Introduction

The three chapters in this section present an eclectic array of strategies and interventions for improving the capacity to regulate, organize, and modulate emotional experience. Until now, efforts to reduce emotionality have relied largely on generic interventions to provide structure, support, and containment. Treatment now makes greater use of specific interventions drawn from diverse treatment models. Nevertheless, expansion of the therapeutic focus and treatment methods occurs within the structure established by the general modules. Generic interventions continue to be important but they now take second stage to specific methods unless the alliance, motivation, or self-reflection falters, when they again assume priority.

The first chapter, Chapter 15, sets the stage for treating emotional dysregulation by considering the part emotion plays in adaptive functioning and how emotional regulation develops. This information is used to establish the general goals for this phase of therapy and the interventions needed to achieve them. Interventions are organized into four modules: (i) patient education, (ii) building emotional awareness, (iii) developing emotion-regulating skills and strategies, and (iv) enhancing emotion-processing capacity. Chapter 16 describes the first three modules and Chapter 17 describes methods to enhance emotional processing capacity, an important issue that is often neglected.