Treatment Suggestions for the Emotional Inhibition Schema
1.Express both your positive and negative emotions with significant others.
2. Find ways to get reinforcement for expressing your emotions rather than reinforcement for restraining your emotions.
3. List the advantages of being more emotional with others.
4. Find balance on a spectrum of emotional expression rather than seeing self-expression it as an “all-or-nothing” behavior. Make it your goal is to reach a middle position.
5. Recognize and list the positive consequences of expressing your emotions. Notice that you can use your judgment about expressing emotions which then allows you to feel more comfortable and willing to experiment with expression.
6. Also, try to engage in an increasingly higher amount of activities for fun.
7. Challenge your negative predictions of what might happen if you are more emotionally. Write down both what you predict will happen if you express your emotions and then what happens when you express your emotions. Then compare the predicted results with the actual results.