Therapist Materials for the Three Parts of Emotions (3-Component Model)

The session covered in this chapter looks at the three components of emotions, which are thoughts, physical sensations, and behaviors/urges. These components interact and unfold over time. With regard to thoughts, clients frequently know that they have thoughts, but they have difficulty putting the thoughts into specific words. With regard to physical sensations, clients are often least familiar with thinking about physical sensations as a part of emotion. With regard to behaviors, it is useful to think of urges as well as behaviors, and also to broaden thinking to a wide range of behaviors, including not doing certain things. It is particularly useful to identify the three components of emotion in different, recent situations where they experienced strong emotion or behavioral symptoms, such as binge eating, compensatory behavior, driven exercise, body checking, or skipping a meal.