Managing or Understanding Emotions––Which Is Better?

Learning emotional and behavioral control is very much in vogue. There is instruction in schools, in the workplace, and in the larger world of interpersonal relationships. In their book Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey describe steps to take to achieve emotional and behavioral management via metacognition. Metacognition is thinking about your thought processes.

Metacognition and CBT

The goal of their strategy is to alter cognitively the way you react to events and choose preferable outcomes for your emotional responses, especially negative emotions.

Their strategy is based on CBT and the goal of altering your thinking about your emotional responses and behaviors. They say this approach allows people to escape being governed by their feelings.

Source: AbsolutVision/Pixabay

CBT, developed by psychiatrist Aaron Beck, dates back to 1976. It is a form of treatment that examines how people look at situations that create feelings leading to subsequent behaviors. It has a problem-oriented focus and is a popular treatment that targets automatic thinking. Beck (1976) says that CBT examines three cognitions: 1) core beliefs, 2) faulty assumptions, and 3) automatic negative thinking. The focus in treatment is on actions to take that alter your thinking about situations.

Brooks and Winfrey describe four steps in their metacognition concept:

1) Observe intense feelings as if happening to another person than you.

2) Write down your emotions, read later on, and list alternate ways you might respond.

3) Keep a list of happy memories along with unhappy ones.

4) Look for what you can learn in the difficult areas of your life.

Do managing and controlling emotions and behaviors provide the most helpful outcomes for distressed people? Another way to grapple with emotions is to understand them, to gain insight into them.

Gaining Insight

Insight into one’s emotional makeup and linked behaviors has a long history going back to Freud and Breuer’s origin of psychoanalysis in 1895. A strategy different from that of CBT leads to understanding and insight: Emotional learning is tied to past experiences and associations from early childhood, say Fonagy and Target. (2003). Such learning and insight are accomplished through what is called psychodynamic psychotherapy.

What Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Does

1) What emotional responses did I learn? How did I learn them? What events occurred that led to my experiencing my different emotions?

2) Who helped me learn (or taught me) the associations between events and the emotions I felt?

3) What kind of person am I? This is important say Martin and Adams (2018) because emotional learning filters through our personality styles and roles learned in childhood.

Hippocrates said, “It is quite as important to know what kind of a patient the disease has got as to know what sort of a disease the patient has got.” This may apply to emotional learning and elaboration as well.

4) Ask yourself how helpful/reasonable is the feeling you have for the circumstance you are in? How was this feeling learned in childhood? Is it maladaptive for your current situation?

5) If an emotion is unwanted or unreasonable for a present situation, what is reasonable to feel or do instead with your behavior?

By gaining insight into the origin of your emotional makeup, you are equipped to decide how to decipher and grapple with the emotions and behaviors in new ways.

Source: John Hain/Pixabay

Comparing CBT and Psychodynamic Therapy

Studies comparing CBT and dynamic psychotherapy treatment reveal increased insight and self-understanding in psychodynamic therapies over CBT, find Jennisson et al. (2018). This self-understanding decreases unwanted symptoms but also results in better coping with life’s problems in the future.

Studies comparing the length of time symptom remission lasts with CBT and psychodynamic therapies show differences. Symptom improvement lasts longer with psychodynamic therapy, showed Shedler (2009) in his study of several meta-analyses. CBT treatment effects decay a year or so after treatment ends. Psychodynamic treatments last for more than five years after therapy ends, Shedler reports.

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Not only does improvement last longer after psychodynamic psychotherapy but improvement continues and grows years after therapy ends, find Abass et al. (2006), de Maat et al. (2009), and Leichsenring and Rabung (2008).

“Psychodynamic psychotherapy sets in motion psychological processes that lead to ongoing change, even after therapy has ended. “ says Shedler. "[It] also foster[s] the positive presence of psychological capacities and resources.”

Future Directions

When problems arise in our lives, we wish we could manage and fix them quickly and in a stepwise fashion like making a favorite cooking recipe. But quick treatments with medications and CBT don’t do what in-depth understanding and insight can achieve. The longer journey reaps rewards not only in terms of mitigating bothersome symptoms. Coping and insight are enhanced.

Perhaps we need to teach more about improving self-understanding with psychodynamic psychotherapy and teach less about emotional and behavioral management via CBT and metacognition approaches. By so doing, we may be able to make enduring gains on suffering from the emotional illnesses so rampant in our society.