Dr. Jenn Veilleux

Dr. Jenn Veilleux, clinical psychologist and professor of psychological science,  discusses the science of emotions.

Learn why many of us are so fundamentally afraid of negative emotions, how contrast avoidance blocks us from joy, and a new framework to accurately interpret the hidden messages your body is trying to send you.

About Dr. Jenn Veilleux

Dr. Jenn Veilleux is a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor of psychological science at the University of Arkansas, where she specializes in emotions, emotion regulation, and personality. In addition to training graduate students in the art of psychotherapy, Dr. Veilleux operates a private practice helping adults and couples transform their relationships with their internal states. As a dedicated emotion scientist, she bridges strict empirical research with practical clinical application to help individuals understand their minds and bodies more gracefully. She is also the author of an upcoming book designed to clearly demystify the psychological science behind emotion regulation, which will be fully linked in our resources below. 

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Differentiate Emotions from Moods: Scientifically, emotions are intense, transient, wave-like states triggered by a specific event that have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Moods, by contrast, are longer-lasting, lower-intensity states that lack a target or explicit starting trigger.
• Receive Emotions as Vital Messages: Emotions are not random disturbances; they are functional communication tools designed to prepare your physical body for action, provide information about your social environment, and facilitate connection with others.
• Confront the Trap of Contrast Avoidance: Master suppressors often actively block intense positive emotions. This tendency is driven by a fear of the sudden emotional drop that might follow a peak experience, causing individuals to stay safely anchored in a low level of anxiety instead.
• Understand the Rebound Cost of Suppression: Pushing an emotional wave down doesn't make it disappear. Because emotions are determined to be received, hiding from them temporarily causes them to return with amplified intensity, much like the avalanche of letters invading Harry Potter's living room.

Connect with Dr. Jenn Veilleux

Website: https://www.jenncveilleux.com/

Book: https://www.jenncveilleux.com/book

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenn-veilleux-3270962a8

Connect with the Show

• Website: justlikenana.com
• Share Your Story: If you have a family story or trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.

Connect with Just Like Nana's Website.

A proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.

Theme music by Carter Penny.

Transcript

Demystifying the Science of Emotions and Moods with Dr. Jenn Veilleux

Amie Penny Sayler 0:21

I am your host, Amie Penny Sayler, at Just Like Nana. We talk about emotions, feelings, moods a lot, both on this podcast and everywhere. But sometimes we use those terms interchangeably. And what's so fascinating about my conversation with my guest, Dr. Jenn Veilleux, today, is that they're actually not interchangeable. They each have their own role and function. And I think there's a lot of power in understanding oh, this is what an emotion is, and this is how a feeling is different, and this is what a mood means. It just gives you the language and the clarity to understand what's happening within yourself a little better. What I love about Dr. Veilleux is she's very clear that she's sticking to the science of what we know about emotions. As you know, if you've listened to other episodes of Just Like Nana, I definitely believe that we are essentially beings of energy and light. And there is a lot that goes on energetically, and quantum physics backs this up that everything is energy. So there's a lot that goes on energetically that we're not addressing in this conversation. It's instead very specific to matter and science. So just understand that energetic component isn't really part of this discussion, and obviously it overlays everything, has an effect on everything that's discussed, but it's purposefully left out of this conversation because it's not scientifically understood as it relates to emotions. So Dr. Jenn Veilleux is a professor of psychological science at the University of Arkansas. She's also a licensed clinical psychologist. She teaches courses on emotions, emotion regulation, and personality, and she trains graduate students learning how to do psychotherapy. She also has a private practice where she teaches adults and couples struggling to deal with their emotions and feelings. Dr. Veilleux also has a book which aims to explain the science of emotion and emotion regulation. Her goal and hope in writing the book was that it could help people understand their emotions better and ultimately manage their feelings more gracefully. And of course, that book will be linked in the show notes. So check it out if you want to dive deeper into what Dr. Veilleux has to teach us today. Welcome to Just Like Nana, Dr. Veilleux, so excited to have you here today. Thank you. So happy to be here. So we like to start if you have a favorite or powerful memory of your grandma that you'd like to share, and then what you called her.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 3:17

