Two steps toward, two steps back

And so, that give and take gives us a sense of agency, autonomy, and control And so, then when we go to regulate, what we want to do is we want to always pay attention to the relationship, literally the space between the emotion and you, where you're looking from. That's what you want to pay attention to, not the body sensation itself. People often, when they go to regulate, they see the intense, they go, ooh, look at this jittery, intense energy. They collapse their awareness on it, and then they get overwhelmed, and it goes from a four out of 10 to an eight out of 10, and then they go do an addictive behavior, right?

We want to stop doing that. That's not helpful. What we want to do is learn to gradually give and come back to from the emotional intensity so you can go, oh, I can take two steps towards the emotion, which makes me closer to it, and then the intensity goes up two notches, and then I can take two steps back, and the intensity goes down two notches, you see. And so, that give and take gives us a sense of agency, autonomy, and control within the world of emotion regulation, where we were taught that we are powerless and don't have control,