Emotion Regulation Skills Pack

What this is

About the workbook

When emotion arrives faster than thought, the gap between the feeling and what you do next is what there is to work with. These are practical skills for widening that gap.

Drawn from dialectical behaviour therapy: distress tolerance, riding out an urge, and what to do at the point where you can still choose.

What is inside

Eighteen pages, printable whole or a page at a time. After the cover comes How to Use This Pack, then two pages of background. What Emotions Are For runs through what fear and anxiety, anger, sadness, guilt, shame and joy are each signalling, and separates a primary emotion from the secondary one that lands on top of it — anger covering hurt, shame about feeling anxious.

The Emotion Wave follows. It sets out the idea the rest of the pack rests on: a feeling rises, crests and falls unless something re-fuels it, and there is a difference between feeding a wave and riding one. Each background page ends with a single write-in line, so even the reading pages ask for something back.

The skill pages

Name It to Tame It gives five word families — MAD, SAD, SCARED, GLAD, ASHAMED — with eight more precise words inside each. You circle a family, pick the closest word, mark where you feel it in your body, rate the intensity 0 to 10, take three slow breaths, and rate it again.

Ride the Wave turns that into a five-step practice with its own log for start, peak, and ten minutes after. The page puts its range at roughly 3 to 7 out of 10 and sends you to TIPP first above that. TIPP is four body-based tools — temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing, paired muscle relaxation — and it carries a caution worth reading before you use it. Cold water and hard exercise change heart rate quickly, and the page says to skip those two, use only the breathing and muscle relaxation, and check with your healthcare provider if you have a heart condition, low blood pressure, an eating disorder, are pregnant, or take medication affecting heart rate.

STOP breaks its four letters into stop, take a step back, observe, proceed mindfully, then asks you to run a recent moment back through them in writing. Opposite Action sets out a table of urges and their opposites for fear, anger, sadness and shame. Check the Facts is a six-step worksheet: camera facts, your interpretation, two other possible explanations, the realistic worst case, whether the emotion fits, and a next move that routes you back to Ride the Wave, Opposite Action, or TIPP.

Pages you fill in again

The Daily Emotion Log is a table — date, trigger, emotion and intensity, what you did, which skill you used, where the intensity landed after — with three look-back questions once a page is full. The Weekly Skills Reflection is meant to be reprinted each week: an average intensity for the week, a checklist of the skills you reached for, and prompts on a wave you rode and a wave you fed.

The Distress Tolerance Menu is a checklist under four headings — distract, self-soothe, improve the moment, accept and allow — finishing with your own top three for hard hours. The Five Senses page does the same for sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, with a go-to line for each. Protect Your Baseline covers what DBT groups under reducing vulnerability: illness and pain, steady eating, mood-altering substances, sleep and movement, with a table to rate each 0 to 10 and name one small change.

Two pages are made to be cut up. My Emotion Emergency Plan is a five-step card you fill in while calm — name the wave, reset the body, STOP, soothe or distract, reach out — and keep somewhere you will actually find it. The last sheet holds six pocket cards condensing STOP, TIPP, the wave, opposite action, checking the facts, and one on the difference between feeling something and acting on it.

The order it suggests

Page two gives six steps: print what you need, start with the background pages, practise the skills while you are calm rather than mid-wave, log daily, fill in the emergency plan and cut out the cards early, and check in weekly. It also says there is no perfect order and no deadline. Before any of that it asks for two things in writing — the date you are starting, and one moment lately you wish had gone differently.

The pack describes itself as an educational self-help resource drawn from dialectical behaviour therapy skills training and general stress-management approaches. Its closing page states that it is not psychotherapy or treatment, that it does not diagnose, and that these skills are not a treatment for self-harm or suicidal thoughts.

Who this is for, and who should wait

The pack is for someone whose feelings arrive too big and too fast — the outburst, the slammed door, the message sent at the peak — and who wants a way to widen the gap between the feeling and the next move. It suits anger as much as anxiety or shame, it is built to be rehearsed on calm days, and it works as practice material for someone in DBT-informed individual therapy or a skills group.

It should be brought to a clinician first in some cases, and the pack says which. Its skills are not a treatment for self-harm or suicidal thoughts; if the urges include hurting yourself, that needs a clinician and the crisis lines, not a worksheet. The TIPP page carries a medical caution — a heart condition, low blood pressure, an eating disorder, pregnancy, or medication that affects heart rate mean using only the breathing and muscle tools and checking with a healthcare provider first. If a wave leaves you numb, blank or far away rather than calmer, stop and take that to a clinician. It is educational material: the daily log is a record, not an assessment, and the pack is not treatment.

How it fits with therapy at TEO

The pack is drawn from dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) skills training — STOP, TIPP, opposite action, check the facts, and the distress-tolerance and self-soothe menus are DBT skills by name. At TEO, DBT-informed individual therapy is offered by Mohamad Shabib and Alison Shaji (British Columbia); the DBT therapy page explains what that looks like by video and how it differs from a full DBT programme, and the anger management page covers the anger-specific side.

A therapist adds the piece a pack cannot: walking back through the moment that went wrong step by step, coaching the skill at the point it fails, and working on the primary emotion the anger or shame is covering. Sessions are available across British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador, evenings and weekends included, with a free 15-minute consultation first and individual sessions at $150 per 60-minute session. A filled-in emergency plan and a week of the emotion log are good things to bring.

Related pages: DBT therapy · Anger management counselling.

Common questions

About using this workbook

This workbook is educational. It is not therapy, not an assessment, and nothing in it is a diagnosis. If you are in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7); 911 in an emergency. Kids Help Phone (for young people): 1-800-668-6868, or text CONNECT to 686868.

Download the PDF

If you want to go further

Working on this with someone

A workbook can take you a surprising distance on its own. If you would rather not do it alone, TEO offers virtual therapy in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador — evenings and weekends, with a free 15-minute consultation first and no obligation afterward.

Related: Anger management counselling.

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