Episode 245: Regulating Our Emotions as Parents with Alissa Jerud, PhD
By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.25 Psychiatry CME Credits.
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Article Authors: Alissa Jerud, PhD
-Check out her book Emotion-Savvy Parenting
-Connect with Dr. Jerud on Instagram and LinkedIn
Announcement: for interest in psychotherapy cohort, go here.
Neither of the presenters have any conflicts of interest to report.
As humans, we are wired to want to avoid pain, whether emotional or physical. Unfortunately, when it comes to emotional pain, our attempts to avoid it often backfire. This is particularly true for the emotion of anxiety. In fact, it turns out that the intuitive strategies many of us reach for (or even suggest others adopt) when feeling anxious tend to maintain and exacerbate anxiety over time.
For instance, if you’re feeling anxious about an upcoming medical procedure, you may try to avoid that anxiety by telling yourself that it will be okay. This may decrease your anxiety momentarily, but there’s a good chance that the thought, “Maybe it won’t be okay,” will surface a little while later, causing your anxiety to increase once again. Alternatively, you may decide to cancel your procedure altogether in order to not have to feel anxious about it. Yet, although this may provide the temporary relief you were seeking, at some point you will likely have to reschedule the medical procedure or schedule an entirely different medical procedure, thus leading to a return of your anxiety.
How Exposure Therapy Can Help
Accordingly, exposure therapy, which is considered to be the gold-standard treatment for anxiety-related disorders, aims to help individuals break the habit of reducing anxiety through avoidance. More specifically, exposure-based treatments consist of repeated, prolonged exposures during which individuals intentionally approach anxiety-provoking people, places, activities, objects, thoughts, images, physical sensations, etc. in the absence of avoidance behaviors or rituals aimed at reducing anxiety or preventing some feared outcome from happening. This structured practice, both in and out of session, allows for important, corrective learning to occur.
Optimizing Exposure Therapy
Notably, although the field of psychology used to believe that the positive outcomes achieved with exposure therapy were the result of habituation (i.e., anxiety decreasing within and between exposures) and the eventual erasure of initial, fear-based associations, newer research suggests that habituation is neither a strong nor consistent predictor of treatment outcomes and that initial, fearful associations remain intact even after successful treatment with exposure therapy (see Craske et al., 2008 for a review). Accordingly, it is now believed that an emphasis on habituation may not only undermine treatment outcomes, but may even contribute to a return of fear (i.e., relapse) after treatment ends. Thus, instead of aiming to decrease anxiety with exposures, we can optimize treatment outcomes by helping people relate more skillfully to anxiety (and the uncertainty that often fuels it) when it arises, no matter how intense this anxiety happens to be.
This, in turn, can help maximize inhibitory learning, which is now believed to be the key mechanism driving treatment gains in exposure therapy (Craske et al., 2008). In a nutshell, inhibitory learning is what occurs when the new learning resulting from exposures inhibits the initial fearful associations. For instance, for an individual diagnosed with panic disorder, repeated, prolonged exposure to feared physical sensations teaches them that these sensations aren’t necessarily dangerous, thus inhibiting the previously acquired belief that these sensations are dangerous.
Having said that, it’s important to note that this new, corrective learning is best acquired through exposure, rather than through restructuring fearful beliefs. In fact, research suggests that learning is greatest when there is a mismatch between what one expects will happen and what actually happens (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972). Thus, rather than try to convince someone that their feared outcomes are unlikely to happen before they do an exposure, it’s best to encourage them to accept that their feared outcomes might happen, thereby resulting in an even greater expectancy violation when the feared outcomes don’t occur.
Perhaps most important from an inhibitory learning perspective is the fact that anxiety is normal and natural and is thus guaranteed to stick around and/or return at some point in the future, even if it does decrease with treatment (Abramowitz, Deacon, & Whiteside, 2019). In other words, the goal of exposure isn’t to get rid of anxiety, but to help patients relate more skillfully to anxiety, no matter how it manifests. With this in mind, rather than see anxiety as a bad thing or as a sign of failure or relapse, we can help patients see moments of anxiety as golden opportunities to practice building their muscles for tolerating distress and uncertainty.
How Does This Relate To Parenting?
