Cognitive and behavioural steps, and a split that is not enough

Many people now, this reading says, live with emotional illness, and the cause is taken to be that they cannot steer a feeling. Once a person is swallowed by it, the quality of a life falls, and people around them can be harmed. The essay therefore looks at the writer’s own pattern of regulation, and at practices that might help a person become more nearly the owner of a feeling.

Strategies are first split by the side of the emotion they step into. Cognitive ones, as named here, include letting a feeling out by shouting or crying, imagining something pleasant, and recalling a happy memory. Behavioural ones include sharing a feeling in order to get sympathy or reassurance. A later stretch adds that this two-way split is not enough. There are also experiential and physiological approaches. On the cognitive side this reading names Beck’s cognitive therapy and Ellis’s REBT; on the behavioural side, behaviour therapy. An experiential approach, unlike those, is said to give weight to the emotion itself and to the process.

A brighter side, a conversation, a song, and a mistake that keeps turning over

The writer’s own pattern, as set out, is mixed. When a situation or a problem arrives, there is an effort to think of its brighter side. When a day has gone badly, the writer tends to tell someone about the feeling and to ask to be understood. To keep excessive strain at bay, there is also singing, listening to music, or sleep. And there is a tendency to keep turning over a mistake or an action that caused the trouble, and to regret and worry. In the past, the writer says, hard feelings were not first seen clearly, but only avoided, and in the end nothing was really solved.

Feel it as it is, and three names for a hard feeling

The experiential method is tried as a practice that is easier to reach than some basic therapeutic methods. To use it, a person first has to understand a feeling and to be able to express it; expression, this reading says, is more helpful to mental health than understanding alone. Looking back at a feeling, living through it, and then waking to it and reflecting, is how regulation is supposed to become more efficient. The writer tried not to run from a feeling, but to take it as it is and watch how it changes. Taking it in, the writer says, made the feeling itself clearer, and made a response more possible. The motto given for the method is that the only way to defeat a negative feeling is to feel it as it is; the aim is a change of feeling through that living-through.

Anger is defined as the feeling that comes when a boundary is crossed and attacked, when a goal is blocked, or when pride is hurt. Anxiety is a discomfort and a tension born of worry about a threat or a danger that may come. Fear is the feeling when a dangerous, threatening stimulus is already in front of a person, or is expected. The books cited — Lee Ji-young’s Emotion Regulation Coaching Book, Sigma Press, 2012; Bang Mi-jin and Han Su-jin, The Skill of Emotion Regulation, Wisdom House, 2011; and Song Nam-yong, My Emotion Regulation Method, Fir Forest, 2009 — are left in those years. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A class essay analysing an emotion-regulation profile and the writer’s own pattern of use, with a practice of feeling a hard feeling as it is.
2. A first split into cognitive strategies (venting, imagining something pleasant, recalling a happy memory) and behavioural ones (sharing a feeling to get sympathy or reassurance), later widened to experiential and physiological approaches, with Beck’s cognitive therapy, Ellis’s REBT, and behaviour therapy named.
3. Lee Ji-young, Emotion Regulation Coaching Book, Sigma Press, 2012; Bang Mi-jin and Han Su-jin, The Skill of Emotion Regulation, Wisdom House, 2011; Song Nam-yong, My Emotion Regulation Method, Fir Forest, 2009, left in those years.

Last updated: 14 November 2026