When the most important thing, for the time being anyway, is to get through the crisis or morment or discomfort, Distress Tolerance skills are useful.

http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/dt_handout_1.html

Going back to Emotion Regulation, the first step is to understand and accept the emotion nonjudgementally. You would focus on the emotion and work through it and then decide if you want to try to change it. We will talk more about that.

Distress Tolerance is more like escaping from whatever is hard to tolarate. You might focus on something else, like your breathing, or whatever you can think of to distract yourself. Or you can focus on how you would like things to be in the future. And we'll talk about this one more too, but if you look at the link, there are some options. This is more of a brief introduction, as in the chat we realized that we still needed to focus more on the other skills first.