Article

The Necessity of Emotional Regulation.

October 4, 2018 · By Deepak Santhiraj, Licensed Clinical Social Worker

In our societal context, we can scarcely go a day without creating an emotional response as part of our daily experience. Emotions can have a wide range of expression and intensity and simultaneously describe a spectrum of life’s experiences. Happiness, sadness, gratitude, anger, shame, guilt and fear are just a few of the universal experiences of human emotion. They can be responsible for revealing an individual’s inner person, giving voice to the innermost dimensions of the individual’s nature, radiating light on the individual’s moral character and producing glimpses into the person’s awareness and conscience.

Emotions can accurately expose vulnerabilities, disclose strengths, illumine life core values, and arrive into the space between people unheralded and in spontaneous fashion. Emotions have an uncanny effect of creating a state of knowing between people with steadfast speed, and regulating them will result in experiencing life more invigoratingly.

The Cost of Poor Emotional Regulation.

Current research shows that different people use various strategies for emotional regulation, and these ultimately have costs and consequences for their well-being, emotional life and their quality of relationships. Dr. James Gross, pioneering emotions expert and psychologist of Stanford University, states, “emotions are not just things that happen inside a person, but also things that happen between people.” Social-personality psychologists and neuroscientists are breaking into new frontiers based on the revelation that expressing our emotions has consequences. By contrast, hiding them will also have an impact. Often, dysfunctional behaviors like suicidal tendencies, substance use disorders, interpersonal conflicts, emotional suppression, overeating and other problematic concerns are caused by intolerably painful emotions. Recent findings from the University of Bergen in Norway indicate that those with emotional regulation skills can prevent relapse, possess emotional clarity and awareness, and move toward an increased sense of tolerance for suffering and pain.

With the current opioid epidemic, statistical significance, as well as ongoing dialogue with current events in our nation, necessitate a better, more accessible and authentic understanding of emotional regulation. The American Psychological Association is also responding to the current opioid epidemic that has started to see an increase of children and adolescents entering the foster system due to parents acquiring a substance use and misuse. Emotional dysregulation can be one of these causal factors for influencing negative outcomes of substance use as well as factors related to major depression. There has been a higher percentage, more than one third of the American population, now resorting to prescription drugs for the cause of alleviating distress and escaping daily stressors.

The Explosion of Emotional Regulation Resources.

The growing and diverse field of emotional regulation continues to flourish with self-help books, articles, conferences and special journal issues populating the global scene. Just as a reference, in the early 1990s, only a few citations each year in journals reflected emotional regulation. By 2007, citations grew to around 3,000. By 2012, a mere five years later, this number had multiplied to around 8,000 citations. Field experts, community leaders, mental health practitioners, parents and families annually grow in facilitating dialogue around this human condition of being governed by our emotions, and also being rulers over them. This field of emotional regulation is one of the fastest growing chutes for publications and ongoing investigations within the soil of modern psychology.

Emotional regulation goals, strategies, and outcomes are part of this ongoing dialogue; new discoveries and developments are associated with emotional learning, decision-making and life experience. Emotional intelligence remains the umbrella and emotional regulation as a core necessity of our internal makeup. Those experiences that we internalize and categorize as emotions powerfully impact the manner that we perceive and engage with the world. Truly, emotions can guide actions, modify our perception of reality, and create tension between what we perceive and the environment that we find ourselves within.

Defining and Treating Emotional Regulation.

Clinical researchers and practitioners alike within the medical community collectively agree that emotional regulation is the ability to control or influence which emotions to have, when to have them and how to experience and express them. The professional community now understands that being able to regulate emotions as well as consciously control them can be simultaneously automatic and effort-based. In studies that have involved longitudinal data and reflections with middle, high school and college-age students, results have demonstrated that emotional regulation is a key indicator and cornerstone skill set for academic and life-long success.

Emotional regulation skill sets are grouped together with understanding and naming emotions, developing change in unwanted emotions, reducing vulnerabilities to the emotional mind and self-managing extreme emotional sensitivity and intensity. In environments where an individual experiences intolerance or strong disapproval for the lack of emotional management, teaching emotional regulation skill sets can be very difficult. The optimal context for emotional regulation skill sets to be taught and grown are in a place where there is emotional validation.

6 Ways to Improve Emotional Regulation in Your Own Life.

Similar to how our own fingerprints identify us in unique ways, the emotional regulation of an individual has a unique and dynamic fingerprint. Here are several strategies for choosing to develop emotional regulation within your family, work space, and community:

Ultimately, whether we have negative or positive emotional experiences, emotional regulation leads to healthier and longer lives filled with precision in how we tend to experience the world around us and within us more enjoyably.

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