My favorite memories of my grandma aren't anything big, they're just the small moment. So I called her grandma. Her name was Elizabeth, but she always went by Grandma Betty. And she was a really interesting woman. She worked at Encyclopedia Britannica in downtown Chicago. So very intellectual. She loved words. When I was in college, she had moved to Madison by that point, and I would take the bus up to spend the weekend with her and with my aunt. She lived downstairs, and my aunt lived upstairs, and I would stay with my grandmother. And some of my favorite memories are of us basically doing nothing. She loved classical music, and so we would sit in her little living room and she would be reading whatever book she had. She was always reading a book. I would pick up a book, and it was just these moments of really calm but togetherness. And I love those memories of just warm, quiet afternoons sitting with my grandma reading.

Amie Penny Sayler 4:22

That is a lovely story. Thank you for sharing that. The fact that it's those quiet, connected moments that stand out to you just as a testament to your relationship and how you must have just felt enveloped by love with your grandma.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 4:36

Yeah, for sure.

Amie Penny Sayler 4:38

And I also have a soft spot for the name Elizabeth. So I don't know that we've discussed this, but the genesis for this podcast is that I built out my family tree and discovered I had 45 grandmas named Elizabeth. And so I'm writing stories about each one of them. So I'm loving Grandma Betty.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 4:53

Oh yeah. Yeah. And my mom's middle name is Elizabeth too. And then my cousin's name is Elizabeth. So there's a lot of them in my family too. Love it.

Amie Penny Sayler 5:13

I'm so excited to have you here today because we on this podcast, and we definitely in society throw around this idea of a feeling. And in honor of your grandma, who loved words, I also love words. And I think some words we're sometimes very precise about, and other words just have morphed into, you know, if you really stop and think about it, what meaning does that even have whatsoever? And feeling might be one of those words. So what I'm excited to talk about because you're a scientist and I love talking to scientists, is what do we know about feelings scientifically? What do we have yet to know about feeling scientifically? And then I would

Defining Emotions and Feelings

Amie Penny Sayler 5:59

say, and I don't know whether you agree with this, that perhaps there are some things that are unknowable by science or otherwise. And maybe that's right, maybe that's not right. Maybe it's just there are a lot of things probably that we know that people a thousand years ago would have thought were unknowable. So I could be very wrong about that. So I would just love to explore those contours with you because that's been your passion and your body of work. What is a feeling? What is an emotion? Is it energy? Is it a chemical? What is it in our bodies or our brains or our nervous systems? How do you define it?

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 6:34

I'm gonna actually set aside feeling for a second because that one's actually harder. We can have feelings that aren't emotions, right? You feel pain, we feel hungry, and those aren't emotions. So feeling is quite an imprecise word, but we use it for lots of things. What is an emotion? It's a great question, but it's a really complicated one because even emotion scientists don't have a great answer to what an emotion is. A couple things we do know though. We know that an emotion is a multi-component state, meaning an emotion is something that rises and falls, right? Sometimes we're in our fields having an emotion, and other times we're not. So waxes and wanes, and that emotions have multiple parts to them. Most emotions have a subjective feeling that there's a sort of a sense of what that emotion is. Emotions are also in the body, there's a physiological piece. Emotions have thoughts that are attached to them, emotions have action urges, emotions make us want to do things, and emotions are designed to be expressed. There's also neurological stuff happening in the brain with emotions, but I'm not a brain type of scientist, so I'm gonna skirt around that one because that's not something we have easy access to. So we know that emotions are states. One thing we also know from a scientific perspective, or at least we've decided, emotion isn't one of those things that we know, but we can make some distinctions that an emotion and a mood are actually different. Have you ever thought about that? I have not. Please go further in that. An emotion has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So an emotion happens when something happens, right? I went on a run this morning and I tripped over the toe of my own shoe, and I've looked around and felt I don't get embarrassed particularly easily, but I was like, oof, just a moment where like that, I wouldn't have felt anything if I hadn't tripped. So an emotion has a starting point and then it curves up like a wave and curves back down. Emotions tend to be more intense and they're pretty short-lived. Whereas moods, like you can wake up just in a bum mood. And so moods don't have an object, they don't have a trigger or a starting point, and they last a lot longer, but they also tend to be less intense. So in language, we often throw around the word emotion and mood like they're the same, but scientifically, we tend to differentiate them and think about emotions as these more kind of wave-like transient states, whereas moods can be a little bit longer lasting and without any clear starting point.

