In ERT you will be taught two exercises aimed at cultivating your meta-cognitive regulation skills. These skills build upon your attention regulation skills and are more “elaborate”. Elaboration here refers to a person’s usage of language, words, and concepts to process a situation in their lives. People with chronic anxiety and depressed mood often engage in elaborative processes such as worry, rumination, and self-criticism, which are clouding the motivational message conveyed by their emotions. The meta-cognitive skills provide you with an alternative to these kinds of reactive responding that happen later in the emotional unfolding.

Often times, people with chronic anxiety and depressed mood struggle to gain distance to their emotions and motivations. Instead of saying “I have my emotions”, they often feel as though “My emotions have me!” Emotions are like a big lake. One choice to dealing with our emotions is to plunge in to the lake, thereby becoming immersed in them. However, a potentially more effective way to deal with our emotions is to sit by the side of the lake. By the side of the emotion lake, we are “having our emotions” without being immersed in them. The goal of the first meta-cognitive regulation skill, distancing, is noticing that we are not synonymous with our emotions and motivational pulls. You can gain distance to your emotional experiences in two ways. Gaining distance in time refers to the ability to see mental events as an experience or a moment in time. Gaining distance in space concerns the capacity to observe our emotions and motivations from a distance where we can see that they are a part of us but that we are more than these experiences.

Once you have gained a healthy distance to a situation you may still struggle with hearing the motivational message conveyed by your emotions. In this case, the second meta-cognitive regulation skill, reframing, may be helpful. Reframing concerns the ability to evaluate an emotional situation from a different perspective. Reframing is considered a healthier form of cognitive elaboration and is introduced as an antidote to obstacles such as worry, rumination, and self-criticism. You will be practicing the ability to adopt a courageous and self-compassionate perspective to help you find strength and support in difficult situations.