What Is Emotion Regulation?

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When emotions grow inflexible, we become generals fighting the last war.

Rigidity of emotional response leads to self-limiting and self-destructive behavior.

The ways we interpret emotions are varied and often troublesome.

Misinterpreted, they can make us into someone we’re not.

The most pervasive emotional problem is rigidity of response. It happens to everybody to some extent, due to the habit-forming tendencies of emotional associations.

When emotions grow inflexible, we become generals fighting the last war, responding to current events with emotional associations from the past. An inflexible emotional system limits growth and development. In the extreme, it motivates profoundly self-limiting or self-destructive behavior.

Emotional rigidity results from the way we interpret emotions.

Problems of Interpretation

Conflicting: The anxiety stimulated by a spouse staying out late garners an interpretation of accident and injury, stimulating compassion with desire to help. It also stirs a conflicting interpretation of infidelity, stimulating jealousy, with motivation to punish.

Uncertain: I’m not sure what this means, but it’s probably not good.

Vacillating: The flowers on the table mean that he loves me, also that he’s feeling guilty about loving someone else, also that he’s sweet and thoughtful, also that he’s setting me up for manipulation, also I should appreciate the expensive floral arrangement, also he got a really cheap deal from the florist.

Self-validating: Problems occur when we interpret intense emotion as reality, instead of a signal of possibility. This is like assuming that the smoke alarm is the fire, instead of a signal that a fire might possibly begin. Like emotional alarms, smoke detectors are better safe than sorry systems, calibrated to give false positives, rather than false negatives.

We don’t want a smoke alarm that goes off only when the house is in flames; we want it to warn us when they’re a little bit of smoke. The false positives will include someone cooking in the kitchen or smoking in the den. We react to smoke alarms by checking out the signal to see if there really is a fire. No one would hear a smoke alarm and scream, “We’re all gonna die!” Yet we assume that emotional signals represent certainty.

Distortion: Problems occur when we fail to account for the amplifying and magnifying function of emotions and when we fail to appreciate their negative bias.

Contributing to emotional rigidity are interpretations that invalidate emotional signals without regulating them:

“I have no right to feel this way.” “I don’t really feel this way.” “No one should feel this way.” “If I felt this way, I’d be crazy.”

“I have no right to feel this way.” “I don’t really feel this way.” “No one should feel this way.” “If I felt this way, I’d be crazy.”

Becoming Whom We're Not

The following can transform character, unbeknownst to the person whose character is transformed.

Dysregulation: Failure to regulate emotions allows them to dominate our being, either through experience of the emotion or avoidance of it. Instead of emotions contributing to a rich sense of self, they reduce the sense of self to a repeating series of temporary feelings.

What Is Emotion Regulation?

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Using anger as regulator: Anger deteriorates thought processes and magnifies attack motivations (underthink and overkill). These produce solutions to problems like turning off a lamp with a rock or grounding your kid until he's 42. Unless physically attacked (and not always then) we cannot act in our long-term best interests in anger. It is virtually always in our best interest to convert the motivation to punish into motivation to heal, improve, correct.

Contagion: If not self-regulating, our emotions make us reactive to every jerk in the world. We tend to take on the emotions of others, which undermines the stability, coherence, and individuality of the self. We tend to internalize the emotions of others, which makes us gullible, susceptible to abuse, and alienated from our deeper sense of self.

Low emotional intelligence: We're unable to understand and regulate our own emotions or to read and understand the emotions of others. When we fail to perceive the effects of our behavior on others, we judge them by our intentions.

Importance-signaling: Problems occur when the intensity of emotional signals does not correspond to personal values or advantage, that is, the perceived change seems too important or not important enough. The former is captured by the title of a popular book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. The latter is misunderstood by its subtitle, It’s All Small Stuff.

Spontaneous signaling: Problems occur when emotional signals disconnect from stimuli. With no specific problem amplified and magnified for interpretive attention, there can be no solution; the emotional signal cannot motivate empowering behavior. This is like racing an engine in neutral gear or driving with the steering wheel locked. Common examples are waking up feeling highly anxious for no discernible reason or looking for excuses to get irritable.

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