Student Wellness Services offering emotion management workshops
By Andreea Timis, October 20 2024—
The University of Calgary’s Student Wellness Services is hosting a series of three in-person workshops for students titled “Finding Emotional Balance” on Oct. 24 and Nov. 28. Now in their third year, these workshops are dedicated to equipping students with a variety of emotional management skills to apply in their lives.
In an interview with the Gauntlet, Kaitlin van Geel — registered psychologist at the U of C’s Student Wellness Centre and leader and creator of “Finding Emotional Balance” — spoke about the workshops and each of their aims.
“[The workshops are] based on DBT skills, so dialectical behaviour therapy,” Geel explained. “I’m not a DBT therapist [myself], but I do know some techniques from it, so the group is adapted from that model of therapy.”
Geel shared that the series used to consist of four workshops each dedicated to one of the four models within DBT — mindfulness skills, emotion regulation skills, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness. Each workshop ran as a 90-minute closed-group session.
“What I tended to find was that was a lot to expect from students just given how busy schedules are, midterms and other obligations,” said Geel. “So I decided to make it an open group, so students can come to [any] session. [And] what I’ve done this time is put in a little bit of the mindfulness stuff at the beginning of each of the three workshops because [they are] foundational to the other three modules.”
The workshops were intentionally structured to occur once a month throughout the semester to accommodate students’ schedules and give them a chance to practice the skills they learned accordingly.
“I did find that sometimes, after a week, people just didn’t always have a chance to practice the skills. And the best way, I think, of solidifying skills is to practice between sessions, so hopefully that provides a little bit more time for people,” she mentioned.
The October workshop focuses on distress tolerance skills, including the strategies students can apply to manage difficult, unchangeable or unavoidable situations.
“It’s quite common for people to do things in those kinds of situations that ultimately make things worse, [so] unhelpful coping strategies,” Geel explained. “So the purpose of this is to help people develop new coping strategies that might be more helpful for them in the long run.”
Finally, the third workshop will cover interpersonal effective skills, such as social and communicative skills to help develop healthier relationships with people.
“There will be a bit of self-compassion work as well with the idea that developing a better relationship with ourselves can also help us to develop better relationships with others. We’ll talk a bit about values in relationships, [so] exploring what kind of people we want to be and [also], what are some skills to help in navigating difficult interactions,” said Geel.
Geel stated that her aim for the workshops this year is to provide hands-on experience instead of just lectures in order for participants to better interact with the material at hand. These include mindfulness practices, guided meditations, pros and cons exercises to identify problem behaviour and even a video, among many others.
Lastly, Geel talked about the importance of the workshops and expanded on how they can help find emotional balance going forward.