In this module, we're gonna talk about intervening for emotion. Now remember, you can intervene with emotion indirectly through cognition and behavior or you can intervene directly. And when we're intervening directly, there are two paths you can take. One is emotion modulation. In which you try to change the experienced emotion, the other is emotional acceptance where you teach the client how to tolerate the uncomfortable emotion and not compound it.
When we talk about modulating negative emotion, one way that we can do that is through progressive muscle relaxation. Now this is helpful, particularly for people that have arousal and tension. For example, your client with a lot of irritability or anger as part of their depressive syndrome. In the case of progressive muscle relaxation, the idea is that we go part by part through the body and teach the client first to tense up that muscle hold it and then relax it.
And in the process of relaxing the body, we find that the mind starts to relax as well. Remember that emotion is two things. It is physiology and it is a subjective feeling state. And those two things are very intimately intertwined. So as, for example, your level of physiological arousal goes up, So too does your level of agitation or irritability or anxiety. And conversely, as your level of physiological arousal comes down so too do your subjective feeling states of anxiety irritability tension and so on.
After the client has mastered the art of progressive muscle relaxation, You can start to use a passive muscle relaxation in which you don't necessarily have to tense the muscles of the body so much but rather the client can just start to say relax and work part by part in the body at just relaxing the muscle. And relaxing the muscle ends up relaxing the emotion and the thoughts as well. As part of the relaxation process, one thing that you can use is what's called guided imagery in which you encourage the client to imagine themselves in some sort of relaxing scenario. That helps deepen the sense of relaxation. Now, we're not doing this as a form of mental escape.
I'm not trying to get you to deny reality. I'm just trying to get you to figure out a way to calm yourself down in the moment so that you can gain better control over your emotional reactions.