Amie Penny Sayler 9:16

Does experiencing an emotion or several emotions close together in time, does that sort of start to create or affect a mood?

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 9:26

My clinical experience, though, in addition to being an emotion scientist, I'm also a clinical psychologist. I see adults and couples for therapy. So some of my answers are going to come from what we know about the science, and others are gonna be like, we don't know, but here's what I think based on my experience with human beings as a therapist and just as a person. So I don't know of any science that is looked at do multiple emotions in a row kind of coalesce into a mood. But my experience as a human and as a therapist says, yeah, probably, right? If you have a bunch of emotions at once, then they may settle into just feeling like an overwhelmed or kind of a bad mood and there's not a specific target, but it kind of settles that way. Could go in reverse too. We know that when people are in a bad mood, emotional waves are more likely because we tend to interpret stimuli that come into our minds and bodies in the state that we're in. So if you're already in a bummer of a mood and then you get into a fight with a family member or even stub your toe, you're more likely to have a stronger emotional reaction because your thinking is going to kind of be consistent with that

Emotional Frequency and Social Interactions

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 10:43

bad mood that will enhance the emotional.

Amie Penny Sayler 10:46

Do we know how many emotions we generally experience in an hour or a day?

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 10:53

No. I do know that emotions are very fast. So the average length of an emotion is like seconds to minutes. So once I ask how long has this emotion lasted, and they're like, three days. I'm like, no, that's probably a mood. But how many emotions a person experiences in a day is going to be really dependent on the person, right? Many, but not all, emotions take place in the context of relationships. It's not like it's impossible to have an emotion by yourself, but if you think about your own life, probably when you have an emotion, when you're by yourself, you're like thinking about relationships with other people or pets. We can have emotions that are purely about us. People might feel bad about themselves, but even then, often there's a social comparison there. I'm not good enough because I'm not as good as these other people, even if that's unconscious. So much of emotion is social that we're likely to have more emotional responses when we have more social interactions.

Amie Penny Sayler 11:57

So when you talk about this wave of the emotion, can you explain what is that? Is that a chemical in the body? Is it an energy? How is that being measured? And then it's interesting when you talk about emotions are largely tied to kind of social interactions, whether those are occurring in the moment or you're thinking about it, a relationship, that sort of thing. And it makes me wonder whether emotions are clues to us about how to interact with each other. So I'd love it if you could address both of those.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 12:30

