Your first response to an emotion

And your immediate response to the emotion dictates whether you'll be regulated or dysregulated. Befriending emotion specifically means with each emotion, especially the ones in the grieving cycle, when they arise, there's this moment, right? Just as the emotion arises. And your immediate response to the emotion dictates whether you'll be regulated or dysregulated.

So if your immediate response is like a yes and like kind of like a warm approach, then that emotion will calm and regulate rapidly. If it's a withdrawal or a pull away or a no, it amplifies that emotion and it causes a lot of the problems that people have with emotion dysregulation. So, first, what we do is you have that negative relationship with the emotion. We then begin, and this is the same pattern in a lot of this, when you're working with patterns with these behaviors.

is you cultivate an equal and opposite pattern So, just as much as you're pulling away, you're moving towards the emotion as arises, and you're learning to revalue the emotion, right? So, what it means when you pull away is you have a negative value of that emotion, right? Instead, we want to have a positive and a more high value of the emotion. So, we create an equal and opposite pattern, and then once that negative withdrawal begins to die away or taper away, then we can pull away or decrease the new pattern and have no pattern.

And when you have no pattern, that's best because that's more the real true state. But, but that's for me, that's what I've always done with unhealthy patterns. Because if I just try to let it happen on its own, it doesn't, the momentum doesn't just go away from me, it has too much momentum.