Feelings can be scary things. They sometimes come from nowhere, increasingly intense. Before you know it, they make you say things you regret, or behave in ways you never thought possible of yourself. Many of us have a tendency to sometimes become the feeling that is raging through us. We become sadness, or anger, or shame. At the worst of times we shrivel up, disengage, or we confront and bang a table or stamp our feet.
The psychologist Dick Schwartz of Internal Family Systems calls this phenomenon “blending”. John and Julie Gottman of the Gottman Institute call it “flooding“.
Regulating Emotions
Oftentimes clients ask me to teach them to control their emotions better. It’s a fair request: they have seen the damage caused by uncontrolled emotional outburst or excessive behaviours in their own lives, and often in the lives of people around them.
Nevertheless, even if it is a fair request, it’s also misplaced. The “bad” news is that “controlling” emotions is impossible. It would be like trying to somehow take charge of the forces playing on the Earth’s crust. “Controlled” emotions tend to go underground, they tend to camouflage themselves, and they reappear as addictions, or manipulative behaviour, etcetera.
Much more effective in life is learning how to regulate emotions.
However, there’s also good news: “regulating emotions” can be taught, you can learn it, you can practice it, and it can become a skill available to you when you need it (most). There are a few steps to learning this. I’ll shortly explain them.
Observing Emotions
Before we start saying harmful things, or doing harmful things, we feel uncomfortable feelings. In an attempt not to feel those “negative emotions”, we start pushing back. Brené Brown in her book Atlas of the Heart describes it as “people in pain cause pain in people”. If I want to avoid sliding down that slide, it is essential to become intimately familiar with my own emotional landscape, in all its variety. Learning how to observe my emotions is the first essential step in learning to regulate them. I can only regulate what I can see and recognise, after all…
Feelings Wheel
To help my clients master this skill I very often give them a bit of homework. It consists of a feelings wheel, with a half a dozen or so emotions, each with their own variations. Anger, Sad, Happy, Bad, etcetera. I ask people to make notes, twice a day, of the feelings they recall having had earlier on. And I invite them to take their time and keep looking not just for one or two intense and “familiar” emotions, but for small ones, or unexpected ones.
After about two weeks I invite clients to see if they can locate some of these feelings in their bodies. The belly, the chest, the shoulders, the sternum, the heart…
Doing this exercise for a month helps people move towards their feelings, as observers or witnesses. It makes them more comfortable even with uncomfortable feelings (aka negative feelings). As time passes, they recognise their own feelings at a much earlier stage, long before these emotions have taken on a life of their own.
Self-Regulate
Once I am familiar and comfortable observing my own emotions, aware that I have emotions instead of being my emotions, I can learn to take care of them. Instead of “being angry” or “being sad” and acting those feelings out, I merely observe that there is, for example, “a growing sense of sadness” or “an increasing heat of anger”. I watch my emotions inside me, as I watch the weather outside my window.
And how will I then regulate, you might wonder…
