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The Process Of Learning Healthy

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The process of learning healthy, functional methods to manage emotional states is a life-long task with key critical periods in early childhood and adolescence. Emotional regulation dysfunction results from a combination of emotional vulnerability that reacts with overly sensitive responses on the part of the patient and an inability to modulate the resulting emotions. Experiences with this type of dysregulation are common, if not typical, of human development and are usually amenable and responsive to newly acquired coping strategies or the restructuring of old ones. When the dysregulation is resilient and persists over time, cognitive distortions, ruminations, and sub-optimal coping strategies will emerge to establish and perpetuate a …show more content…

The defining element in an invalidating environment is that it pervasively communicates to the individual that his/her private responses to events are invalid, inappropriate or incorrect. This type of developmental environment is problematic on its own. Furthermore, as described by Cutuli (2014) and Schore (1996), it greatly exacerbates the challenge of coping with and processing the overwhelming pain from these trust and security eroding experiences that flood the limbic system, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), the orbito-frontal and the dorso-lateral and ventro-medial pre-frontal cortexes (OFC, DLPFC and VMPFC). The resulting neurological adaptations stemming from over-stressing the homeostatic regulation mechanisms governing cell metabolism, gene expression, and synaptic transmission invites a serious consideration from a behavioral neuroscience perspective (Bertocci et al., 2014). The nexus of mutual interaction between individual biology and individual experiences of the world is one’s emotional reactions from moment to moment and subsequent behaviors. Due to the centrality of its role in cognition and the powerful influence it exerts over behavior and subsequent physiological adaptation, emotional dysregulation is the fundamental substrate of pathology in child and adolescent psychological disorders. Learning to cope

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