simultaneously, the child's efforts to control or defend against the disruptive effects of intense emotional arousal by excluding certain information and engaging in distractions begins a pattern of avoidance that interferes with the process of emotional differentiation-the ability to discern , label , and understand nuances of feeling and with leam - ing how to cope with feelings and the situations that arouse them . Guidano ( 1987 ) further suggests that these restrictions on what can be known ultimately interfere with the development of abstract thinking capacities and thus the ability to stand back , reconsider , integrate new information , reformulate , and generate higher-order frameworks that can encompass conflicts and contradictions