In this didactic video, Dr. Dawn‑Elise Snipes presents a practical approach to emotion management for clients who experience dysregulation or view emotions as threatening. She frames emotions as communication signals—expectations generated by past experiences that act like a smoke alarm, warning of possible problems but not confirming them. Emotional intelligence (or emotional quotient) is defined as the capacity to recognize, tolerate, and manage a range of feelings, which in turn supports personal safety and empowerment. To operationalize this, Dr. Snipes introduces the I.D.E.A. framework: Identify the feeling and its bodily/cognitive signature; Downregulate to return to a “wise mind” using mindfulness and physiological calming techniques; Explore the trigger, meaning, and options (including positive emotions); Act by choosing a response aligned with a client’s meaningful life goals; and Assess the outcome, adjusting as needed. She walks through each step with concrete clinical examples—recognizing physical cues of anger, using refrigerator emoji charts, differentiating early irritability from full‑blown anger, and handling trauma histories with caution. The video emphasizes early detection, the importance of mindfulness for down‑regulation, and the need to attend to both distressing and uplifting emotions. Dr. Snipes also discusses practical applications in individual and group settings, strategies for dealing with uncontrollable external stressors (e.g., politics), and the necessity of moving from theory to actionable steps. The session concludes by previewing a follow‑up video on enhancing mindfulness and self‑regulation to improve treatment compliance.
Chapters
Hey there, everybody. And welcome back to this series whole person counseling 26 essential skills for 2026. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Today we are talking about emotion management skills to address dysregulation. People who don't understand their emotions or have been overwhelmed from them at some point start to perceive their emotions as a threat. We have a lot of people that we've worked with in session who may be comfortable with one or two emotions or may not be comfortable really feeling or expressing much in the way of emotions. Or when they do start to express those emotions, it goes from 0 to 2:50 and they feel completely overwhelmed by what they're feeling. That's terrifying. It really is. By helping them conceptualize feelings as communication, we can help them feel safe in their own skin. The first thing is to help people understand that emotions are expectations that our brain has based on our prior experiences. What happened before isn't necessarily happening again. Right now this is just similar. So our brain is sending out a warning sign like a smoke alarm that, hey, there might be a problem, doesn't mean there is. Emotions are our body's way of communicating with us, but those feelings are not facts. People's emotional quotient or their emotional intelligence is their ability to recognize, tolerate and manage a variety of emotions. When they're more in tune with their emotions, they're better able to recognize their safety and personal power in the present moment. So to help people increase their emotional intelligence, I created the acronym idea. Identify what the feeling is and what it feels like in your body and mind. Downregulate so you can get into your wise mind. Explore the feeling, what triggered it, and what your options are and then act and assess. So let's go through each one of those because this is a really handy tool for people to have. We want them to identify what each feeling feels like in their body and mind. And again, if they have a trauma history, we want to be very careful not to have them do too much feeling focused or somatic focus until they feel safe. But when you're getting angry, what do you notice? Do your hands start shaking? Do your palms start sweating? Do you start gritting your teeth? What do you notice? And it's important to have them take it one feeling at a time. Angry, irritable, resentful, guilty, envious, jealous, happy, curious, depressed, hopeless. There are lots of feelings and encouraging them to look at them. Sometimes. I will take one of those charts that we used to put on the refrigerator with the different emojis on them and I would have them identify what that feels like in their body or what their body does, how they know they're feeling that. Feeling disgusted is always a challenging one for people. Most people say when they feel disgusted, they feel their face contorting, like, okay, that is fine. We want to encourage them to start becoming mindful of what their body is telling them to through nonverbal signals and emotions. This can take some time. This is not a one session thing. It's a learning process. So they'll probably talk about several emotions in session. And you may even ask when was a time that you felt angry, anxious, disgusted, depressed, lonely? So they can kind of anchor it and, and think about, okay, this is, I think, what my body was doing and how I knew what to label that feeling. Great. Now, over the next week, I want you to pay attention, Pay more attention to what your body's telling you and notice when you're starting to feel these feelings. That way you can identify and address them earlier. The good feelings, we want to ben bolster those. Those are great. If I'm starting to feel curious, okay, what can I do to go down that hole? That's, that's an excellent path to go down if I'm feeling irritable. Yeah, probably want to try to address that. So when I start feeling irritable, noticing it early, it's a lot easier to address it when it's a little problem than when it's this huge