There is no good science on what an emotion is. It's a multicomponent state. So is an emotion energy? I don't know. Well, you said earlier, maybe there's some questions we're not going to know the answer to. I don't know how to measure energy like that, but maybe some scientists do. Is it a specific chemical? No, I don't think so. There's lots of chemicals happening in our brain, lots of neuroreactions that are happening when emotions are taking place, but I don't think we can isolate it to one in particular. There's not a good answer as to what an emotion is exactly other than it's a collection of stuff. And emotions are also motivational, which kind of gets to your second question. Like emotions prompt us in different directions. We have emotions for a reason, they serve functions. So emotions help us get our bodies ready for action. So you've probably heard of the fight, flight, freeze. I think there's an another one now, fawn, and reflex, right? Emotions help us navigate big conflicts like that. So they help prepare our bodies, either jacking our body up or trying to move our nervous system down. So there's definitely stuff happening in the body. Emotions also give us information about ourselves. I like to think of emotions as messages, right? They're trying to tell us something about the way that we're interacting, our responses to the world, our responses to ourselves. And emotions are designed to be communication tools. You could probably watch a movie in a language that you don't know and still get a sense of what's happening because of the emotions of the characters, right? Emotions are designed to be expressed, they facilitate communication. And absolutely, I think that if you use emotion as a message and a clue to guide yourself and your reactions to those social relationships, then you can engage in some of those social interactions more wisely and in ways that help you and maybe help the other person too.

Amie Penny Sayler 14:44

Let

Processing vs. Suppressing Emotions

Amie Penny Sayler 14:45

me ask you about processing versus suppressing an emotion. I think is it safe and accurate to say an emotion exists in your body?

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 14:54

I think it exists in your mind and your body, right? I'm gonna be precise here as well and say the mind is maybe a little bit different than the brain. The brain is a physical thing, the mind is a little more amorphous. But yes, emotions live both in our mind and our bodies.

Amie Penny Sayler 15:10

What do we know about how we either process or suppress an emotion?

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 15:17

I get asked the process question a lot. That's also not a question that's been answered clearly by science, but I have some thoughts. I think processing emotion means kind of two different things. And it relates to the fact that emotions are both in the mind and in the body. And so when somebody is processing their emotions, some of what's happening is cognitive, it's understanding that if you're processing your emotion, you're reflecting on what happened, what triggered my emotional response, how was I interpreting this situation, what from my past got brought up in this moment that might have contributed to my response? There is this sort of mental piece of reflection that is useful in processing, but it is definitely possible to process intellectually without processing physically. And that's where we land in the realm of overthinking. Some people like to think about their emotions and not actually feel them. For me, processing an emotion involves both pieces. If somebody is just feeling everything in their body, letting it wash through them, but not thinking about it. I don't know that that's full processing. They're thinking and not feeling it, I don't think that's full processing either. So I kind of think we need both to get the message of the emotion, you have to feel it in your body, see what it's connected to, because that is what allows the emotion to crest and come back down when we can situate it in ourselves and then let it go.

Amie Penny Sayler 16:58

As a person who would tend to be more in the let me intellectualize this, think it through, understand it from every angle, you know. Hey, body, you're fine. I'm gonna leave you alone. I'm gonna cut you off at the neck.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 17:10

You're okay down there, but I'm gonna stay up here. Exactly.

Amie Penny Sayler 17:14

And

Fear of Emotions and Contrast Avoidance

Amie Penny Sayler 17:15

I will just say for myself, I think what I've come to appreciate is I am afraid of an emotion. Why are we afraid of our emotions?

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 17:24

I ask myself that all the time because I see it all the time. I see it in myself too. I'm also more of an intellectualizer, though I think becoming a clinical psychologist has helped. I've sometimes I hear myself talking in session and I'm like, I maybe you need to take my own advice here. But I think that there's a couple of reasons why we're afraid of our emotions. One is they don't feel good. And when we're talking about emotions here, most of the time what we're talking about right now is probably the negative emotion. And I say negative emotion as a scientific term. It's not a judgment. It is that these are negatively valenced, meaning they're unpleasant. So we're talking about anger, guilt, shame, sadness, fear, anxiety. Those are what's clustered as the negative emotions. People are generally not afraid of their positive emotions, but some people are. People who are depressed and anxious are actually often afraid of their positive emotions, especially the really strong ones. The negative ones, it's unpleasant. We don't want to feel things that are uncomfortable, especially in this culture. There are some cultures that are better at moving towards discomfort. We are not. So we don't like feeling uncomfortable. And because we don't like it, and so we don't do it all that often when we can help it, then we end up thinking that feeling is dangerous, right? You feel pain, you're supposed to, you know, take headache medication, you're supposed to put a band-aid on it, you're supposed to cover it up. And we treat emotion like it's the same way. We got to get rid of it immediately because this is toxic or it's harmful in some way. When the reality is we have emotion for a reason, we have pain for a reason too, right? Pain's supposed to tell us that something's wrong. Emotion tells us that something's happening. It's not necessarily that something's wrong, but we're afraid of our emotions because we also don't know what we're gonna do when we experience them. A lot of people have experiences of when they're emotional, they feel like they might want to attack someone else, hurt or berate themselves. People are scared of what they're gonna do when they're emotional. And so, because of all of those fears, and fears are about uncertainty. And so, because there's uncertainty and unknown, it's just better to stay away, is the thinking. Yeah. Does that resonate with your experience?

