The self-help industry, the psychology world and the spiritual field are all currently abuzz with the idea of “emotional regulation”. You can’t go anywhere without hearing people talk about how important it is to learn how to regulate your emotions and to be emotionally regulated. Today, I’m going to explain to you why the idea of emotional regulation is detrimental and needs to be put to rest, as well as what needs to be done instead.

The unfortunate reality is that we are alive at a time when humanity is in the dark ages relative to emotion and feeling. In the year 1600, doctors considered bathing unhealthy because they thought that it removed a protective layer of oil and dirt, exposing the body to unclean water and diseased air. They also considered bloodletting the right treatment for all kinds of physical maladies. So, it should not surprise us that in the emotional dark ages, experts have all kinds of misconceptions about emotions and how to deal with them. 

So first, let’s talk about emotions. Emotions are reactions in and of themselves. They occur within you in response to many different stimuli, such as people, places, things, situations, circumstances, and energies that you are encountering in the external world as well as your own thoughts, especially your own thoughts about those external stimuli. Remember that thoughts can be subconscious or conscious. When we encounter a stimulus, we experience a reaction to it in the form of a highly physiological response that we feel. Within this felt based response, is information. Emotions carry a lot of information about our environment and about ourselves, most especially about our subjective experience of our environment and about our personal truths. Some people might refer to this as cognitive interpretation. For example, a person may be having a strong emotional reaction and contained within this emotional reaction might be the information “that makes me feel powerless to X bad thing happening and I need to feel like I have some hand in making sure it doesn’t happen.” This is why emotions can serve as a kind of internal guidance system and influence a person to take a certain action. 

Sometimes it is helpful to think of emotion as a different language in which information is received and transmitted. When we have an emotional reaction, most of the time, this information within the emotion is totally subconscious. And we do not take the time to make it conscious. We don’t tune into this language that is occurring within us so as to consciously ascertain the information it contains. And because of this, we simply have a behavioral response to the emotion. This is what people are most familiar with… the actual behavioral expression of an emotion. One of the biggest false assumptions people make is that all people experience emotions the same way and with the same level of intensity. They don’t. For example, anger does not always feel the same in one person’s body as it does in another’s. Some people also feel emotions much, much more intensely and for longer. 

Our emotions are an automatic response. And for very good reason. When we are out navigating the world and the people, places and things in it, we need to have reactions to things and make sense of things VERY quickly. The physiological arousal response element of emotions (which you feel) as well as the cognitive interpretation element of emotions (which you are only rarely consciously aware of) happens in such an immediate and intertwined way. And yet, all of the focus is on trying to regulate emotions. 

Let’s look at what it means to regulate. To regulate means to control or govern by a rule, principle or method. To adjust to some standard or requirement.  To adjust so as to ensure accuracy of operation. Or to put something in good order. You should not be trying to control, govern, hold a standard for, expect “accuracy” from or order your emotions. And here is why:

1. Emotions are not a problem. They are certainly not the problem. And this mentality that you must control your emotions, paints emotions to be the problem. It paints them as not ok and not good. It scapegoats them. 

2. You cannot “control” whether or not an emotion occurs within you. You should not be trying to control the way you feel. You are not going to be able to bring order to the way that emotions occur within you. And you need to stop considering emotional control a virtue. When we try to control our emotions, we approach our emotions as our adversaries. And when we do this, several negative things happen. We make our emotions the problem for existing. We resist them, rather than opening ourselves up to feeling them and becoming conscious of the information they contain. And we fall into behaviors like denying, disowning, negating, suppressing, rejecting, opposing and disconnecting from our emotion/the way we feel. Also, we play mental games with ourself to try to convince ourselves that we shouldn’t feel the way we feel or that we don’t feel the way we feel. Or that everything is fine when it isn’t.    

3. Our approach of trying to change and manipulate and control the emotion we feel does not actually work. So, it doesn’t lead to results. So, you just end up feeling like something is wrong with you and you start fearing, distrusting and hating this fundamental aspect of yourself. This is a big deal when you realize that the way you feel is the core of your life experience.          

4. When it comes to emotions, the idea of holding your emotions to a standard or to some requirement is utterly bizarre. After all, emotions don’t have the free will or ability to live up to a standard or requirement.  

5. Emotions are sometimes a perfect reflection of reality. And, emotions are sometimes very much not a perfect reflection of reality. Especially given that emotions are responding to all kinds of factors, including previous life experiences that have informed a person’s cognitive interpretations of events. In this way, emotions cannot ever be held to the standard of “accuracy” or “appropriateness” for that matter. Nor should they be. Our emotions may not perfectly fit the reality of a situation and still, they are very important and carry very valuable information that serves our awareness.

6. There is no way to prevent an emotion from occurring. There are simply a great many things you can do regarding the cognitive interpretation of things and this may in turn alter what emotional reaction you have when you come into contact with a specific stimulus. 
   What is important to accept is that you can’t prevent an emotion from occurring within you. And you can’t choose which emotions you experience. The process we call an emotional response, happens very quickly and without your conscious will. Your rational mind  is not involved in this process. You can however decide what you do with emotions when they occur. Where we are trying to consciously intervene is in that tiny, (let’s be honest sometimes infinitesimal) gap between the experience of an emotion and the behavioral response to the way we feel. Most of us behaviorally react to our emotions on autopilot, and mostly according to patterns from the past. For example, you feel angry — therefore you hit someone. Or, you feel insecure — therefore you withdraw. Therefore, we need to stop talking about learning to regulate our emotions and start talking about learning how to consciously master our behavior. Any tool out there that is presented as a way to regulate emotion, is actually a tool that is designed to regulate behavior.
   Emotion (you could say the way we feel) is a very important part of us. It is a key component of being truly alive and staying alive. Emotions are absolutely constructive. And as such, this language should be mastered and the way we feel should be consciously tended to. When emotions occur, they must be acknowledged, seen as important, owned, fully felt and allowed to move through our being, the information within them, ascertained. And then, your response to the emotion (including the information contained within the emotion) must be consciously chosen. We should not be trying to prevent or control or govern or hold a standard for or expect “accuracy” from or order our emotions at all. We should be trying to prevent the activation of the automatic behavioral reaction, so that we can consciously choose to respond to our emotions and according to the information inherent within them. And guess what, the more you try to control, suppress, deny, disown, negate, reject or opposing your emotions, i.e., “regulate them”, the harder it becomes to do this.         

Help me to change the discourse in this world around this topic, because in this case, the discourse and the semantics really do matter and really does have a negative impact on people and on human society at large. Help me to change discussions around emotional regulation into discussions about emotional embracing + behavioral mastery.