info@Psych-EReg.ca
Midland, ON, Canada
Based in North Simcoe/Muskoka, providing services throughout Ontario
The Centre for Psychology + Emotion Regulation The Centre for Psychology + Emotion Regulation
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  • Getting
    Started
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  • What We
    Treat
    • Eating Disorders
      • Anorexia Nervosa
      • Bulimia Nervosa
      • Binge Eating Disorder
      • Other Specified Feeding & Eating Disorders (OSFED)
      • Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder
      • PICA
      • Rumination Disorder
    • Personality Disorders
      • Borderline Personality Disorder
      • Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder
      • Avoidant Personality Disorder
      • Histrionic Personality Disorder
      • Dependent Personality Disorder
      • Narcissistic + Antisocial Personality Disorders
      • Paranoid+Schizotypal Personality Disorders
    • PTSD/Trauma Related Disorders
      • PTSD
      • Acute Stress Disorder
      • Adjustment Disorder
  • Treatments
    • Psychological Assessments
    • Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
    • Radically-Open DBT
    • Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)
    • CBT-E
    • Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
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    / Team Training
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Personality Disorders

What is Emotional Dysregulation?

Personality disorders are maladaptive and inflexible patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviour that typically begin in late adolescence and create significant challenges in a person’s life. The patterns of behaviour deviate from what is socially or culturally expected.
Individuals with a personality disorder may have great difficulty relating to other people, managing emotions, or controlling their behaviour. Difficulties with relationships, identity, and emotions are common.

One of the key defining features across personality disorders is the inability to effectively manage and regulate emotion.

What is emotion dysregulation?

A transdiagnostic (meaning it can be applied to a range of diagnoses) term used to describe one or more of the following:

  • Difficulty identifying or understanding/observing emotions
  • Difficulty understanding or reading the emotions of others
  • Deficits in communicating emotional needs to others
  • An inability to regulate emotions in healthy ways
  • High sensitivity to emotional cues
  • Intense emotional experiences or flat affect/lack of emotional experiencing

The Continuum Framework

Researchers have explored emotional functioning along a continuum of overcontrol vs undercontrol.

Undercontrol

Individuals struggling with emotional undercontrol tend to feel like they are on an emotional rollercoaster. They experience many emotional ups and downs, tend to engage in repeated and impulsive self-destructive behaviours, and have difficulty containing or regulating their feelings. Borderline Personality Disorder, Dependent Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder fall in this range.

Overcontrol

On the other hand, disorders of emotional overcontrol are characterized by rigid and inflexible emotional responses. Individuals in this range tend to present with a flat affect, are risk-avoidant, tend to be isolated and lonely, and work very hard to suppress, minimize, and rationalize their emotions. Obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic, antisocial, avoidant, schizoid, schizotypal, and paranoid personality disorders tend to fall in this range.

We also see patterns of emotional overcontrol and undercontrol across many psychological illnesses including:

 

People that “get stuck” in the extremes of over vs under control tend to suffer the most. Our DBT and RO-DBT programs help individuals change their self-control tendencies and move away from extreme ways of thinking, feeling, or acting.

At the Centre for Psychology & Emotion Regulation we have extensive training in the assessment and treatment of personality disorders. As the Clinical Director of the program, Dr. Federici has an international reputation for her work treating and researching DBT and disorders of emotion regulation.

Learn more about our DBT Programming (including Comprehensive DBT, DBT Skills and Radically-Open DBT).

Borderline Personality Disorder
Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder
Avoidant Personality Disorder
Histrionic Personality Disorder
Dependent Personality Disorder
Narcissistic + Antisocial Personality Disorders
Paranoid + Schizotypal Personality Disorders

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267 King Street Midland, Ontario Canada L4R 3M4 Get Directions

Open Hours

Monday 9am – 6pm Tuesday 9am – 6pm Wednesday 9am – 6pm Thursday 9am – 6pm Friday 9am – 6pm

Let′s Talk

Phone: 249 492 2673 Fax: 249 492 2640 Info@Psych-EReg.ca

© 2021 Dr. Anita Federici