Amie Penny Sayler 19:45

Absolutely. And as you were talking, I was thinking of it as a control issue. Yeah. I was also thinking of it as sort of an authenticity issue. And I don't want to say that I'm an inauthentic person. I am trying to be true to myself and be an authentic person. And I have historically and am still working through, been very aware of, but what might other people think of this? And so I can see that tie between if I experience something and I'm going to have a reaction to my experience that's true to myself, perhaps that won't be exactly what someone else wants to hear, see, think, or do. And that might be a reason that I'm cutting that off. So that's fascinating to think about.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 20:31

Yeah, and a lot of people do that. You brought up the point of suppression. So there's a bunch of different ways that people can suppress their feelings. One is that people can try to just push down the feeling within themselves, that sort of suppress the experience. Take that feeling, lock it in a box, put it in the closet, try to not feel it. We can also try to suppress our thoughts, right? Like, I'm not gonna think about that topic. That topic makes me feel bad. I don't want to think about that. I'm gonna block away those thoughts. Another thing that people do is when they're feeling an emotion, they suppress the expression. So expression is one of the components of emotion. And so that's kind of what you were just talking about. Like you might feel a feeling and you might want to push it down because it's difficult for you, but you don't want to make it difficult for other people. So we mask, we hide our feelings. We're like, yeah, everything's fine, even if it's not fine inside. So that's called expressive suppression. One of my grad students is actually doing her dissertation on what are the motivations that people have for suppressing their emotion and not wanting to burden other people, and also fearing judgment from other people, are those are two of the reasons that we definitely think about when we think about why people block the expression of their emotion from other people.

Amie Penny Sayler 22:00

To get back to the positive emotions as well. And I will say again, I'll just speak for myself, but immediately when you were talking about that, I was thinking about as a suppressor, as a self-declared suppressor, sometimes it is hard to experience the positive as well. And I don't know, and this is my brain's answer to it or my mind's answer to it. But I think part of it is this not wanting to be disappointed or not wanting to have that taken away from me. And so if I don't experience the positive, it can't be taken. And I don't mean to turn this into a session between the two of us, but I don't want to speak for other people either. So if you can just kind of talk about that positive.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 22:41

So there's a name for what you just said. It's called contrast avoidance. And it's really common in people with anxiety. And so the concept is people who have this contrast avoidance tendency to find the really strong kind of positive emotions a little bit scary in part because, exactly like you said, it's the contrast of when it drops. If I feel good, at some point the bus is gonna hit and I won't feel that again. That drop is so gross, so fearful that I would rather stay in this low level, even if it's a low level anxiety, than have to experience that drop. So, yes, that's called contrast avoidance.

