if it’s hurt, that will help you solve your emotional problems. One of these tools is virtual reality
How do we feel the emotions?
We all feel, experience and express the emotions in different ways. Let’s see whats the triple answer channel of emotions:
If we imagine a television with three channels, a first way in which we feel is our body, and it is what in psychology we call physiological channel: palpitations, abdominal discomfort, headache, tremors, excessive sweating …, are examples of how we feel the emotions in our body.
A second channel is our behavior, motor channel: block us out of anguish, cry, be in bad humor, avoid or flee of determined situations are another way of fear.
In third place, but not less important, are our thoughts, cognitive channel. In this channel, we tend to anticipate the worst, we stay just with the negative part of the situation, for example, having an accident…
These three channels, unlike what can happen in a television, are perceived at the same time. That is to say, when we feel an emotion is like we are seeing the three channels at the same time. Imagine that you are watching a movie, a documental and a tennis match at the same time and in the same television… Is because of that that sometimes, is difficult to understand what is happening to us.
How the emotional disorders appear?
That a fear ends up being a psychological problem is more likely if the following conditions are met:
People who are more nervous by nature (by genetics) are more likely to have an emotional problem.
But that is not usually a sufficient condition for a fear disorder to appear. It has also been discovered that fear disorders are learned. In other words, our experiences in relation to certain situations are also very important: having a bad experience, not having done something or never or very little, having seen other people having a bad time during a particular situation, having seen or received news about a certain situation … are experiences that influence our fear.
In short, our way of being and our experiences are the most important aspects to explain why a fear disorder appears. Knowing that the origin of the fear is in our way of being and in the lived experiences, help us to explain how and why an association is made between certain situations and the appearance of fear. In addition, (as will be explained later) it will be very useful to us to understand how the fear is solved.
How is a pathological fear kept?
When we suffer from an alteration of fear, it automatically appears when faced with situations related to the fact that we fear
An usual behavior is usually to try to avoid situations in which appears our emotional discomfort (physical and / or cognitive). For example, if a person talks about flying in a conversation, the person who is afraid of flying does not participate, if we find ourselves bad in a restaurant or in the subway … we go home…
This behavior reduces fear very quickly. However, in the medium term, the avoidance is bad, because we are learning that not doing what we are afraid of eliminates feeling the fear. However, it does not make fear to be resolved once and for all.
In addition, we also learn what is good to avoid in advance. That is, the more things related to the fact that we fear we can avoid, the better. Since that way I will have less fear. However, fear is usually widespread and generalized. Every time we fear more things; Maybe initially you were only afraid of the subway, but now you have developed fear the moment you leave home, travel…
In conclusion, Avoidance, Sensitization and Generalization explain why the emotional disorders of fear do not usually disappear alone or without a change in the behaviors that a person performs to manage their fear.
How we solve emotional problems?
To solve an emotional disorder you will learn how to break the Association that has been created between the situation or conditioned situations (getting away from home, going by subway, by car …) and fear (physical sensations and unpleasant thoughts).
Psychotherapy will help you to train and perform a series of learning that will allow you to break that association: Through the exposure technique, you will face progressively, situations related to your fears, which will help you to break down and reduce the intensity of the association between your fear and those situations.
Learning how to use your breath can also be helpful in reducing the feelings of discomfort that appear when you have fear.
Finally, learning to detect negative thoughts and change them to more real and functional ones will help you in your cognitive discomfort.
With training and these lessons you can solve your fear. Cheer up!
What is an exposure hierarchy?
An exposure hierarchy is a list of things or situations that cause you disgust and/or you avoid doing because of fear.
These lists are about specific topics, for example, the fear of flying or the fear of dogs and include in an extensive and varied way the situations that cause me discomfort.
In addition, these situations are ordered from minor to major discomfort, without having to follow a normal chronological order.
How to make an exposure hierarchy?
Let’s use the example of fear of dogs:
- First, list the situations that cause you discomfort. Remember that the list should include concrete and varied facts.
- Once you have the list made, score on a scale of 0 to 100 the two situations on the list that lesser and greater discomfort provokes to you. Do not worry if you doubt or make any mistake, make changes as often as necessary and score all the other situations, one by one, depending on the subjective degree of discomfort that they generate to you.
- Finally, sort the list according to the score that you have assigned to each of its elements (from minor to major discomfort or score).
Congratulations, you already have your exposure hierarchy ready!