Emotional Regulation
October 27, 2020
Emotional Intelligence ( Episode # 2 )
Hi everyone, this is Ludemia ( aka Mia ) and welcome to Heart-Mind Equation.
This is the second episode of my Emotional Intelligence Podcast Series.
Today, we are addressing Emotional Self- Regulation. We will be focusing on how to promote a good emotional state, how to decrease overwhelming emotions.
First, I wanna share with you one of my childhood memories, to illustrate the importance of emotional regulation.
I remember, from the age of 6 or 7 y.o all the way up to my teenage years, my father used to lose his temper very often. I later understood that his anger was a symptom, describing 2 fears that he had, at the time:
1) of not being in control of anything, especially the finances,
2) an inferiority complex.
In this case, my father’s triggers were :
1) not being listened to (by us the children and by my mother)
2) when received bills by mail
3) time of the year ( like Christmas and beginning of school year )
4) time of the day ( upon his return from work )
These triggers sent us warning signs that he was about to explode, such as :
1) Acting hyper
2) Pacing
3) Screaming at us for everything and anything
4) Clenching his teeth
5) Blaming – Verbal abuse ( especially towards my mother )
6) Slamming the fridge door or the kitchen cabinet doors.
At those moments, the atmosphere in our home changes radically. Indeed, we know how emotions are contagious. So we suddenly became anxious as well, afraid of when he will be blowing up.
When he finally explodes, communicating his rage, it often turns to conjugal violence. Example of him not able to regulate his anger. After blowing up on us, he would become ashamed of his behavior, while pretending that he had to react that way. To prevent his psychological suffering, he will blame our mother again, for ‘’ making him’’ behave in such a way, he said. By analyzing the situation, it was relevant to say that my father’s feelings of insecurity have influenced him to behave in such ways. Thinking that the only ‘’superiority’’ he had, was his loud voice and physical strength, used in his case, for domestic violence.
We can clearly say that my father was lacking emotional intelligence. First, he did not have any emotional awareness, since he was more into blaming than taking responsibility for the way he was feeling.
Being self-aware would be in his case, to acknowledge his triggers and his emotional warning signs. Addressing the situations and the related thoughts could have been the first step. Unfortunately, he was never comfortable discussing his issues with anyone, because of too much pride. Besides, he was determined to see a problem into every solution.
Second, he was unable to regulate his emotions. He gave into them, as at the time, it felt better to release them, then control them. In several cases, just like my father’s, someone needs, scream louder than his will. In my father’s situation, his need to release his stress, at the time, was greater than his will to shift his focus from the situation or resolve the problem. He was reacting instead of responding to his overwhelmed emotions.
Obviously, he was also lacking empathy.
Empathy usually helps us to regulate our emotions, as it makes us become more resilient to other people since we consider their feelings as well,… not only our own. For example, just seeing the fear in our eyes and my mother’s tears were enough for him to understand our distress. But it didn’t matter enough to him, at the time. He was more focused on releasing his anger than protecting us from it.
For my father, there were a few ways he could have used to regulate his emotion of anger, by searching for ways to calm himself down. For example: listening to music ( that is his number one distraction ), reading ( he loves philosophical books ), exercising at home ( had a workout program ). I don’t know, still, today, if he knew that his behaviors were symptoms of fear and insecurity.
Generally, the way we choose to regulate our emotions goes all the way back to our childhood. It depends on our attachment style where we observed or learned to develop our self-comforting ability. It is based on the quality of the relationship we had with our parents, as a child ( or with our caregiver ).
As per psychiatrist, John Bowlby ( 1969 ), there are 4 kinds of attachment styles that we can observe in the relationship dynamic between the parent and the child or, in some cases, between the caregiver and the child.
Attachment behaviors from a parent to a child are related to the way that the parent responds appropriately or not to the child’s needs. The 4 types of attachment styles seem to be universal among cultures.
Here they are :
1) Secure attachment
2) Anxious – Resistant attachment
3) Avoidant attachment
4) Disorganized – Disoriented attachment
Actually, we will present a whole podcast series on attachment styles, in a few months.
In my father’s example, I can confirm that he was brought up in a rather anxious attachment style with his mother, when he was a child, fearing making her mad all the time. He was always in fear of physical punishment and blame, by his mother ( my late grandmother ).
Indeed, if someone had a rather anxious attachment style with his or her parents when growing up, he would most likely manifest signals of distress, melodrama. Some other people with that attachment style will search for some kind of external comfort or the presence of selected people to help them deal with the negative, difficult or overwhelming emotion. Basically, it is just more difficult for this person to regulate his emotions. He or she will tend to be more impulsive, even risking lashing out at someone, rather than assessing his emotions calmly, to respond to them later..
On the opposite side, there is the person who has experienced an avoidant attachment style, growing up.
In contrast to the first example, this person with an avoidant attachment style will tend to bottle up his/her negative -difficult-overwhelming emotion. In those families, when they were growing up, any extreme emotion, such as showing vulnerability or anger, was a sign of weakness. That future adult will most likely repress or suppress his emotion of sadness, distress, depression, even!