Amie Penny Sayler 23:23

Interesting. It's good to know I'm not an anomaly.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 23:26

There are names for what I'm doing. And other people are fearful of positive emotions. Like people who are depressed, for example, they tend to feel more comfortable feeling sad because it's a place that they've been. And so you ask people who are depressed, do you want to be depressed? And they're like, no, I want to feel better. I don't feel good. But compared to people who are not depressed, people find sadness more comforting and positive affecting. It doesn't feel like me, right? And so people have a hard time putting effort towards emotions that feel uncomfortable, even when those emotions are positive and would help them feel better, but it just feels like off. And so they're less likely to pursue some of those positive emotions, which is partly why one of the treatments for depression is trying to help people savor and experience more positive emotion so that they can shift that balance a little bit.

Amie Penny Sayler 24:25

What happens with an emotion when we do suppress it?

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 24:28

As a clinician, I talked before about when people

Impact of Childhood Emotion Coaching

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 24:32

suppress an emotion and they kind of put it in a closet and they put it away. A couple things do happen. Where does it live? I don't know. But what happens is when people suppress their emotion, they're telling themselves that they can't handle it. And so that makes subsequent emotions harder to take. The other thing that happens when people try to inhibit or push down their emotions is that if an emotion is a message, and I think emotions are messages that want to be received, right? And so if the message wants to be received, what's gonna happen is that emotions are gonna have to get stronger to get your attention, right? It's kind of like, are you a Harry Potter person?

Amie Penny Sayler 25:15

Yes.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 25:16

Okay, so you know how in Harry Potter one, he gets like a letter from Hogwarts saying he doesn't see it, but his uncle takes it and throws it in the fire. And then the next day, two letters show up and the uncle gets rid of them, and the message is determined to be received. So he eventually more and more letters show up because they are determined to be received. Well, emotions are kind of like that too. So if you suppress an emotion, your body and your mind are gonna be like, all right, we gonna amp this up because I gotta get her attention. And so emotions actually get stronger over time when we suppress them, which is exactly the opposite of what we want them to do. But if it's a message that wants to be received, it has no other choice. You're not listening, so it has to get louder to get your attention.

Amie Penny Sayler 26:05

What I love about your Harry Potter analogy too is to continue that on. You've got letters flying around the room. And so the uncle's answer to that is we're going to go somewhere so remote that the letters, the message, if you will, can't find us. And in avoid so hard. Yeah. Yep. Indeed, the message does get through. I won't give a spoiler alert as to how, but it's fantastic how it gets through. So it seems the same that you really can't hide from it. It will continue to try to find you.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 26:40

You can for a short period of time, but the other piece is that there's some really cool science on how suppression works in the short term and then it rebounds. So you try not to think about something, you try not to feel it, like it comes back stronger later. So, as a temporary solution, you know, if you're at work, have to do a presentation, and then there's a family drama that comes up. Does it make sense to kind of try to block that out so you can focus on your task? Sure. But then you have to go back to it. So trying to stop an emotion doesn't work. Putting pause on it so that you can do something else that you care about, and then going back to it when you're in a headspace, and I don't mean years later, like hours later, maybe the next day, that you can then process it a little bit more. That is probably okay.

Amie Penny Sayler 27:31

And I do just want to call out as we were talking, and I'm not suggesting that I know the answer, but when we're talking about scientifically, we're not sure where it quote lives in the body or does it or that sort of thing. There is a lot, I think, to energy and around energy that, as you said, we don't know. We don't yet understand that or know how to measure that in a reliable manner. Just like Nana focuses on what we get from our ancestors, and that can mean many things. That can mean a grandma three generations back who we never knew. That can mean the parents who raised us, and that can obviously, when you're talking about people you have living relationships with, can mean the actual relational components of how you were raised. And so I'm curious about what we kind of know about emotions that way. And I'm assuming what we know is mostly around sort of child rearing and what we're taught as children. Can you address how what we're modeled as far as this is how you manage an emotion, how that impacts how we see emotions, interact with emotions as we move forward through life?

