How to control emotions?

Many people extolled or criticized the behavior of BBB participant Ana Paula, who was expelled from the house for assaulting one of the participants. Makes sense. Who ever slap someone who told you something nasty? Or did you suffer, being on the other side, being the target of an unjustified explosion? It may seem liberating to see someone doing "what works on the tile" as Ana Paula has so often done on the BBB, or even indignation about the apparent disregard for the other's limits.
However, this apparent freedom sometimes hides something. much more uncomfortable and painful. Overcoming the limits of the other may be much more an impossibility to react otherwise than a true choice. These are cases where there is such intense emotional deregulation that it can lead to extreme behaviors such as assaults and suicide attempts.

Emotional dysregulation is a very low threshold for feeling intense emotions and a slow return to calmness, associated with a difficulty in modulating emotions and responding to them in an effective and context-sensitive manner. For these people, it is very difficult to tolerate what they feel and choose how to respond. This stems from biological predispositions combined with traumatic life experiences lived in an environment that did not validate one's emotional responses, nor teach them effective ways to deal with emotions and everyday problems. High emotional sensitivity and lack of skills to deal with such emotions make people with dysregulation have impulsive behaviors that relieve some of the suffering they experience but have unintended consequences - usually the removal of loved ones, and sometimes even risks. to life itself.

As such, impulsive acts, or seemingly disproportionate to the situation that motivated them, may not be a choice or an act of sincerity or spontaneity, but desperate responses to very intense emotional pain that produce more suffering. and lead to great interpersonal difficulties. This puts the person in a cycle of suffering that only grows, and can lead to tragic consequences if he does not receive adequate help. This is why it is crucial to know how to separate emotional dysregulation from simple lifestyle variations.

It is important for mental health professionals to be able to recognize when a person suffers from emotional dysregulation and to be able to indicate effective treatments to reduce the suffering caused by this condition. An example is Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a highly effective therapeutic approach, whose intervention model was specifically developed to address the complexity of emotional dysregulation in its various components: behavioral, cognitive, interpersonal, and self-awareness instability. Rather than criticizing or praising such behaviors, it is important for the general population to try to understand where they come from and to guide people in such an out-of-control situation to seek help so that they know it is possible to build a more balanced life and that worth living.