National Center for PTSD; STAIR Skills Training in Affective and Interpersonal Regulation

Clients will often resist learning emotion regulation skills due to misconceptions about its nature and consequences. The following misconceptions about emotion regulation are broken down into the key areas below:

• Distress Reduction:
  • Requires rejection or denial of feelings
  • Trivializes feelings
  • Invalidates abuse trauma
• Positive Emotions:
  • Are inconsistent with life experience
  • Are inconsistent with self-image
  • Feel "fake"