#affect regulation

Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self (Peter Fonagy, 2002)

“Building on Piaget's concept of reversibility, A. E. Thompson considers affect "irreversible" when the child cannot imagine other reactions to the object, or feelings other than the one he currently feels.

Reversibility gradually emerges between middle childhood and early adolescence.

Slowly the child wonders what it might take not to feel as he does, or to change the feeling state of the object.

With formal operations fully deployed, the child begins to think of general principles rather than aspects of the specific situation that can explain or change emotions.

However, while advances in the capacity for abstract thought enable the adolescent to take a step back and to monitor himself and others, this does not necessarily feel like a good thing.

For the adolescent, as experiencer of affect in himself and others, the world is suddenly much more complicated and confusing.

Thus, he needs at times to withdraw from interactions, or from mentalization in general, to take a rest from the ramifications of alternative motivations. (…)

Some adolescents may engage in arcade games, surfing the Internet, and so on;

Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self (Peter Fonagy, 2002)

“It is important not to conflate reflective function with introspection. (…)

Reflective function, referred to in developmental psychology as "theory of mind,"

is the developmental acquisition that permits children to respond not only to another person's behavior,

but to the children's conception of others' beliefs, feelings, attitudes, desires, hopes, knowledge, imagination, pretense, deceit, intentions, plans, and so on.

Reflective function, or mentalization, enables children to "read" other people's minds. (…)

In our view, the caregiver facilitates the creation of mentalizing models through complex linguistic and quasi-linguistic processes,

primarily by behaving toward the child in such a way that the child is eventually led to postulate that his own behavior may be best understood if he assumes that he has ideas and beliefs, feelings and wishes,

that determine his actions, and the reactions of others to him can then be generalized to other similar beings. (…)

Naturally the absence of reflective function in such situations will give the appearance of rigidity to the person's behavior, as if only a singular pattern of response were accessible.

Furthermore, the response may frequently be in conflict with social norms because the tendency to take the perspective of others has been abandoned in that context,

and consequently the "moral emotions" used to make judgments about the consequences of actions and to regulate behavior are absent.

The absence of reflective function may further exaggerate an antisocial response by forcing the individual to see the other not as another intentional agent,

Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self (Peter Fonagy, 2002)

“Similarly, in order to be recalled as an item in autobiographical memory, the memory representation of a specific event that a person has experienced must not only specify the event itself

but must also represent the fact that the memory has been caused by that event (memory for causal source of knowledge).

Perner reviews evidence from theory-of-mind research indicating that children before 4 to 5 years of age are notoriously bad at identifying the causal sources of their beliefs

(such as whether they have seen, were told about, or inferred what is in a box). (…)

Perner also argues that infantile amnesia (the lack of genuine memories of personally experienced events that occurred prior to about 3 to 4 years of age)

is due to young children's inability to "encode personally experienced events as-personally experienced'—that is, in terms of their causal informational source "as having been seen." (…)

At around 4 years, however, "children become able to hold in mind multiple representations or models of the world simultaneously".

This enables them to establish temporal and causal relations among memories of previously encoded experiences of the self and, in particular, to causally "evaluate the relevance of previous states of the self to the present self." (…)

The ability to relate multiple representations underlies, therefore, the establishment of an abstract historical-causal self-concept (the "autobiographical stance"),

Lifestyle self-management: Diet, exercise, sleep

E-CENT Blog Post

14th September 2018

Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2018

Dr Jim’s Blog: Mental health is not just about childhood experiences; Or about current stressors; or badly managed thoughts… Mental health is related to diet and nutrition, inner dialogue, physical exercise, re-framing of experience, and sleep science…

Introduction

In science as well as popular culture, the body and mind have…

as you struggle to hold on to feelings they slip and slide like ice cubes, like olives chased with a toothpick, life fish in shallow sea water, and you cannot firm them up, know that you have them. or you know them, but only intellectually. you know that you love, that you don’t hate, but your heart feels this love like a melting ice cube you try to capture with a fork before it’s gone. time bomb baby. i know that my feelings grow and inflate like madly whipped cream and are just as easily deflated. i know that my mind deflates them bc it can’t bear the excitement. love and happiness are way more intolerable to my mind than pain and sadness. i do not think this is rare. i think this is common. people take refuge is states of diminishment because thriving, being genuinely happy, is simply intolerable to them. 

so, tonight, i felt i hated S. i love S. i know that i love S. but i felt as if i hated him. i felt so angry. i wanted him to stop dragging himself around the house like a sad sack of sorrows. mild annoyance got quickly whipped into white hatred.

and i felt scared of my girlfriend, and sometimes, ridiculously, when i feel this scared, i want all of this to go away, this budding relationship, this lovely, lovely thing. i prefer gray. i prefer no sky. 

and maybe my anger at S and my fear of J are bound inextricably, because how can i walk away from the gentle, loving, survival-enabling chains of my rapport with S toward the clear blue sky of my rapport with J without looking at the chains that killed my lifejoy for 25 years and raging at them?

and how can i walk toward this blue sky, so unprecedented, so unlikely, and not feel tremendous nostalgia for the chains that are now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, the life i know, the life that moored me and kept me from spilling over uncontrollably into emptiness? the life in which i got my ph.d., taught fabulous classes, formed valuable relationships, had moments of joy, had moments of comfort, felt sometime peace. how can i not have terrible mixed feelings about all this.

i need quiet. i need to find calm. but calm seems to put a damper on love. i need calm to rest and function, and calm is absolutely inconsistent with this upheaval of madly whipped feelings.

today i said this to J, this thing about my need to put a damper on feelings, and how sad it is that i may need to be numb when i visit her. this numbness terrifies me too, by the way. because what if i lose her, inside me and inside her? and then i told myself, and her: i will be more alive the next time.

Play-Dough Feelings Face Activity:  This is a simple feeling identification/affect regulation activity (good for TF-CBT)

Print out or draw a blank face (Click here for free printable faces).  I usually just print the outline of a face and have children color in the skin color and hair.

Direct the child to create facial expressions on the activity sheet.  I usually start out general (ex. Show me a happy face) and then ask for them to make up a related story/scenario. As you go on it can become more personalized (ex. Show me how you look when you are sad?).  I also use this to open the child up for conversation about their feelings (ex. Can you tell me about a time when you felt this way?) or as a way to ask about specific situations (ex. Can you show me how you felt when your dad yelled at you).

This can be incorporated into games using things like feelings tic-tac-toe, jenga, etc.