Core Emotions And Defenses

Posted on: February 15, 2018

Katherine E. Watkins is a Santa Monica psychiatrist and senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation. The overall goal of her research is to improve the quality of care for individuals with behavioral health disorders, by developing, implementing, and evaluating innovative treatments and treatment models of health care delivery.

What is a core emotion? Core emotions are biologically determined emotional responses whose expression and recognition is fundamentally the same for all individuals, regardless of ethnicity or culture. They are largely composed of physical sensations that we come to recognize and name as a particular emotion. Core emotions are hard wired and are not subject to conscious control. Triggered by the environment, each core emotion is pre-wired to set off a host of physiological reactions that prime us to respond to the environmental stimuli. For example, fear is experienced by the fight or flight physical response. Researchers disagree about (more…)

Posted in: Fundamentals

Sadness

Posted on: January 23, 2018

Katherine E. Watkins is a Santa Monica psychiatrist and senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation. The overall goal of her research is to improve the quality of care for individuals with behavioral health disorders, by developing, implementing, and evaluating innovative treatments and treatment models of health care delivery.

Many people when confronted with someone who is sad feel pressure to fix the person’s sadness and make it go away: to say or do just the right thing. I know that I did: I thought I was supposed to cheer up the person suffering, as though they had a problem to be solved. Eventually, I figured out that I could not “fix” someone”s sadness. Yet, the desire to make the sadness go away didn’t leave me. I also didn’t like feeling sad myself, and would try to avoid it through distractions. (more…)

Posted in: Fundamentals

Intimacy

Posted on: December 20, 2017

By Katherine E. Watkins, M.D., M.S.H.S.

Katherine E. Watkins is a Santa Monica psychiatrist and senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation. The overall goal of her research is to improve the quality of care for individuals with behavioral health disorders, by developing, implementing, and evaluating innovative treatments and treatment models of health care delivery.

Everyone has a need for love, connection and intimacy. As Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic and political activist, once said, “Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.” Yet many people have trouble with intimacy, and long to experience deeper ways of relating to others. Increasing one’s capacity for intimacy yields many benefits. (more…)

Posted in: Fundamentals

What Makes ISTDP So Effective?

Posted on: February 5, 2016

News & Insights From Santa Monica Psychiatrist Katherine Watkins, M.D.

One of the things that makes ISTDP so effective is its concentrated attention to the unconscious barriers that work against successful treatment. In ISTDP, these barriers are referred to as “defense mechanisms” or “defenses.” ISTDP posits that defenses prevent us from experiencing our authentic feelings, and that it is only with active and persistent attention by the therapist to exposing and confronting these defenses will patients be able to experience the full range of their emotions. In childhood, defenses can be a useful tool in emotionally overwhelming or traumatic situations. Defenses such as dissociation and repression can shield us from intense feelings that we are developmentally unprepared to experience and process. However as we grow up, this shielding cuts us off from our full range of feelings, even when we are now emotionally able to handle the feelings. When this happens, it may lead to depression, anxiety, relationship problems and self-defeating behavior, or as one of my patients said, “I’m living a two dimensional life.” (more…)

Posted in: Fundamentals, ISTDP