Sow Your SEEDS: One Path to Emotion Regulation (Part 7 of 10)
Whereas distress tolerance refers to short-term coping in the moment, emotion regulation refers to a long-term lifestyle change that will ultimately support much healthier emotionality. When I teach emotion regulation skills to clients, I use an extended garden analogy. For example, if you want to have a healthy garden of flowers, would it make any sense to scream and swear at the flowers? Ignore the flowers? Shame the flowers? Coerce or manipulate the flowers? Of course not. Your flowers do not need to be controlled — they need to be cultivated.
The same concept applies to our emotions. Instead of trying to control them, we need to care for them — like beautiful, delicate flowers. (By the way, it makes me cringe every time that I hear therapists — and even DBT practitioners, no less — paraphrase emotion regulation as “controlling your emotions.”) There are several things you need to do to care for a real garden: plant the right seeds, do some weeding, check the soil, continue to care for the garden even when you feel like giving up, and fertilize. Each of these activities represents a specific way to care for our emotions as well. Here, I will simply introduce the first one: You need to plant the right SEEDS.
Planting the right SEEDS refers to five ways of taking care of your physical body: Symptoms, Eating, Exercise, Drugs and Sleep. If you want to have a healthy garden of emotions, you will need to plant each of these seeds by addressing physical symptoms, finding healthy eating patterns, getting moderate exercise, monitoring which drugs enter your body, and getting adequate sleep. After helping my clients develop a specific plan for each of these “seeds,” I often have them provide me with a quick SEEDS report at the beginning of each session, as part of their weekly check-in.
This blog post is an excerpt from Trauma stabilization through polyvagal theory and DBT, an article published by the American Counseling Association on September 14, 2021 by Kirby Reutter.
If you would like to learn more about how to use trauma-focused DBT with a variety of trauma-based disorders, I recommend the following resources to get started:
- The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for PTSD: Practical Exercises for Overcoming Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Kirby Reutter, 2019
- “DBT for Trauma and PTSD” (DBT Expert Interview series at psychotherapyacademy.org/dbt-interviews)
- Survival Packet: Treatment Guide for Individual, Group, and Family Counseling by Kirby Reutter, 2019
- “The Journey From Mars: Brain Development and Trauma” webinar (youtube.com/watch?v=WSFqHS_axOc)
