Big Emotions, Better Tools: Learning Skills to Navigate Life's Challenges

What It's Really Like to Work with Riana: Bestie Chats and learning to feel your feelings

Riana, a therapist at Brazen Therapy, describes her style as "bestie chats, but with therapy." We sat down with her to talk about how she works, what a session actually feels like, and why her clients tend to stick with her for the long haul.

You use the feelings wheel a lot. How does it show up in your sessions?

"I like to use it as a tool for my clients to build their emotional vocabulary, especially my clients who are generally in the overly disregulated or sometimes the overly regulated so much so that they have a hard time being able to even identify the feeling. We start in the middle with a core emotion and work outward. If someone says they feel sad, we can ask whether that sadness is closer to guilt, loneliness, or despair, and whether the loneliness comes from feeling abandoned or feeling isolated from other people." Riana also has a companion worksheet that pairs each core emotion with body sensations, like a lump in the throat for sadness or a tight jaw and a need to escape for fear.

She doesn't hand it to everyone right away. "I do not use this until it's something that my clients are wanting to reference in session. They will be exploring something and I'm like, you know, how do you feel about that? And they kind of look around, and I'm like, yeah, let's use the wheel."

Many of your clients are very in tune with their emotions but still struggle. What's going on there?

"A lot of my clients are very, very in tune with their emotions, but they are so overregulated in them." They intellectualize the feeling and keep moving. Riana sees that as protection rather than a flaw. "Their overregulation is so that they don't have to necessarily feel that feeling, right, cause that's not been safe."

Her goal is to help clients stay with the feeling safely, then decide what to do next. "It is about learning to be able to allow yourself to experience that feeling and then decide if the activity you're going to do is going to be something that helps regulate it. Is it going to distract from it for a little bit? Or do you need to sit with this feeling a little bit more?"

Where do you start when someone is overwhelmed by a feeling?

With vulnerability factors and the PLEASE skills, which she teaches together as a wombo combo. The PLEASE skills cover the basics: treating physical illness, eating enough, avoiding mood altering substances, getting enough sleep, and exercising. The vulnerability factors include those basics plus the bigger things that pile up over time.

"It's not like when the day starts over that slate is wiped clean, right? Our brain is still processing the things that have happened earlier on in the week or earlier on in the month." Riana pairs this with a chain analysis, where she and the client walk backward from a big blowup to see everything that fed into it, like a sleepless night or a run-in with someone from the past that stirs up some emotions.

What about coping skills?

"My belief system as a therapist, and I do strongly drive this home, is that you can't learn coping skills until you understand what you are coping with."

She's equally direct about the 100-coping-skills handout. "If you've gone to therapy, and you've had a therapist throw a list of 100 coping skills at you and said figure it out, no wonder it didn't work."

Her favorite way to explain the alternative is a driving metaphor she's used for six years. "We can't be driving the car at 100 miles an hour and then reach a fork in the road and expect our brains to go, yeah, go down the unbeaten path because that's what your therapist told you to. We have to start first with building that neural pathway. When you have practiced it enough times when you're calm and regulated, when you are driving 100 miles an hour and you hit that fork in the road, your brain goes, ooh, that IS an option."

How would you describe your therapy style?

"Very much an eclectic approach. I'm a very cognitive person." Her work is rooted in CBT and DBT, and she borrows the stuck point worksheet from cognitive processing therapy to help clients challenge the beliefs their trauma left behind. "CBT done at a surface level with worksheets? Sure. CBT done with a therapist who knows how to ask the important questions , this goes a lot deeper."

The worksheets are visual aids, not homework packets. "I'm not making every therapy session feel like school and homework. I tell clients it's bestie chats, but with therapy I'm talking to you like I would talk to a friend, in a way that is approachable and comfortable but still involves the therapy work."

You've said you're a confrontational therapist. What does that mean?

"I'm not gonna yell at you and tell you what you are doing wrong kind of therapist, but I'm going to tell you like, girl, what were you thinking with that decision?"

She tells consultation clients up front that she will challenge them. "A lot of therapists, no disrespect, have sat back and just validated, validated, validated, and never really taught you much else. I'm going to be a therapist that will challenge you." That comes with a lot of freedom, too. "You can live your life however you would like to. I'm not gonna ever be upset with my clients. I just want to know, do you understand why you're doing that at least?"

Riana is the same person in the room as she is outside of it. "Who I am in front of you is exactly who I am outside of my sessions. I choose to present myself wholly authentically and I do not drop that for anything."

What's your favorite skill to teach, and which one do clients resist most?

Opposite action-and she warns that clients don't love it. When anxiety says to avoid something, the opposite action is to move toward it. "You have to move towards the thing that is making you feel overwhelmed, or else you will never be able to get through the thing." She is careful to add the boundary: "That does not mean that you should tolerate abusive circumstances."

How long does this work take?

Longer than most people expect. "Sometimes it takes my clients a couple of years to get to that point," she says, which is why she has clients she has seen for a long time. She is honest about her own timeline as well. "I have been working on these things individually for myself for years, and they finally feel second nature. So you need to remember all of the time and effort that you're gonna have to put in in order for that to feel like it really solidifies."

Is there anything you want to lean into more?

The pleasant moments. "I don't necessarily teach the observing and describing of an emotion so much for the pleasant emotions, and I feel like that's something I actually do need to lean a little bit more back into. We do have to be able to sit and recognize as we are experiencing a pleasant moment and soak that in wholly as much as we can, because we know that that feeling is going to be temporary."

What's on your bookshelf?

Riana isn't a self-help book person, but she keeps a short list. There's the one she calls her "Therapy Bible," "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD the only book she recommends to nearly everyone, especially anyone who has noticed a pattern of dysfunction that started in childhood and echoes their family. She also loves Daniel J. Fox's borderline personality disorder workbook, which blends DBT, CBT, ACT, attachment work, and trauma work, and It Didn't Start With You by Mark Wolynn, which explores generational trauma. "We didn't just wake up and decide to be this way, right? This comes from years of our family patterns being reinforced."

If you want a therapist who is warm, funny, direct, and willing to go deep with you at your own pace, Riana is one to meet.