At Cascade Psychotherapy, I work with clients to help them decrease their intense emotional responses.

Learning about emotions seems simple, but we tend to overlook the intricacy of what we feel and why. Many of my clients learn that their emotional responses run deeper. Understanding how past experiences with family, relationships, or trauma impact you today will uncover why you feel so anxious, hopeless, mad, or sad so frequently. We tend to label our emotions as over the top and unnecessary when we don’t accurately know where they actually originate from.

We also need to understand that fear of emotions magnifies them. Learning to decrease or eliminate certain emotional responses requires a paradox approach. Validate it, reduce your fear of it, welcome the emotion in, apply skills to regulate it’s intensity, and over time, notice that emotion diminish or stop.