This person will search for ways to isolate himself, not talking by giving the silent treatment, smiling when he/she wants to cry, leaving for a walk or car ride ( to run away from escalating tension ), or escape in different distractions. They will search for ways to avoid any confrontation with someone or will try to escape from their own feelings, sometimes.
In a scientific journal from the Cornell Research Program, we have separated the self-regulation strategies into 2 groups, such as: healthy and unhealthy strategies. This is mostly to point out general behaviors that preserve our mental status, and therefore, promote our emotional health. Those strategies help us regulate our emotions by preventing those emotions from becoming overwhelming.
In the healthy common strategies, we can announce: confiding in someone we trust, engaging in an internal monologue about how to accept our emotion without judging it, exercising, taking cold showers, meditating, praying, writing in a journal, to rest when we are sick or exhausted, turning to our favorite hobbies, searching for ways to find one positive thing into every situation ( even negative ones ), etc.
You might ask yourself: what does that have to do with emotional self-regulation. We can explain it by the fact that each of these examples contributes to improving our emotional health.
Confiding in someone ( to a spouse, a family member, a friend – a therapist or to God: with prayer ); writing down our feelings in our personal journal; engaging in our internal monologue about the way we feel——All of these 3 strategies helps us to regularly express our feelings. That way they don’t accumulate to overflow, making it harder for us to regulate them.
We need to consider our emotions like messengers from our subconscious mind to our conscious mind, in a language that our body understands.
Exercising is a healthy habit, it’s also used as a hobby for some of us. Among all the beneficial effects of exercising, it helps us release some of our psychological and emotional tensions or distress. It is scientifically proven to reduce symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. When we exercise, we are engaged in the present moment, while we are doing the exercises and enhance our blood circulation, which feeds our brain, for better cognitive ability and less subjective reactivity.
Meditation is another way to regulate emotions. Especially by using the breathing techniques, I have mentioned in the first episode of the series. Meditation involves simultaneously: mindfulness ( meaning engaged in the present moment ), breathing methods, and focus change from a thought to another or a feeling to another.
Basically, what is highly suggested in this journal to promote ( keyword ) the regulation of our emotion is to:
1) Take care of our physical needs, to be less on edge about everything. It is to reduce our emotional vulnerability (with a good diet, exercise, and sleep hygiene)
2) Engage in an activity that builds a sense of achievement ( improves our self-worth and self-confidence, to be less reactive and more proactive )
3) Changing the focus of our thought patterns, causing negative emotion.
In my father’s case, …
Recommendation #1: ‘taking care of physical needs’ was lacking considerably. He was sleep-deprived, as he was working extended hours to make ends meet. He barely ate breakfast or lunch, as he was drinking so many coffees to keep him stimulated. So you can imagine hoe he was always on edge.
Recommendation #2: ‘engaging in activities that build a sense of achievement’ was also difficult for my father. Especially that he did have low self-worth and self-esteem. This is where his inferiority complex came from. This recommendation #2 can also be associated with helping someone with something. It does not have to be a big thing. My father often goes to help other people and offers his help, even when not required. After that, he would complain that he had to help so and so,… I later understood that by helping others, he was looking for a sense of validation. So his kindness was not always genuine. So he was often defensive to every comment, …being more reactive than responsive.
About recommendation #3: ‘to change the focus of our thoughts’ is a decision we have to make. This is also being more proactive, instead of reactive.
The emotional self-regulating cycle is defined as:
A situation or Trigger —– Thought (conscious or unconscious) —– Emotion (the messenger from the subconscious to the conscious) —– Message are warning signs to the negative or overwhelming emotion —— Behaviour ( that reinforces, disempowers, or changes the initial thought we had, to level down or change the previous emotion ).
The relevance of changing our behavior response to the emotion is to initiate a different thought, which will, therefore, help us regulate or change the negative emotion.
Most of the time, the problem, is the way we perceive the problem.
By changing the narrative, or the story we associate the so-called problem with, we also change the thoughts that are related to it. Therefore, the brain’s neural circuits take a new path every time, to change that same thought. When we do this frequently for that same thought, the old neural-pathway slowly gets disempowered, until it gets totally replaced by the new one.
Sometimes, we feel so consumed by an emotion ( especially the negative ones ), that it is difficult for us to just change our perception of that problem. The perception that causes the overwhelming emotion. We then suggest to carry ourselves differently, change our posture, our facial expressions, the word we use to describe a situation ( removing the word as: never, always or negative attributes as clumsy, stupid, loser, ugly, etc. ). Most often than not, those simple changes will again change the neural-pathway our brain will use in an association with the situation. This is possible because of our mirror neurons, which reflect us, all of what we imagined as if they were real. So we fake it until our brain believes it, to make it. These 2 methods are often used in psychotherapy for anger management, fear-based emotions, depression, etc. They are called: 1) CBT for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and 2) DBT for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Both are using thought, words and behaviour to change our emotions or lower the intensity of our overwhelming emotions.
So, this concludes episode 2 of our Emotional Intelligence Podcast series.
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