The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Anxiety

Basic Emotion Regulation Skills 151

Balancing Your Thoughts and feelings

As you’ve already learned, overwhelming emotions can be caused by many events. But you
can also be overwhelmed by your emotions when you only pay attention to part of what’s really
happening. This type of thinking is called filtering (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979). Here are
some examples:

 Zeva was a straight-A student, she always made the honor roll, and she had already

received a full scholarship to her first choice of colleges. But when she got a poor

grade on her math test she broke down. “I’m such a loser,” she thought to herself,

and, very quickly, she felt overwhelmed, upset, and angry.

 Antonio asked his girlfriend if she could come over at three o’clock. She said that

she was busy until seven, and she’d come over then. Antonio immediately got

angry and accused her of abandoning him.

 Jennifer grew up in a typical middle-class family in a fairly good neighborhood.

Most often, her parents were kind and supportive, and they always tried to do their

best for her. However, one day when Jennifer was five, her father punished her for

talking back to him, and she was grounded for a week. Later, as an adult, whenever

Jennifer thought about her young life, she only remembered that incident, and she

got upset whenever she thought about it.

Do you see the filtering in each person’s thought process? Zeva was devastated by one less-than-
perfect grade because she filtered out all of her past successes. Antonio filtered out the fact that his
girlfriend said she would come over at a different, more convenient time. And Jennifer filtered out all
of her positive childhood experiences and only focused on the one hardship she’d experienced.
Imagine living your life with dark sunglasses on all the time so that it’s impossible to see the
colors of the world. Think about what a limited, dreary life you might have. Similarly, when you
filter your experience and only focus on the distressing elements of your life, you’re also choosing
to live a limited, unfulfilling life.
In order to begin balancing your thoughts—and therefore your emotions as well—it’s necessary
to examine the evidence that supports both sides of an emotion-stimulating event:

 Evidence supporting your self-criticisms versus evidence that you’re a good person

 Evidence that only bad things happen to you versus evidence that good things

happen too

 Evidence that no one cares about you versus evidence that people do care about

you

 Evidence that you never do anything right versus evidence of your past successes

 Evidence that the current situation is awful versus evidence that it’s not as bad as

you think