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 28:48

There's definitely some genetics at play too. We know that emotions are related to, say, neuroticism as a personality trait, as well as extroversion, agreeableness. We know that these personality traits do have a genetic piece. So in terms of biologically, people vary in like how sensitive they are to threat and reward. Some of that may be passed on through the DNA. So there's that piece. But we learn a lot about emotions from observation, from seeing how our parents, our caregivers, our extended family, how they navigate emotion, and then how they treat our emotions. So there's a whole set of research on emotion coaching, which kind of has to do with what parents believe about emotion. Are emotions helpful? Are they harmful? Should emotions be shared? Should they be kept inside? And how those sort of beliefs then translate into what they do with their children. Are they telling their children that they should express their feelings? Kids all show emotion. You can't help it. I know of no kid who's emotionless. So when a kid shows an emotion, is the parent like, tell me what you're feeling, let's talk through this, or is the parent like, get over it, figure it out. I don't want to deal with your feelings. And then everywhere in between. So we learn a lot about emotion implicitly by what we see and how we interact with our families. And then there's a broader cultural piece here too, because our families pick things up from their families and from their kind of broader cultural contexts, especially around emotional expression. Should emotions be shown or not? You can think about what you know about different countries, right? I grew up hearing that people in Italy and Spain have smaller social distances. There's more passion and drama. I mean, those are stereotypes, but some of those stereotypes are based in, yes, some people get up in your face a little bit more and are willing to express anger. And others, the cultural norm is to kind of stay back and to try to stay calm and to not show passion and to try to be logical at all times. And so those things end up affecting the way that parents operate in their kind of coaching of kids' emotions.

Amie Penny Sayler 31:18

And then as adults, how do we start to, okay, that's what I was taught by my parents, but now I'm an adult and I can start to figure out my relationship with my emotions. How do we start to manage that or change that relationship that we have? Our willingness to receive messages. I'll call it that.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 31:38

I think a lot of it is willingness to receive messages, willingness to even think about it and reflect on what kinds of coaching did I get when I was a kid? What do I like about the way that I was raised around emotion? Like what worked for me? Because most parents, like there are definitely abusive, neglectful parents that are out there that were focused on themselves and not focused on doing the best for their kids. But I think most parents want to do the best for their kids. And we're all going to screw up. My husband and I talk about this all the time. I have two kids, and we're like, I wonder, we're going to screw up in different ways because we've both talked about what are the things that we don't like about the way that our parents navigated emotions. And then we're not doing those things, but I'm sure we're doing something else. So it's not possible to be perfect. What are the things that matter to us? What are the values around emotion that we care about? And so how do we take steps to pursue those? So, like for me, for example, my older kid is like very emotionally sensitive. And he's also a boy, which is a tricky combination because boys are taught especially to push away anxiety and sadness. Boys are taught that it's okay to be angry. Girls are taught that angry is bad. But my kid is like very quick to cry, quick to feel. And his whole life I've been like, okay, you have an emotion, feel it. Let's label it, let's talk through it. It is not okay that you hit your sister. And he's like, But I'm mad. Like, no, no. The feeling is not a problem. Like you taking it out on somebody else, like that is the problem. That is the thing we want to work on, is stopping the action urge that comes with the emotion from turning into an action that hurts somebody else. But it's mattered to me a lot to not play into some of these gender stereotypes around emotion and letting my kid be a sensitive kid and that he gets to have emotion and that there's nothing wrong with having emotion, even though there might be something wrong with how we act on it sometimes. We can hurt other people and we want to not do that.

