What emotional regulation in recovery is & isn’t.

When we talk about “emotional regulation,” we’re not talking about tamping down our feelings so we barely feel anything. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m a particularly emotional person— and I’ve come to understand that’s a feature, not a glitch. 

I wouldn’t be who I am, without my highly sensitive nature— and I’ve come to believe that my ability to help and support people, as imperfect as that ability may be, is due to that highly sensitive nature. 

Does it cause me pain? Sure, sometimes. Does it cause me inconvenience? Sure, maybe more than sometimes. 

But what we need to understand when we talk about emotional regulation is that it’s not about making us “less emotional.” 

Our emotions represent important facets of who we are and what we’re all about. 

Attempts to deny or disown our emotions necessarily end up being attempts to deny and disown who we are— and that’s literally the opposite of what we’re trying to do here in trauma and addiction recovery. 

What emotional regulation actually is, is understanding our emotions and being on good enough terms with them that we don’t experience them as overwhelming, threatening, or “bad.” 

Just like the essence of trauma and addiction recovery is forging a new, honest, compassionate, communicative, cooperative relationship with our self, the essence of emotional regulation is getting on speaking terms with our emotional self. 

That’s not easy, when we’ve been shamed or punished for being “sensitive” or “emotional” growing up— which an overwhelming number of people are, whether or not they grew up in environments most of us would call “abusive” or “neglectful.” 

We live in a culture that celebrates and glamorizes emotionality on the one hand— but then turns around and demonizes and shames it on the other. 

Almost all of our catchiest pop music is about emotion— yet when we hear about the tumultuous love life of our favorite pop star, many of us roll our eyes at the “drama.” 

Yeah. We got lots of mixed signals about emotions from the very beginning, don’t we? 

Most of the great art and literature we’re ever exposed to is about dissecting and experiencing emotions— yet when we have reactions to that art and literature, we often feel silly. 

I’ll be the first to admit, I cry at movies. I cry at some songs. And, if you’re like me, and you do that too, you probably experienced what I experienced for a long time: a pervasive feeling that we need to shut that reaction down. That crying at popular art was a mark of immaturity, or lack of self-control. 

My ass, it is. 

Learning to regulate our emotions most often boils down to the three tools that, as far as I’m concerned, make up the nuts and bolts of trauma recovery: self talk, visualization and focus, and breathing and body language. 

How our nervous and endocrine systems understand and process emotions depends on how we use and integrate those three tools. 

But it’s real important we not try to use those tools to completely shut down our emotional core. 

We need that emotional core. 

One of the reason we need to regulate it is BECAUSE we need it. 

We NEED access to those emotions, because those emotions are who we are and what we’re all about. 

If we try to deny and disown our emotions in the name of “emotional regulation,” those emotions don’t just go away— very often they get split off into “parts” of us, where they remain until the burden of keeping those emotions out of consciousness becomes too great. 

That’s when “the body starts keeping the score,” to coin a phrase. 

If we don’t want the body keeping the score— which we don’t— we need to be on good terms with our emotions. Speaking terms. Compassionate, understanding terms. Cooperative terms. 

We start that process by listening to how we talk to and about our feelings; paying attention to what we visualize and focus on when we’re experiencing feelings; and paying to where and how our feelings intersect with and are shaped by our body language and breathing. 

Lots of us survivors make emotional regulation and lot harder than it needs to be— and that’s not our fault, given how we were conditioned to think about and respond to strong feeling states. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

None of this has to be that way. 

We can start repairing our relationship with our emotional core and body today.

Maybe start with breathing. 

Blinking. 

Maybe focusing inward— with compassion and patience. 

Try it out for a few minutes after you’re done reading this. It’s free, you’ve got nothing to lose.