DISTRESS, REACTIVITY,
& EMOTIONAL CLARITY

Session 1.1

Chronic anxiety and depressed mood

Chronic anxiety is characterized by almost constant worry and anxiety that is difficult to control. Virtually everyone can describe personal examples of times they have felt anxious and worried. It’s a natural part of being human. Anxiety is an emotion associated with a future sense of danger, misfortune, and dread. This means that we can become anxious about things that may or may not actually be harmful or that might never come to be. Nonetheless, anxiety helps us survive by signaling that an outcome is important to us and mobilizing us to act to prevent a possible negative event from happening. When depressed mood is present, it is often accompanied by low energy, sleep or appetite disturbance, loss of interest in things that one once found pleasurable, difficulties concentrating, and a sense of despondency in their lives. Sadness is a common emotion in depression, which acknowledges an important loss or an unreachable goal, allowing for disengagement.

Reactive responding and emotional clarity

Humans not only have emotional responses but also try to handle them. That is, we commonly have “reactions to our reactions”, also called reactive responding. The kinds of responses we have to our emotional reactions can be found in our thoughts, our actions, as well as in other emotions, for instance worry, rumination, self-criticism, avoidance or in-activity.

One way to picture reactions to our reactions is like a snowball. Right after a snowfall, the snow is white, pristine, and fluffy. It is pure snow, a frozen form of water, with nothing added. For many of us, we can picture a snow-covered hill or mountain, perhaps a sledding hill from our childhood or a ski slope. Our initial emotional reactions are much like a ball of this white, pristine, pure snow. When emotions are intense and painful, we may have difficulty staying in contact with them and therefore try to escape or dampen our emotional experience. Individuals with chronic anxiety and depressed mood are likely to react to such emotional experiences with reactive responding. These responses are akin to the snowball rolling down the hill. The snowball collects dirt, leaves, and twigs and by the bottom of the hill, it is no longer white and pure, but instead is icy, dirty, and hardened. In other words, the reactive responses have clouded the emotional experience and thereby blocked the motivational message.

In contrast to clear emotions, cloudy emotions are often experienced as hazy and vague and are characterized as diffuse emotion states (e.g., frustration instead of anger; anxiety instead of fear). Cloudy emotions signal that a person is uncomfortable remaining in contact with a situation in one’s inner or outer world and the clear emotions and motivational messages that such situations convey. As a result, persons mired in cloudy emotions are often unable to glean what is important to them in a given situation. Cloudy emotions often prolong negative emotional states because they mask motivation information communicated by our clear emotions. Each cloudy emotion can also increase the intensity of this emotion cascade, which leads to further secondary reactions and, sometimes, paradoxically increases in primary emotions. In essence, when one is in the throes of cloudy emotions, all we sense is an intense, but nonspecific sense of dread or danger. Responding reactively is akin to responding to the messenger while ignoring the all-important message (or hearing only the distressing aspects and ignoring the rest of the message). Reactive responses cause us to lose sight of the full range of emotions and the information they convey, ultimately resulting in emotional distress.

As an alternative to being reactive, ERT is aimed at teaching a number of skills that will guide our attention to see the full range of our emotional experience in a given moment. By paying attention to our emotional experience, we are better able to take effective actions.