Interestingly, we can take a very similar approach when working with parents, regardless of whether they meet criteria for an anxiety-related disorder. After all, parenting is full of moments that can easily ruffle even the most cool, calm, and collected among us and pull us to act in ways that aren’t all that helpful in an attempt to avoid our own uncomfortable emotions. Indeed, when feeling strong, unwanted emotions, it’s understandable that parents may focus on trying to change their children’s behavior in order to get their kids to stop engaging in the button-pushing actions that they are finding so triggering. However, as is the case with anxiety, these attempts to control our kids tend to backfire, especially in the long run.
For instance, let’s say that your kids are shrieking in the house and you yell at them to stop making so much noise (as just about all parents sometimes do). Regardless of whether your kids quiet down or up the ante and start shrieking even louder, when you yell at your kids in this way, you strengthen the habit of trying to reduce your own distress by controlling your kids. As a result, the next time your kids do something that prompts an unwanted emotion in you, you are likely to find yourself reaching for a similar tactic in hopes of reining in your kids’ behavior. In other words, rather than learn that you can tolerate whatever emotions your children’s behaviors prompt in you, you are essentially teaching yourself that the only way you can cope when triggered by your kids’ behavior is if you get your kids to change.
Yet, the reality is that the only behavior we truly have full control over is our own. Indeed, even if our kids initially acquiesce to our requests (or demands), there’s a good chance that at some point our attempts to get them to change won’t work and that we’ll find ourselves floundering and feeling even more uncomfortable as a result. Moreover, our attempts to get our kids to change are unlikely to leave them feeling all that good about themselves or our relationships with them.
Thus, instead of focusing on trying to change our kids’ behaviors – whether through threats, punishments, yelling, or even rewards - we are much better off focusing on controlling our own behavior instead. This is where Emotion-Savvy Parenting comes into play.
What Is Emotion-Savvy Parenting?
Emotion-Savvy Parenting is a science-informed approach that aims to help lighten the heavy load of parenthood by empowering parents to let their values – rather than the unwanted emotions they experience – guide their behaviors (Jerud, 2025). Of note, being emotionally savvy does not mean never feeling intense, uncomfortable emotions. Instead, it’s about reducing our vulnerability to these emotions and feeling them when they arise, without allowing them to govern our behaviors.
How The ART Tools Can Help
Emotion-Savvy Parenting is comprised of the ART Tools, with ART standing for Accept, Regulate, Tolerate. These are evidence-based strategies adapted from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills training (Linehan, 2015) that parents can use anytime to increase emotional agility, whether they are with their kids or not. The skills for accepting emotions allow us to welcome unwanted thoughts, feelings, and even behaviors without judgment, while the skills for regulating emotions reduce our vulnerability to painful, unwanted emotions and help us change these emotions when they do arise and aren’t serving us well. Finally, the skills for tolerating emotions enable us to feel intense, uncomfortable emotions while still showing up as the parents we want to be.
Accept
Acceptance means acknowledging reality without judgment. It does not mean liking or approving of something, but simply recognizing the facts exactly as they are. Not only does acceptance feel better for us and those with whom we are interacting, but it is often the catalyst for change, as we can’t change a given situation or behavior unless we first accept and understand it.
With this in mind, we can aim to accept all thoughts and feelings, as well as all behaviors that fall outside of our control (assuming these aren’t causing harm to us or others), and we can use mindfulness as a tool to help us be more accepting.
Mindfulness is the act of paying attention on purpose, without judgment, to the present moment, as experienced through any one of the five senses. We can practice mindfulness by non-judgmentally noticing or observing (within or outside of ourselves) or participating, without distraction, and we can return to this practice whenever distracting or judgmental thoughts arise.
Regulate
We don’t want to suppress or avoid unwanted emotions, but we can take steps to reduce our vulnerability to experiencing these feelings in the first place, and we can also use skills to change emotions when they do arise and aren’t serving us well.
First, however, it can be helpful to note that our emotions are much more complex than many of us realize. This complexity allows for many points for intervention.
Skills for regulating emotions:
Problem-solve to change the prompting event
Reframe unhelpful thoughts
Rest, fuel, and move our bodies
Tolerate
We can’t always prevent painful emotions from firing and we may not always be able to change these emotions when they do surface. However, we can use distress tolerance skills to help us withstand intense, unwanted emotions without giving in to the unhelpful action urges that accompany these feelings.
Skills for tolerating emotions:
The CARE Skills: Cool with ice, Activate your body, Relax your muscles, Exhale slowly
Opposite action
Distract and self-soothe
Mindfulness of painful thoughts and feelings