Riding the waves of emotions that naturally come along in life with some effectiveness and skilfulness is an ability that we can develop and learn. For those of us who didn’t have a chance to learn how to be with our emotions and manage them skillfully (for various reasons), it makes sense that they can sometimes seem scary, messy, or too big to handle.
At its core, emotional regulation is not about suppressing emotions or ignoring them, but about feeling, understanding, and managing them in a way that is constructive. We can choose how we want to respond to our emotions and express them in ways that are safe for us and for others.
When thinking of emotional regulation I like the metaphor of driving a car. Imagine that you are a driver and your emotions are the passengers who are sitting with you in the car. With conscious emotional regulation on board you are staying behind the wheel, you don’t let your emotions drive the car (you are not your emotions), but also you don’t put them into the boot or throw them out the window, pretending they don’t exist. The idea is to acknowledge them, give them room (contain them), transform them, and learn from them.
Emotions can have a very significant function. They want to keep us safe and inform us and others about our feelings and needs. Peter A. Levin, a renowned expert in trauma therapy, in his book ‘Trauma and memory’ points out that emotions are part of our internal guidance system, our inner voice and intuition. Hence, by being in connection with our emotions we can become more clear about our needs, the choices we are making, and the type of life we want to live.
With practice and patience, emotional regulation can become our superpower in navigating life. It can allow us to approach challenges with clarity and resilience.
Here are some tips to practice emotional regulation:
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Recognize that you are not your emotion. Your emotion is part of you, but it is not all of you and it doesn’t define you. You are more than your emotion; You may say: A part of me feels angry; a part of me feel scared; a part of me feel sad. It’s not all of me. By creating this separation, we engage in a process called witness consciousness. This allows us to acknowledge, contain, and transform our emotions, rather than getting overwhelmed by them and/or getting stuck.
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Label your emotions and grow an emotions vocabulary. It’s common to experience a number of different emotions all at once and you may have many nuanced feelings. There are free apps that you can download on your phone to help you grow a stronger emotional vocabulary, like ‘How we feel’.
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Try to be curious towards your feelings. How can you describe them? How can you describe joy or annoyance? You can use adjectives, colours, shapes, textures, images, or metaphors to describe how you experience them right now. You can also draw your emotions using any art materials.
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Explore what kind of action can be supportive to process your emotions? Some examples might be: a soothing self-hug, gentle moving, going for a walk, a breathing exercise, a mindfulness technique, or calling your trusted friend to express yourself. Creating some space and allowing yourself to process an emotion without immediately reacting to it can help you feel more in control of what happens next, and avoid consequences of impulsive actions.
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Use journaling to access, process, and manage the responses to your emotions. You may reach for free-writing – writing without structure and self-censorship about how you feel, or you can use prompts like:
