UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS
What is the difference between a feeling and a behavior?
A feeling is an emotional experience, while a behavior is the action a person chooses in response to that feeling.
What is all-or-nothing thinking?
Viewing situations in extreme terms, such as believing something is either completely successful or a total failure.
What are maladaptive behaviors?
Unhealthy coping strategies that temporarily reduce emotional pain are called these.
What is a trigger?
A person, place, smell, sound, memory, situation, or feeling that activates a trauma response.
What is a boundary?
A limit that protects a person’s emotional, physical, mental, or relational well-being.
Name three physical signs that may indicate anger is increasing
Possible answers include a clenched jaw, racing heart, muscle tension, sweating, shaking, or rapid breathing
What is catastrophizing?
Assuming the worst possible outcome will happen, even when there is limited evidence.
Isolation, substance use, self-harm, and avoidance are examples of this.
What are maladaptive coping skills.
Name three possible trauma responses.
Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, shutdown, emotional numbness, hypervigilance, or dissociation
Give one example of a healthy boundary.
“I am willing to discuss this when we are both calm, but I will not continue while I am being yelled at.”
What is a secondary emotion?
An emotion that appears after or covers a more vulnerable primary emotion. For example, anger may cover fear, shame, grief, or hurt.
Assuming you know what another person thinks or feels without asking or having clear evidence.
What is mind reading?
What is addiction switching/substituting behaviors?
A person stops drinking but develops a shopping addiction. This is often called what?
Why might someone react strongly even when they know they are currently safe?
The nervous system may connect the present situation to a past danger and respond before the person can fully evaluate the current environment.
Why do some people feel guilty when setting boundaries?
They may fear rejection, conflict, abandonment, disappointing others, or being viewed as selfish.
Why can avoiding emotions make them feel stronger over time?
Avoidance provides temporary relief but prevents a person from processing, understanding, and learning how to tolerate the emotion.
Challenge this thought: “I made a mistake, so I am a failure.”
A mistake describes one action or decision. It does not define the person’s entire identity or worth.
Maladaptive behaviors often provide this before consequences appear.
What is temporary relief?
How can trauma affect relationships?
Trauma may cause mistrust, emotional distance, irritability, fear of abandonment, control, avoidance, or difficulty with intimacy.
What is the difference between a boundary and controlling someone?
A boundary explains what you will do to protect yourself. Control attempts to force another person to behave a certain way.
Identify one emotion you frequently express and one emotion that may be hidden underneath it.
Responses will vary. Example: anger may hide sadness, fear, rejection, shame, or helplessness.
How can emotional reasoning affect decision-making?
Emotional reasoning causes a person to assume that because something feels true, it must be factual. Example: “I feel unwanted, so nobody cares about me.”
What is the cycle learned in this lesson
The destructive cycle
What is the difference between processing trauma and reliving trauma?
Processing occurs with safety, support, regulation, and meaning-making. Reliving feels as though the event is happening again without emotional control or present awareness.
How can poor boundaries contribute to resentment?
A person may repeatedly say yes when they want to say no, ignore their needs, overextend themselves, and later feel angry or unappreciated.