thing. This can be done in group, it can be done in individual, but it's important to come back. And for the following few weeks, when you're talking with people, if they are people who like to use or are comfortable with feeling words, when they say, I got really angry, okay, tell me what that looked like when you got angry. Or if they're talking and they're not using feeling words, that's okay. Not everybody's comfortable with feeling words. Tell me what that looked like or felt like to you. So some people will say it feel, felt like I got punched in the gut. Okay, you know, that is something that they associate with anger. It's not for me to tell them whether it's a good or a bad description. It's how they associate it and that's fine. But they need to become more aware in order to get off autopilot. And if they're mildly irritable, then their thinking mind, their prefrontal cortex is still mostly engaged. By the time they get to outright angry, their stress response is fully engaged and their prefrontal cortex is almost completely Shut off. So the ability to intervene and interrupt that emotional progression goes down markedly the longer it goes unattended. Which is why mindfulness is so important. We want to help them develop those skills to down regulate. Once I notice a feeling, I notice I'm angry. Okay, I'm probably not thinking super clearly right now. Hopefully I'm still in enough of my wise mind to say, okay, I need to downregulate. So using those skills we talked about in the downregulation video, doing something to slow my heart rate so I can get back into my wise mind. Then E stands for explore. What triggered the feeling when it occurred. Even the positive ones. If I notice that I'm feeling happy, okay, I'm not going to need to downregulate because I'm still, you know, engaged. That's great. What triggered that feeling? We have a little deer that has been living in our backyard and she recently jumped the fence and was out with their family. I felt sad. You know, I was happy she was staying with her family and everything, but I was sad I wasn't going to see her. Okay, I addressed that feeling. Then she came back and the feeling of joy. And that just washed over me when I saw her cute little face. She's not even a year old yet. You know, that was joy. And I was like, that's what triggered that feeling was seeing that little yearling come back and encouraging people to start becoming aware. Because a lot of times people who are experiencing distress, they may notice the things that trigger their distress, but they almost never notice the things that trigger the brief moments of happiness. And a lot of times people feel like, well, if I tell somebody that I had a happy moment, then they're going to say, I'm not depressed. That's not true. That's not even true in the diagnostic manual. The diagnostic manual says you feel depressed most of the time. Most days, days, not all the time. Every day. And we need to explain that to people because a lot of times they're afraid to talk about the good stuff be because they don't want their depression or their anxiety or their anger to be minimized. We need to be clear about that. We also need to be clear that being mindful of their distress will empower them to figure out how to handle it. So we identify what triggered the feeling that occurred. We identify whether there is a problem or threat in the present. So I'm going to down regulate and I'm going to say, okay, is this a big deal? And then we're going to encourage them to think about the best ways to use their energy to move toward their rich and meaningful life. This is going on. I don't like it and it's completely out of my control. There are some things, like politics, for example, can get under people's skin. That's true. And it does impact us. I'm not saying it doesn't impact us, but with the exception of writing your congressman or senator and voting, there's not a lot you can do about it in most cases. So getting angry and stewing on it for hours, just burning up a lot of energy you could use to nurture the things that are actually important in your rich and meaningful life. And finally, act and assess. At a certain point, you've identified what triggered it. You've identified whether it's worth addressing or not. You've explored ways to handle the situation. You let it go, you address it. You know, well, those are pretty much the two things. You let it go or you address it and you choose a response. You say, okay, this is what I'm going to do now to move forward and improve the next moment. After a while, you may reassess to see if it's being effective. If there's something like politics that really was bugging you and you got really upset about, but there's nothing you can do about it and you said, okay, I'm going to set that aside for now. I'm going to focus my attention on my painting because that's important in my rich and meaningful life. Great, so start painting. Then 20 minutes, 30 minutes later, reassess. If the person is still perseverating about the politics, then the painting's probably not helping much. So what could they do instead? Maybe they need to call a friend. So identify the feeling. Downregulate, explore, act and assess idea. It's a very simple concept that can help people walk through the trigger or the the mo period where they become motivated to actually choosing an action and acting. Telling people to explore how to use their energy to move toward their rich and meaningful life, that's great, but if they don't have the skills to move from theory to action, they're going to feel helpless. In the next video in this series, we're going to talk about how to enhance mindfulness and self regulation to improve treatment compliance.
