“Four dogs” - A metaphor about emotion regulation

Emotions evolved to give us information about the world around us. Based on these messages we can choose how to react in a helpful way to a situation. We can’t control the emotional response that first arises in any given situation, but emotions are powerful and sometimes they influence our behaviour in unhelpful ways. We’ve all lost our temper over a misunderstanding, and we’ve all felt anxious about something we didn’t really need to worry about. It is therefore important to sometimes separate our emotions from our behaviours. For example, feeling jealous while watching your partner chatting to someone else at a dinner party may be a completely valid emotion, just indicating that you care about them and would fear losing them. Depending on the situation, the emotion may or may not be entirely justified – there may be objective cause for suspicion, or the conversation may be entirely innocent. Then a whole variety of behaviours could result from that initial emotion, that may be justified and helpful, or that potentially could be unwarranted and cause damage.

This is where emotion regulation comes in.?It’s about receiving the initial message (the emotion), trying to interpret it correctly and then learning how to remain mindful of our corresponding behavioural response. This last element may be a behavioural response directed towards others, or it may be the ability to soothe yourself when a strong emotion appears to be a false alarm.

Protect and connect

Human beings are capable of experiencing a wide spectrum of emotions (you can use websites like www.feelingswheel.com to practice labelling more nuanced emotional states). But for now, let’s focus on four key emotional states: fear, anger, sadness and happiness. These four emotions are critical for our survival. Without ?fear or anxiety you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. Without anger we wouldn’t be able to stand up for ourselves when someone is violating our boundaries. Without sadness we wouldn’t seek comfort from loved ones. Without happiness we couldn’t celebrate successes or bond with our peers. Broadly speaking, anxiety and anger protect us, while sadness and happiness connect us to others. This social connection is equally essential for survival, as humans evolved to live in tribes and those that were outcast didn’t last long alone in the wild.

The four dogs

Now, imagine these four emotions as four dogs on leads. Your anger dog should be trained to attack, if and when it is necessary. Your anxiety dog will signal when there is a danger you need to run away from, or perhaps can run to seek help from someone else (think of Lassie). Your sad dog has those cute ‘puppy-dog eyes’ that draw others in to offer support. And your happy dog is that bouncy puppy that every passer-by stops to adore on the street, creating connections with others.

For some of us, one of these dogs may be dominant and this can cause problems because the dominant emotion may not accurately reflect the situation and may stop us from getting our needs met. For many people, anger can be the emotion they are most likely to express when they actually feel sad or anxious; this may push others away at a time when they need support. For others, a situation that should provoke justifiable anger actually causes a predominant feeling of anxiety, or low mood if the anger is internalised; this can make it difficult for us to protect ourselves effectively. There are many different reasons this can happen, as a result of a varying life experiences and different sociocultural norms about ‘appropriate’ emotional expression.

Can’t I just keep the happy dog?

No! Although they’re not all pleasant dogs to be around, we need them all to stay safe and survive. Without any signals telling us to defend ourselves or to get away from an unsafe situation, we’d quickly get taken advantage of by others or find ourselves in danger. Equally, imagine being at a funeral and being very animated and happy; people may view you as insensitive and you wouldn’t receive any support to process the loss. Emotion regulation is not about getting rid of any of these emotions. It is about staying connected to all of them, but training the dogs so that you can choose the appropriate response for each situation.

Training not suppressing

Let’s think about our anger dog. Those who struggle with anger management may feel pressured to never express any anger. Others may be fearful of their own anger dog. They may want to get rid of it, permanently muzzle it, or sedate it. Suppressing our anger too much means that we can’t be assertive when we need to. Our training needs to be more nuanced. No, the dog shouldn’t be running around attacking people at random, but it shouldn’t be asleep either. If it is alerted it should be trained to stay on the lead until the situation can be assessed – does it need to just growl as a warning? does it need to actually attack? or was it a false alarm?

The other dogs need to be trained in the same way. Ideally, we want to have access to a full repertoire of responses any situation. Of course, there will always be situations where an innate automatic response is still critical – if a bus is hurtling towards you, you don’t want to be pondering over which bus route you’re on, you just jump out of the way! Don’t worry, you can’t train your brain out of that! But there are many day-to-day situations in which developing your emotion regulation skills will be beneficial for feeling better within yourself and for interacting with others.

How do I train my dogs? ?

First of all, you have to get connected to all the dogs. Many of us have learned to avoid feelings of anger, sadness or anxiety through life experiences and social learning. Step one is learning to reconnect with these emotional states and notice how they feel in your body. Labelling emotions is a key emotion regulation skill in itself; it is not an innate skill and we tend to underestimate how challenging it can be. By training your brain to notice and identify emotions in their early stages, we give ourselves a much better chance of being able to successfully manage the emotion before it becomes overwhelming, or before we have reacted on autopilot.

Next, we can notice when each dog gets triggered. This can help us prepare the dogs in situations you predict they will struggle with. For example, if you know that you snap at your family when you’re fearful of social judgement, then you can try to prepare your anger dog pre-emptively – “just pause and wait to see how they actually react, maybe they won’t be as critical as you expect”. We can also learn to notice if one of our dogs is overactive, for example learning that sometimes if we feel angry it may be helpful to reflect on whether the anger is covering other more vulnerable emotions, such as anxiety. We can then focus on taking an action that is more in line with the message that underlying emotion is trying to deliver.

Finally, there are lots of skills we can learn to help us create some distance and sense of control between an initial emotional response and the resulting behavioural reaction. Slow breathing is one of the most important, because it sends a physiological signal to your brain to soothe your neural threat system. It can be done anywhere and nobody needs to know. To use any skill successfully though, we need to practice – try setting a timer on your phone twice a day to sit and do some slow breathing for 60 seconds, focusing on the long slow out-breath. There are apps that help with this if you need a visual focus, such as ‘Breathe Easy’. ?

To develop more advanced emotion regulation skills, you can practice mindfulness techniques, use soothing imagery and cultivate self-compassion (‘The Compassionate Mind Approach to Difficult Emotions using Compassion Focused Therapy’ by Chris Irons is a great resource for the latter).

Developing emotion regulation skills allows you to ask “which dog do I really need?” in a situation where your automatic emotional response may not fit with the reality of the situation. It allows you to express yourself effectively and get your needs met. It can be a difficult skill to learn but luckily our brains really can be trained, just like our dogs! So have a go at some of the tips in this article and keep practicing!

Credit: this metaphor was developed collaboratively with Chris Easton; he has given me permission to share it.