Getting Reacquainted With Our Emotions

What is emotional self-regulation?

It is the ability to manage your emotions and the resulting behaviour, including processing your emotions without reacting, adapting to the demands of the environment, and self-soothing, so we can use them optimally.

What is emotional dysregulation?

We all use less than ideal emotional regulation strategies from time to time, but when individuals regularly feel overwhelmed, we are much more likely to rely on unhealthy strategies. Often, it is our interpretation and not the situation itself that leads to a feeling of being overwhelmed — sometimes leading to what is known as a vicious emotional cycle, in which emotions, thoughts, and behaviour are all interconnected.

Unhealthy coping

When emotions build to the point of becoming overwhelming, you feel like you’re going to explode. This may produce a deep need to do something to bring down the intensity. Some may use self-injury as a coping mechanism — a short-term and sometimes dangerous fix that can leave lifelong scars or wounds. Other unhealthy strategies: abusing alcohol or substances, avoidance, physical or verbal aggression, and excessive social media use.

Healthy coping

Your therapist can help you swap unhealthy coping strategies for more adaptive ones: talking to friends or family, exercising, journaling, meditating, spending time in nature, practicing mindfulness, focusing on basic needs (sleep, healthy eating, drinking water), identifying triggers, responding differently to negative thoughts, and taking a break.

Ready to become an active agent in your emotional management?

Your therapist can help you find different ways of looking at the negative thoughts that lead to uncomfortable emotions. They can also help you become an observer of your feelings rather than enmeshed with them, and find healthy coping strategies that work best for you.

These processes allow you to let go of emotions faster, reduce the intensity of emotions, down-regulate or up-regulate. According to psychologist James Gross, this process can be implemented before feeling an emotion (antecedent-focused emotion regulation) and after reacting (response-focused emotion regulation).

Learning to control how we respond

1. Identifying triggers — helps you prepare for or adapt situations.
2. Reframing — identifying different ways of appraising a situation.
3. Mindful acceptance of emotions and the wisdom they have to offer.

Your therapist can help you pass on emotional wisdom by teaching you:

1. Ways to model effective coping strategies
2. Ways to avoid engaging in behaviour not in line with your values
3. Ways to provide a safe place for your children to practice labelling, responding, and appropriately expressing their emotions

Using age-appropriate language, you can start talking to your kids about emotions, encouraging them to name them as early as two years old:

1. Identify emotion using age-appropriate vocabulary
2. Identify triggers
3. Delay response time while teaching them about actions and consequences
4. Teach adaptive coping strategies
5. Validate their emotions

Reacquaintance through Dialectical Behavioural Therapy

Society doesn’t help — we are bombarded with messages that downplay the importance of certain emotions: “You are weak if you show that you are hurting,” “Men don’t feel sad or cry,” or “Certain emotions are not important.” Your therapist will help you identify any underlying assumptions about emotions, and together you will debunk them.

Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), founded by Marsha Linehan, helps clients slow down and become mindful of the process of experiencing emotions and teaches adaptive coping strategies.

Emotional regulation activities — breathing exercises

1. In for the count of 5, hold, and out to the count of 5; in for 5, hold, and say “reelllaaaxxx” as you exhale.
2. Belly breathing
3. Triangle, square, and rectangle breathing

Your therapist will help you identify triggers, learn to see the early signs of specific emotions in your body, and become acquainted with your primary and secondary emotions. Our emotions usually precede an urge which can lead to action — but not always. By identifying these urges and deciding if, when, and how you would like to respond, you take back control of your emotions.

If your emotional regulation feels off, a 20-minute consult is a low-stakes way to talk about whether therapy might help.