Amie Penny Sayler 33:57

I'm hearing a lot about how you're helping your son navigate that makes sense as an adult, too. Just okay, let's label it. What do you say about how to feel an emotion for people who are master suppressors? I'm sure you've had to help adults with this. What are your action steps about? Here's how you stay with that emotion, both in your mind and in your body.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 34:18

Yeah. I've been playing around with AI pop songs. I wrote the lyrics to a pop song and had AI write the music. That's basically what's this question? I have a music video. So the acronym that I like to go for is ABLE, A-B-L-E. So, how do you feel a feeling? The first step is being aware that something is happening. And that could be an awareness that something just feels off. That could mean that you're hungry, it could mean that you're sick, just being aware that something is happening. You're thinking differently, just sort of increasing awareness. So that's step one. That's A. The B of Able is trying to locate, all right, where is this in my body? Where is this sensation? Am I feeling tension in my head? Am I feeling something in the pit of my stomach? Am I feeling my muscles clench? So, where is this in the body? And then the third step is giving it a name. Sometimes people ask me, what is the most important emotion regulation coping skill that you have? And I think the answer tends to surprise people because the answer is emotion labeling, giving emotions a name. It doesn't sound like it's as helpful as it is, but some of the science suggests that people think that giving an emotion a name is going to make the emotion worse. But when you give it a name, your brain's like, oh yeah, that's what I'm feeling. I'm anxious. You're acknowledging what's there. Then your brain kind of recognizes based on past experiences of anxiety. Here's this category. Okay, that means I'm uncertain. That means my body's activated. Okay, that's what's happening. And your body starts to process the feeling better when you give it a name. So that can be hard to do. That takes practice, figuring out how do you map on physical feelings to a name. I struggle with this a lot. It was really bad when I was pregnant, but I feel anxiety in my stomach. And so it's like, am I hungry? Am I sick? Am I anxious? When I was pregnant, I was like, is that the baby? It's like really hard to tell. So once I know that something's in my body, I have to go through the options. Am I sick? No. Am I hungry? No, I just ate. Oh, I'm anxious. Okay. That's what's happening for me right now. And then once I realize that I'm anxious, so doing the kind of body first, then I move into the E, which is explore. That is trying to figure out, like, all right, what is the message? That's the more cognitive piece. So, okay, anxiety. What is that? The message of anxiety is that there's something threatening in the future. There's something I'm uncertain about. Is that true? Yeah, actually, there is something. I'm worried about this upcoming trip. I'm worried we're going to miss our connection. That's what I've been thinking about. I'm anxious. Okay. Is this anxiety helping me? Does this help me prepare? If I'm worried about my connection, that means I'm going to have a schedule for when I get off the plane, like where we're going to run to. Like my anxiety can help me. And sometimes the anxiety is like, no, actually, this is not helpful to me at all. I'm going to send anxiety to go sit in the back seat. I'm not going to let anxiety drive anymore. And I'm going to try to move towards my own values. But that happens more when I've gone through all of those steps. So aware, body, label, explore.

Amie Penny Sayler 37:45

Thank you so much for talking about emotions today. It's been just so interesting and so enlightening. If you could leave listeners with sort of one little tidbit of, hey, if you take away anything, think about this. What would that be? Emotions are trying to be helpful.

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 38:03

I saw a meme recently that said something like, emotions are like children. You don't want them driving, but you can't stuff them in the trunk. And I was like, yes, this is brilliant because emotions are trying to be helpful, right? They're like toddlers who want to help you do things.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Dr. Jenn Veilleux 38:21

And sometimes they are legit helpful. And sometimes they get in the way and they actually make tasks harder. But you don't want to push your toddler away because then they will either get mad and kind of come back stronger, or they will run away and you'll feel numb and you won't be able to feel the positive things either. And so emotions are trying to be helpful. The trick is about trying to befriend them so that you can get the functions of emotions, but not get overwhelmed by them and realize that emotions can be regulated. We can't always control what we feel, but we can control what we do about it. Emotions can be shaped and shifted and changed. And so learning how to navigate emotions means learning about yourself and learning about emotion so that you can kind of get the benefits of them without the negative consequences. But the benefits are there. So befriend your feelings is sort of my overall shtick here. They want to be helpful.

Amie Penny Sayler 39:29

That is perfect. Thank you. And thank you so much for your time today. It's been just wonderful talking with you. Thank you.