Healing after trauma isn’t a straight line. One moment you’ll feel ok, the next minute find yourself angry or in tears. It can be an emotional rollercoaster and just being on the emotional rollercoaster can be exhausting. Stay on the rollercoaster long enough and there’s a good chance you’ll get sick in one way or the other. Some of us settle into low-grade, chronic resentment. In this state, you’re just going through the motions without any real joy or interest in life like you used to have. Some people get stuck in a perpetual state of anxiety, always on guard, irritable, have trouble with relationships. Some of us get stuck in avoidance of pretty much everything we used to love, including the people in our lives. We isolate. Hang out at home. Oversleep. Distract with YouTube videos.
All of these things are normal behaviors after we experience trauma. And as normal as they are, they are meant to be a temporary state. In order to move forward, we need to get a handle on our emotions. We need to learn to emotion regulation skills. That’s what I’m going to be talking about starting with this episode and over the next few episodes.
Today I’m going to talk about:
- What the Emotion Regulation means
- Understanding Your Own Emotions, Why That’s Important
- How to Decrease the Frequency of Unwanted Emotions
- How to Decrease Vulnerability to Emotion Mind
- How to Decrease Emotional Suffering
What is Emotion Regulation?
Emotion regulation is the ability to control or influence which emotions you have, when you have them, and how long you experience and express them.
When emotions are out of control, or dysregulated, you are unable, despite your best efforts, to change which emotions you have, when you have them or how you experience or express them. You may feel like your emotions are all over the map, unpredictable and in control of you, rather than you being in control of them. The good news is that regulating emotions is a skill that can be learned so you don’t feel like you’re at the mercy of your emotions.
The good news is that regulating emotions is a skill that can be learned so you don’t feel like you’re at the mercy of your emotions all the time.
Meg South
Regulating emotions can be automatic or consciously controlled. The first step is to focus on increasing conscious awareness and control of your emotions. Then we will practice skills so that you overlearn how to regulate your emotions so that it becomes second nature. Overlearning the skills is the key to making them automatic.
Understanding Your Own Emotions
In order to regulate your emotions, you need to understand them. You can do this by doing two things:
1. You need to name your own emotions, so you know what you’re feeling.
2. You need to understand what emotions do for you. Yes, they actually have a purpose other than making you miserable.
Decrease Frequency of Unwanted Emotions
Once you understand your own emotions, you can learn how to cut down on the frequency of the ones you don’t want by:
1. Stopping unwanted emotions from starting by making changes in your environment.
2. You can change painful emotions once they start. Fact check: It’s a myth that changing emotions is not authentic. It is also a myth that all emotions should be suppressed. People usually fall into one of these two camps. Some people believe that if you’re feeling an emotion, it’s inauthentic to try to change it. Other people believe that you should always suppress any emotion you feel. Both extremes are emotional myths and not helpful to healing.
Note: It is important to highlight that the point of emotion regulation is to change the emotions YOU want to change, not change the emotions OTHERS want you to change.
3. Remember that emotions are neither good nor bad. They just are. This is an important point to wrap your head around and come to terms with. You might not like feeling a certain emotion, but that doesn’t make it bad or good. Try not to judge your emotions.
4. Suppression of emotions makes things worse in the long run. Suppressed emotions don’t disappear into the ether. They get stuck in your body, and they can reappear in ways that make your life more difficult, such as snapping at your child or as a headache or just a general feeling of exhaustion. Now we can’t always address our emotions in the moment. It may not be appropriate to vent the anger you feel towards your abuser in the middle of a meeting at work.
What do you do in this situation? Your options aren’t just you’re your emotions down or express them. There’s a third option.
You can put your emotions in a container in your mind or body until you are in a position to address them. Visualize a jar, a box, a closet, or any kind of container that you want in your mind’s eye. Next, put all of the feelings you can’t address in the moment into the container and put the lid on or close the door. While you’re visualizing this, breathe in normally through your nose and extend your exhale through your mouth. Pause for a count for 4. Repeat the breathing pattern a few times until you feel yourself becoming calmer. Later in the day when you are able, imagine yourself taking the emotions out of the container so you can address them.
5. It’s also important to remember that emotion regulation is for ineffective emotions only. An ineffective emotion means that it is an emotion that isn’t helping you achieve your goals. For instance, an ineffective emotion would be bursting into tears in the middle of a meeting with your supervisor at work or suddenly feeling angry at the narcissistic ex when you are at your child’s holiday concert. In both of these situations, your emotions would not help you achieve your goal of being successful at work or watching your child’s concert with love and pride.
Emotions are effective when:
- Acting on the emotions is in your own self-interest.
- Expressing the emotion will get you closer to your own goals.
- Expressing your emotion will influence others in ways that will help you.
- Your emotion is sending you a message you need to listen to.
Decrease Vulnerability to Emotion Mind
Learning how to regulate your emotions will decrease your vulnerability to Emotion Mind and increase your resiliency. Remember that Emotion Mind is when you are so emotional that reason and logic are crowded out. You can think straight. Emotion regulation will help you balance your state of mind and be in Wise Mind more often. Remember that Wise Mind is the state of mind in which emotions and logic work together.
Decrease Emotional Suffering
Developing your emotion regulation skills will help you reduce suffering when painful emotions come up. It will also help you to manage extreme emotions, so you don’t make things worse.
Things to Think About
- What emotions would you most want to change?
- Some people always know what they’re feeling. Others have no idea most of the time. For some, trying to figure out how they’re feeling is like looking down into a fog. Which type of person are you?
- When have emotions been useful and when have they been destructive? What emotions give you the most trouble?