Emotional Regulation

Emotional Regulation

Most of us learned as children that our negative feelings were in some way unacceptable, or even dangerous. As a result, when our own child has a meltdown our inner child gets triggered. We feel a sense of panic and react with fight, flight or freeze. It’s the very same panic that caused our own parents to rage, isolate or give up.

While parenting is no walk in the park, children have the difficult task of learning to ride their wild emotions with grace. Our ability to stay calm during the storm helps them develop the neural pathways to self-soothe when activated. But most of us find it tough to stay empathic when our child starts to lose it.

So what can we do to address our own fear of emotional dysregulation? First and foremost, take a deep breath and acknowledge your feelings. Remind yourself that emotional expression is a good thing and try to tolerate the big feelings without taking immediate action. You’re just naming and breathing.

Emotional regulation is a practice. You’re being asked to reflect and respond against something that feels natural to the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s why the bulk of the work is learning to titrate emotions. When all else fails and you’re feeling overwhelmed, ask yourself what matters most and try to choose love every time.

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1 thought on “Emotional Regulation”

  • Thank you for this important post on emotional regulation. This article:

    https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/10/23/childhood-environment-may-influence-emotional-regulation-in-adulthood/61085.html

    describes another way the cards are stacked against kids who grown up in poverty:

    “the amount of chronic stress from childhood through adolescence — such as substandard housing, crowding, noise, and social stressors like family turmoil, violence or family separation — determined the relationship between childhood poverty and prefrontal brain function during emotional regulation.”

    This study:

    https://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00292/full#h1

    offers some hope.

    “This finding suggests that the effects of meditation training on emotional processing might transfer to non-meditative states. This is consistent with the hypothesis that meditation training may induce learning that is not stimulus- or task-specific, but process-specific, and thereby may result in enduring changes in mental function.”

    And public health efforts like this:

    https://prevention.psu.edu/people/documents/SayOm.pdf

    offer to help those at-risk youth.

    “Mindfulness-based approaches may be advantageous to urban youth by improving their capacity to
    cope with persistent stress. Enhancing responses to stress and the ability to control negative feelings
    and troubling thoughts among at-risk youth has the potential to encourage the development of core
    competencies that will benefit young people in school, at home and with friends, in the community—
    and throughout life.”

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