So the science is cool and all, but WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO WHEN WE EXPERIENCE OVERWHELMING EMOTIONS?
No worries… I got you covered on this one!
Peter Levine: Use “SIBAM” to work with emotion
S: Sensation (interoception/internal perceptions) — proprioception (the body in the field of gravity, the body in space), vestibular sense (balance), movement, velocity; heat/coolness, tension/relaxation
I: Image (external sensations) — sight, sound, touch, taste, smell (literally gets you out of your head and into the world!)
B: Behaviors (mostly “subconscious”) — pacing, wringing hands, deep sighing, posture, facial expressions
A: Affect (the “actual” emotion) — the felt sense /experience in the body; name the “categorical” emotion (fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, contempt, etc. — and there may be more than one!)
M: Meaning (the LAST step) — suspend cognition until the end. What triggered this? What is my body prompting me to do? How can I see this emotional experience as INFORMATION?
Click here for a 13-minute guided meditation with this practice.
There are many ways to approach a situation!
As shown in the graphic of the Process Model of Emotion Regulation above, we have many options for dealing with emotional encounters and situations.
For example, let’s use the simple example of being in traffic and feeling frustrated with how slow your commute is.
- Situation Selection: Avoid the situations you know can trigger stress! While this is not always possible, perhaps there are things you can change about your daily routine. Can you take the bus? Bike to work? Carpool?
- Modify Situation: Is there something you can change about the current situation? Can you get off at the next exit and take the back roads home?
- Attentional Deployment: Shift your attention to something else (remember how we did this in the guided meditation on working with pain, pendulating between places of pain and islands of security in the body?) Can you focus on the direct experience of the present moment, without getting lost in the story about terrible commutes? Or, instead of focusing on your anger over the traffic (which you can’t really do anything about now that you are in the middle of it), listen to music that you love, download an audio book to ‘read’ while you drive, or download an interesting podcast.
- Cognitive Change: Is there a way to see the situation differently? What is the kindest, most generous assumption you can make? (I remember when the recession began in 2008 that my commute got a little shorter — there were fewer people with jobs driving to work! I think of this often, and remind myself 1) to be grateful for my job, and 2) to see lots of traffic as a sign of a rebounding economy!)
- Response Modulation: Can you respond in a way that can reduce your stress? Can you do some belly breathing in the car? Can you exercise when you get home?
Many times, stress makes us see a situation through a very narrow lens, when, in fact, we have many possible options for how to deal with a situation.
Additional Practices for Working with Stress
You can learn more about Peter Levine’s work on Somatic Experiencing here.
You can read Tara Brach’s words about working with difficult emotions here.
Want a guided meditation on emotions with an Australian accent? Click here!