What is Emotional Regulation:
Emotional regulation is the ability to understand the complexities of our emotional experience. It’s the ability to navigate our emotions with skill, awareness, maturity, and responsibility. Effective emotional navigation makes for healthy relationships.
In an ideal world, we would learn this as young children. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case for many people, myself included. Instead of learning healthy ways of dealing with feelings, we were taught how not to feel.
The Default Setting of Emotional Regulation:
There’s a very good reason why this is the default setting when it comes to emotional regulation— or lack thereof.
Simply put, feeling our feelings, especially those outside our preferences, is uncomfortable. It’s inconvenient, confronting, energetically draining, and can be confusing. Acknowledging our feelings takes time and energy. It’s much easier to push it all down and distract ourselves.
Additionally, most people defer to their minds when an uncomfortable feeling arises. We look to justify, rationalize, and “make sense out of it.” And if there is no logical reason or explanation for what we’re feeling, we invalidate ourselves, say we’re crazy, and shove the emotion down even further.
Acknowledging our feelings usually requires that we take responsibility for them.
Learning how to address our emotions appropriately is one of the most important skills as a human being.
Perhaps it’s having a hard conversation with someone we love or having to “confront” someone about something. Maybe something is out of alignment in our lives, and an adjustment needs to be made, i.e., with work, where we live, or within our relationships.
This is confronting. It is much easier to ignore and brush it all under the rug.
How to Deal with Your Emotions in a Healthy Way
The mainstream understanding of emotional regulation is to “regulate” uncomfortable emotions. According to Psychology Today, “emotional regulation is the ability to exert control over one’s own emotional state. It may involve behaviors such as rethinking a challenging situation to reduce anger or anxiety, hiding visible signs of sadness or fear, or focusing on reasons to feel happy or calm.”
I don’t entirely agree with this definition or school of thought. The way I practice and teach being in relationship with emotions is slightly different. Controlling, hiding, or “state-shifting” (sometimes referred to as shaking yourself out of your uncomfortable emotions) isn’t healthy, useful, or effective.
Rather, this approach teaches avoidance of unpleasant emotions.
Three Key Components for Healthy Emotional Regulation
1. Key component number one for navigating your emotional experience skillfully and effectively is allowing space for every emotion that arises.
As tempting as it is to defer to the mind and ask, “Why?” when we feel sad, for example, it’s good practice not to do this. Rather, give the emotion the space to be felt fully.
After all, emotion is just energy in motion, “e-motion.” It has a brief lifecycle, believe it or not. As quick as an emotion enters is as quick as it can be released when you have the proper skills.
2. The second component of healthy emotional regulation is understanding that our emotional dimension differs from our mental dimension.
The emotional dimension of our being speaks its own language. The mind, for example, is rational, linear, and solution-oriented. Our emotions are more fluid, cyclical, and less goal-oriented.
Emotions are the body’s job, not the mind’s. What comes through our emotional dimension carries wisdom and insight and communicates what we need to hear and feel.
Our emotions are signals of things that might need adjustment. When we feel stress, fear, uncertainty, and worry, these are all signals the body’s wisdom is communicating. If we look to state-shift, shake it off, focus on something else, rationalize it through the mind, or brush it aside, we’re missing these vital messages trying to come through.
I look at emotions as the soul’s messenger, carrying important insights asking for my attention.
3. Key component three for healthy emotional regulation is understanding that you can shove down the tough stuff you want. It will continue to come up for you to see and feel.
An example of this is repeatedly finding yourself in the same situation with different people. That’s happening for a purpose. It’s designed to have you look more deeply inside. How you’re being triggered is in service to your awareness.
Plus, when you shove the tough stuff, you inadvertently shove the good stuff.
The Universe gives you the exact situations and scenarios to get the lessons needed for your highest good and soul’s evolution. This particular teaching is woven into everything I teach and write about.
In Summary:
We feel for a reason. It’s not just an inconvenience. Learning to navigate your emotional world is deeply instrumental to accessing joy, alignment, and our highest evolution.
We do ourselves a great disservice by not creating the space and cultivating the tools to navigate our emotional experiences effectively, positively, and healthfully.
Ultimately, we heal what we feel by feeling what we feel. There is no other way around it. We must go through it.
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Now I’d love to hear from you. What are you taking away from this blog post? What resonated with you? Share your thoughts below.